The Odyssey - Manual of Secret Teachings?

Harold said:

his is a great thread, I don't have much to add. Except the Gods are pretty much like us... and that the Roman, Greek and Christian gods seem to have the same teams of 12 players etc.

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Al Today said:

Harold said:

his is a great thread, I don't have much to add. Except the Gods are pretty much like us... and that the Roman, Greek and Christian gods seem to have the same teams of 12 players etc.

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Curious that number twelve(12). I sure don't have a definitive answer...

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mkrnhr said:

Actually keeping the Greek names is not totally superfluous. The names have meanings. For example Calypso (to hide, the same root for apocalypse (revelation, uncovering...). Odysseus, Telemachus, and even when he says to the Cyclops "my name is nobody" (strategic enclosure?). All that gives some weight to the story.
The characters in the Odysseus are very few, so the Greek names are bearable. I remember that the Iliad is far worse, especially when people on the ships are described one by one (that's even more boring than the hobbit songs in the LOTR).

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dantem said:

Just finished reading the Odyssey in Italian. I'd say that the main recurring themes are:

- Never ending struggle to gain anything
- Hospitality theme
- Theoxeny theme
- Recognition i.e Testing of Will and Conscience theme
- and why not?.. the Food theme! Is abysmally important to eat well before doing anything! ;)

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Windmill knight said:

I listened to an audio-book in English and I enjoyed it a lot.

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...The basic cultural blueprint guiding people today is largely insane in terms of our prospects for social and psychological well-being. ...

Most books about happiness have been written from the perspective of the individual. These often describe ways in which the person can enhance their own happiness in relation to their personal circumstances. ... The approach I took was to explore the whole issue of happiness in a wide historical and cultural perspective. ... that draws from multiple sources of knowledge, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, economics, and religious studies. I try to define the essence of happiness at various ages in the past, as well as what it has become and where it is going as a result of the current mega-forces that give direction to our lives. ...

When I look around me, I do not see a very happy world. This is despite the collective preoccupation with happiness, and with anything that can make people happier. The majority of people still appear to be living in ways that are not conducive to happiness. Some people will disagree with this view, pointing out that a high percentage of individuals still claim to be happy. But in my mind, we were meant to be far more social, spiritual, loving, and intellectually engaged than we are being programmed to be by modern consumer culture. ...

I use words such as 'genuine", "authentic", and "deep-felt" to describe the higher grades of happiness that contrast sharply with the more superficial varieties that tend to be the consequence of contemporary consumer living. I make the point that millions of people have been sent on a wild goose chase for a type of happiness that does not nourish them at the base of their being. In doing so, may modern people are losing sight of, and neglecting important aspects of, their lives and their relationships. ...

Happiness now reigns supreme over noble priorities such as love, health, family, God, wisdom, and honesty. Get happy. The rest is icing on the cake. In surveys that ask "what is the most important thing in life?" happiness is by far the most common answer. When people are asked what they want more than anything else, "happiness" comes out head and shoulders above all other goals. Ask parents what they want, above all else, for their children and their answers will be the same: "To be happy."

Little or no tolerance remains for bad news. Books with negative-sounding words in their titles do not sell well. Personal ads presenting the person as sober and socially concerned get few replies. Positiveness, even in the face of an apocalyptic nightmare, has become so vogue that pessimists and realists have lost almost all appeal. The cheerleaders are policing the game with an iron fist. All of society's seers are at risk of being neutered by the decree of mandatory positivity. Only the bravest are not being bullied into cheering up or at least shutting up.

...The quest of happiness has become nothing short of a cultural obsession. Never before has our species been more preoccupied with issues of happiness, or more fearful that they might not be as happy as they could be. It is not true, as we have come to assume, that human beings naturally regard happiness as the main purpose of life, or the highest value that steers their existence. Personal happiness as an end in itself that transcends all other values and goals is quite a recent development.

Albert Einstein once said "Happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig." Some say that this pigs-at-the-trough analogy is appropriate for the way in which people today strive to slurp up happiness.

...Journalist Jeremy Seabook spoke out recently about his reasons for turning against all the happiness fanfare. He writes about victims like himself of fraudulent happiness in his Guardian newspaper article "For People Like Me, This Era of Insistent Jollity Is a Trial. He describes his own temperament as "melancholic" but not depressed, and says it is simply his nature to view the world in the wider realities of loss, decay, and misfortune. But all around him, he sees people drive to delete these realities from their experience in order to drape themselves in a veil of mirth: "I have experienced as violence the emergence of the culture of compulsory industrialised joy, which is the companion of consumerism." Not surprisingly, Seabrook's article was jeered immediately by angry happiness fans. ...

The happiness rage is revealing itself in many ways... never-ending stream of self-help books, magazine articles, feel-good gurus, television and radio programmes, workshops, infomerical videos and DVDs, internet discussion lists and so on... promise to fast track us to the ultimate prize of happiness. ... New professions such as happiness counselling, happiness coaching, life-lift coaching, and joyology are being invented to cope with the demand.

{...}

Elisha Tarlow Friedman and her colleagues post the question "Is there some point beyond which the energy, enthusiasm, and sociability normally associated with happiness would give way to smug complacency, obnoxious arrogance, and lack of motivation." ...

{...}

The depression statistics do not seem to match up with the results of happiness surveys. The discrepancy is especially great in some "happy" countries. In Sweden, for instance, only 4 percent of people report being "not very happy" or "not at all happy." At the same time, Sweden is dealing the the same plague of depression afflicting the rest of the Western world, plus its suicide rate is nearly double that of the world average.

{...}

The growing preoccupation with personal happiness is bound up with the self-absorption that has come to shape people's identity and their understanding of what it means to feel good. As people have retreated into themselves, happiness has become somewhat autistic in the way it is defined and experienced. Increasingly, it is become a private affair. In the process, many things that make one feel good by way of direct engagement with the outside world have lost an association with happiness. For example, states of awe, reverence, fascination, and empathy can feel extremely good. But all of these are interactive or shared. We sometimes no longer feel that these are happy experiences since happiness now tends to be comprehended as something that is ours and ours alone. ...

The high levels of self-absorbed happiness that exist today may be driving people crazy. Repression and depression are closely related. At its most basic level, genuine happiness is unity with one's nature, which is essentially a social and spiritual nature. It could be that the dehumanised variety of happiness that people chase today in consumer culture requires them to repress certain emotions and basic human tendencies that make this type of happiness depressing.

{...}

Relativism dominates our current thinking about happiness. This means that we do not make judgments about the quality of a person's supposed happiness, or how he or she got to be happy in the first place. So long as someone says "I'm happy", it does not matter if he or she got that way by fighting poverty, selling seal pup pelts, collecting Smurf toys, or leading a skin-head gang. ...

All modes of happiness are an extension of a person's values. ... Ayn Rand: "Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values."

This changes the question from "what makes you happy?" to "what are your values?"

{...}

Sometimes the key values of a society ... are revealed in the greetings and well-wishings that people give to one another. ...traditional Mongolian greeting: "Your animals are fattening up nicely" or give hopes that their animals will fatten up. Many native societies of North America tended to wish each other beauty. Their counterpart of "Have a nice day" was "May you always walk in beauty." They tended to see the Europeans as peculiarly impoverished when it came to the skill of living beautifully. The way of the Europeans seemed ugly and u7nnecessarily destructive, especially regarding their relationship to the natural world. This was diametrically opposed to all of their wisdom about a beautiful life.

{...}

This beauty goes far beyond the passive recognition of beauty outside of oneself. It is understood as the highest form of consciousness and the ultimate goal of human destiny. ...For the Navajo, one does not find beauty, just as one does not find happiness. One enters into beauty by firstly creating it, and then incorporating it into oneself. One achieves beauty by becoming beautiful. The Navajo might also say that one becomes happy only when one becomes happiness itself. It is an active process that requires individuals to develop themselves to the fullest, and to become fountains from which happiness flows out the the rest of the world.

{...}

The vast majority of people within any society will think of themselves as happy in their lives match up with the values that are the product of their cultural indoctrination.

{...}

In the West, coming first is a primary value. Being last is assumed to be the same thing as being unhappy. So self-reports of happiness will be influenced by the extent to which a person feels that he or she is leading or lagging behind the pack. ...The quest to be the first is the prime source of the social alienation that is blamed for the rapidly deteriorating mental health of the modern Western person. ...

"Values pollution" is sometimes used to describe the sick values that are circulating in consumer society. ...an inferior, precarious, and fleeting happiness that only feels like happiness because it somehow coincides with the prevailing values of the culture. We do not usually think in terms of the fitness of lack of fitness of a culture. But cultures are capable of developing catastrophic flaws... we now live in a culture of unhappiness. Being happy within it is no guarantee that one has found a healthy format for happiness. ... the healthiest people in a society as sick as the one that exists today in the West are more likely to feel unhappy and abnormal. ...

The appetites for the present type of (material) happiness is often insatiable and compulsive. ...

The modern person finds it difficult to experience any emotion at a very deep level. In most cases, their sense of being happy is a false and fabricated one.

There is an air of desperation about the modern plea for happiness. The sheer size and intensity of it suggests a huge vacuum which people are trying to fill. The existing quick-fix solutions do not seem to be doing the job.

{...]

{Archaeology reveals} Our precivilised ancestors existed in groups of between fifty and one hundred people, often said to be the intended size of human survival groups. They had very close kinship ties, and a strong network of cooperation and social support that was essential to their survival.

They were well fed, nutritionally healthy, intelligent, and resourceful. ... They ate what we were meant to eat as human beings. Their diet was actually so healthy that it probably had beneficial consequences for both physical and emotional health. Likewise, they received lots of physical exercise throughout the course of their daily activities, none of which were abbreviated by conveniences and technology.

There is little doubt that diet, nutrition, and exercise contribute to one's potential for experiencing positive emotion. ...the modern diet has a negative impact on the body as well as the mind. ... the healthiest of all possible diets is the one eaten by our Paleolithic ancestors. ...

A number of scholars have even been willing to speculate the pre-civilised people were a genuinely happier lot than those who inhabit the modern "dead zone of civilisation" as primitivist John Zerzan calls it.

"Primitivism" refers to a radical philosophy that views civilisation and "progress" as the main culprits for most of the social, psychological, and environmental ills plaguing the contemporary world. While still limited to the cultural fringes, the rising popularity of eco-primitivism has drawn more attention to this school of thought in recent years. ... eco-primitivists argue that one cannot, or should not, be happy while participating in the wholesale destruction of nature. Instead, happiness that resonates with the human spirit is only possible in the context of living in harmony with the natural world. Nothing deserves to be called happiness if it contributes to the demise of life. Any true happiness is life-supporting.

Primitivism denounces civilisation on the grounds that it strips human beings of equality, freedom and community. ... Civilisation is a killer of natural tendencies toward communal sharing, peacefulness, playfulness, and reverence for nature. While many primitivists accept that we are now trapped in civilisation, they see many ways that we can improve physical, mental, and environmental health by following the example of our paleolithic ancestors.

Primitivism is primarily a response to the monumental crises facing humanity. ... There is undoubtedly some merit in the primitivist argument that a quality heart-felt happiness is not possible once people have become insane in terms of their own natures, and their attitudes toward the planet upon which they and future generations rely for survival.

Zerzan writes: "Prior to agriculture, humanity existed in a state of grace, ease, and communion with nature that we can barely comprehend today" By comparison, he adds, we moderns live in "an upside-down landscape wherein real life is steadily being drained out by debased work, the hollow cycle of consumerism and the emptiness of high-tech dependency.

As challenging as life may have been back then, it was aligned to our neurological and physiological heritage. ... A good match between biology and the environment minimises stress and maximises the prospects for reward and gratification. ...

The concept of Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA) is sometimes used to describe the conditions to which our genetics have become adapted. The human EEA reflects an environment that existed during the Middle of Late Paleolithic period, from around 200,000 years ago until the dawn of agriculture somewhere between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. A discord simply refers to a situation or set of demands that force people out of their EEA.

...There are many serious rifts between our biological design and the modern environment...

...moderns grow up without adequate parenting, sufficient nurturance, or social connectedness. These factors and others take a heavy toll on our sense of control, the ability to withstand adversity, and the quality of our relationships. Our immune system also takes a beating under extreme discord conditions. ...

We are not living like human beings. ...

Without... living exactly like our Paleolithic ancestors, we can imitate them by increasing the closeness of our extended kin. This pertains to both physical and emotional closeness. We could develop true friendships of the type that existed in an age prior to the "fair-weather" friendships that dominate today. ... begin to again notice the gifts of nature that are sources of beauty, wonder and nourishment.

The concept of an intact "moral net" is used to express a situation in which people are experiencing maximum social and emotional well-being as a result of living in accord with their basic human nature. ...

The moral net does not refer to isolated individuals who are able to achieve well-being by meeting their own personal needs. Instead it refers to the overall fitness of a culture in terms of the intactness of its belief systems, social institutions, codes of ethics and behaviour, ritual and ceremonial traditions, initiation practices that establish a person's place within the group, and systems of activity that promote cooperation and harmony.

...the word "moral" is used as a measure of a culture's ability to meet indispensable needs such as belongingness, transcendence, identity, recognition, intellectual stimulation, and physical expression. ... It lays an existential foundation that lets people make sense of birth and death, and everything in between. ...

A vast amount of anthropological research over the years shows that a weakening of the overall "moral net" is the primary factor determining the prevalence of problems such as depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, marital breakdown, psychosomatic disorders, sleep disturbances, and delinquency. The general thrust of the data reveals that modernisation has the consequence of cutting away at the "moral net" and making people vulnerable at all levels. ...modernity seems to be rather backwards when it comes to emotional health.

{...}

The anthropological literature contains quite a bit about the Ibans. The first medical anthropologists to encounter them were unable to find any evidence of neurotic mental disorders. The longhouse is often described as an ideal type of social structure that is exceptionally well suited to the way in which we human beings evolved. For thousands of years, it provided a largely seamless cultural existence that gave people of all ages a clearly defined role, and a shared system of belief, ritual and custom. It was the ultimate in terms of an intact interconnected community. It left no cracks through which people could fall into meaninglessness, alienation, and existential fog.

{...}

Prehistoric people had no choice except to be swept along in union with themselves and the world. Life was in motion. .... Individuals were fully integrated into the group, as well as impregnated by the natural and spiritual worlds. There was no room for the type of happiness anxiety that provokes judgments about the value of one's private emotional portfolio. Individualism and narcissism were a long way off. ... There was no need to make an effort to be happy. They had not yet been expelled from the natural order of things.

...Paleolithic people had a much higher degree of emotional intelligence of the type that lets one recognise feelings as they occur, identify the emotions of others, and act on emotions as they arise. These are things at which Paleolithic people excelled due to their bond to the moment...

... certainly the more immediate experience of emotion ... resulted in tensions that needed to be resolved as they arose. It had not become profitable to suspend, delay, or avoid conflict ... A modern outsider looking in on their world might come away feeling they were not always being as nice as they could be. ... the absence of emotional dishonesty bore fruits in terms of their ability to experience happiness and avoid the build-up of toxic emotion. This meant that they probably had ongoing means of catharsis.

If the emotions were more alive in pre-civilised times, the same was probably true of the mind. ... the intellect of our paleolithic ancestors was almost certainly much more active than what we find in the anti-intellectual modern age. Our technology and information access can create the illusion that we are mental giants.... from the standpoint of the rapture that a well-exercised mind can deliver, the primitive environment was far superior to that of consumer culture with its steady diet of intellectual shortcuts and brain-numbing distractions. It offered more ongoing challenges and was a richer foundation for curiosity, exploration, and wonder. Few things are more closely associated with happiness than these.

The native landscape was a perpetual classroom that not only edified but also fostered genuine maturity. Hayes makes the following comparison between our early ancestors and the modern person whose mind has ceased to be a source of happiness.

"In primitive societies, all members who reached maturity were expected to use their intelligence in order to contribute to the good of the whole. Imagine the improbability of finding members of a hunter-gatherer society who expressed pride in their lack of knowledge about hunting and food preparation. Contemporary anti-intellectualism is no less ridiculous; we've just learned to accept it as normal. Among our Stone Age ancestors, survival depended upon devoting one's full attention to one's present activities, whatever they were at the moment. That we assume that our ancient ancestors were stupid reflects an enormous gap in what we refer to today as intelligence."

Without trying to romanticise prehistoric life, the people back then undoubtedly had a tremendous eye for detail. This was born from their here-and-now time location, and their need to be intimately attuned to the immediate environment. It had the effect of tuning them to all potential channels of happiness. ...

Mindfulness has been defined as "paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment". It means "on purpose" in the sense that the mind is focused and not distracted by competing thoughts and sensations. All this takes place in the Now, without contamination from future anticipations. When people are mindful, they can stay with an experience, and not have it be discoloured by negative emotions that intrude from other sources. This creates an emotional anchor that allows for feelings of calmness, contentment, and freedom. Our early ancestors had a high degree of mindfulness...

...The Rainbow Man, Banjo Clarke, had an astonishing ability to pick up on the subtlest of things around him. As we walked, he would point out birds and animals, sounds, colours, textures, and movements that eluded me completely. ... my senses were dead. He was operating at a level of perception far beyond my own. I was too far ahead of myself to be alive to what was around me. ...

The second lasting impression... the profound connection that Banjo had with the bush and with nature. He walked through it with reverence, and seemed rewarded by love and calmness. ... an intense spirituality that radiated the long-lost knowledge of the sacredness of the natural order, and our duty to respectfully concede to its genius. ...

...all life, both human and animal, coexists in an intricate, unchanging relationship that is orchestrated by the spirit ancestors.

There are several early accounts of the natives themselves who were baffled by the obvious unhappiness of the European arrivals. They did not dance, sing or celebrate. They laughed very little unless intoxicated. They had no magic. No miracles.

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Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the world will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the 'past.' People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the 'Future.' -- Cassiopaeans, 09-28-02

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Laura said:

In case ya'll didn't miss me, I was in Weimar, Germany, for the past week, accompanying my husband to a mathematics conference where he gave two talks.

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Lilou said:

Laura said:

In case ya'll didn't miss me, I was in Weimar, Germany, for the past week, accompanying my husband to a mathematics conference where he gave two talks.

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You were indeed missed, Laura. You absence from the forum for the past week was, at least to me, palpable! Welcome back and glad your travel was safe. :)

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Laura said:

In case ya'll didn't miss me, I was in Weimar, Germany, for the past week, accompanying my husband to a mathematics conference where he gave two talks. Basically, I spent my time poking about on my own and, of course, reading.

Two books out of the selection I took with me are must reads though I'll only quote one on this thread. The other goes under a different topic. The one that concerns me here is "Happiness: Understanding an Endangered State of Mind" by John F. Schumaker. Ya'll might remember him as the author of "Corruption of Reality" and "Wings of Illusion".

It might not seem so clear at first in the following excerpts, why this belongs in this thread, but I think as you get towards the end, you'll get the connection...

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Laura said:

Obviously, our reality is a bit different from living in the bush, but the principle is the same. Observing, seeing, taking note of everything, reading the signs, responding to everything in an appropriate way, are all practices that bring us closer to our original "way of being". And even if the things we note in the environment are scary, being as fully aware as possible, being response-able to others, helps to restore us to life not to mention opening channels to happiness hitherto unknown. In a sense we can all be Odysseus though the "scenery" of our Odyssey may be somewhat different. Obviously, the dynamics are quite similar.

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Ana said:

Thank you, Just reading the excerpts gave me shivers and an intense feeling of nostalgia, for that wich seems lost in the days we are living.

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In our age of political correctness, it makes us nervous to even hint about social difference between people. We have also become paranoid of making generalisations, even if they stand to increase our understanding of an issue. For these and other reasons, many people have been reluctant to speak of "happy societies" that once existed, or that might even exist today in places that operate differently than our own. Yet some people insist that there was indeed a Golden Age when spirits were able to soar higher than today. Descriptions of initial encounters with societies that functioned in a similar manner to our Paleolithic ancestors almost always allude to the simplicity of life as a possible explanation for their greater happiness.

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Ever since human societies and civilizations have been created on our globe, people have longed for happy times full of tranquility and justice, which would have allowed everyone to herd his sheep in peace, search for fertile valleys, plow the earth, dig for treasures, or build houses and palaces. Man desires peace so as to enjoy the benefits accumulated by earlier generations and to proudly observe the growth of future ones he has begotten. Sipping wine or mead in the meantime would be nice. He would like to wander about, becoming familiar with other lands and people, or enjoy the star-studded sky of the south, the colors of nature, and the faces and costumes of women. He would also like to give free rein to his imagination and immortalize his name in works of art, whether sculptured in marble or eternalized in myth and poetry.

From time immemorial, then, man has dreamed of a life in which the measured effort of mind and muscle would be punctuated by well-deserved rest. He would like to learn nature’s laws so as to dominate her and take advantage of her gifts. {At this point, Lobaczewski does not make clear that this urge must be born of pathology; he seems to assume that it is just what human beings do if they have sufficient leisure. However, the archeology of Paleolithic times makes it pretty clear that living in peaceful societies for many thousands of years was possible.} Man enlisted the natural power of animals in order to make his dreams come true, and when this did not meet his needs, he turned to his own kind for this purpose, in part depriving other humans of their humanity simply because he was more powerful. {Again, the acts of pathological individuals.}

Dreams of a happy and peaceful life {dreamt by pathological types} thus gave rise to force over others, a force which depraves the mind of its user. {Yes, normal humans can be depraved by these ideas, but the ideas are born of pathology.} That is why man’s dreams of happiness have not come true throughout history. {This is not, apparently, true. The Paleolithic archeology demonstrate this.} This hedonistic view of “happiness” contains the seeds of misery and feed the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times, which in turn cause the suffering and mental effort which produce experience, good sense, moderation, and a certain amount of psychological knowledge, all virtues which serve to rebuild more felicitous conditions of existence.

{The psychological knowledge that assists in this process is, primarily, the knowledge and awareness of pathological individuals and how to suss them out. This is one of the lessons of The Odyssey. Theoxeny is one of the tests to determine whether individuals are pathological as demonstrated by Odysseus.}
During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection, introspection, knowledge of others, and an understanding of life’s complicated laws. Is it worth pondering the properties of human nature and man’s flawed personality, whether one’s own or someone else’s? Can we understand the creative meaning of suffering we have not undergone ourselves, instead of taking the easy way out and blaming the victim? Any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor if life’s joys appear to be available for the taking. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport; a more farsighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet-blanket killjoy.

{Exactly what Schumaker is describing in his descriptions of the search for "happiness" in our materialistic, consumer oriented, pathological modern culture. It's worth reading the whole book just to get some of the details he's dug up about this.}

Perception of the truth about the real environment, especially an understanding of the human personality and its values, ceases to be a virtue during the so-called “happy” times; thoughtful doubters are decried as meddlers who cannot leave well enough alone. This, in turn, leads to an impoverishment of psychological knowledge, the capacity of differentiating the properties of human nature and personality, and the ability to mold minds creatively. The cult of power thus supplants those mental values so essential for maintaining law and order by peaceful means. A nation’s enrichment or involution regarding its psychological world view could be considered an indicator of whether its future will be good or bad.

During “good” times, the search for truth becomes uncomfortable because it reveals inconvenient facts. It is better to think about easier and more pleasant things. Unconscious elimination of data which are, or appear to be, inexpedient gradually turns into habit, and then becomes a custom accepted by society at large. The problem is that any thought process based on such truncated information cannot possibly give rise to correct conclusions; it further leads to subconscious substitution of inconvenient premises by more convenient ones, thereby approaching the boundaries of psychopathology.

Such contented periods for one group of people - often rooted in some injustice to other people or nations - start to strangle the capacity for individual and societal consciousness; subconscious factors take over a decisive role in life. Such a society, already infected by the hysteroidal state, considers any perception of uncomfortable truth to be a sign of “ill-breeding”. J. G. Herder’s iceberg is drowned in a sea of falsified unconsciousness; only the tip of the iceberg is visible above the waves of life. Catastrophe waits in the wings.

{Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), a theologian by training and profession, greatly influenced German letters with his literary criticism and his philosophy of history. Along with W. Goethe and Schiller, he made Weimar the seat of German neohumanism. His analogy of national cultures as organic beings had an enormous impact on modern historical consciousness. Nations, he argued, possessed not only the phases of youth, maturity, and decline but also singular, incomparable worth. His mixture of anthropology and history was characteristic of the age.}

In such times, the capacity for logical and disciplined thought, born of necessity during difficult times, begins to fade. When communities lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism, the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale, whether individual or macrosocial, until everything reverts to “bad” times.

{Now, Lobaczewski turns to the topic of pathology.}

We already know that every society contains a certain percentage of people carrying psychological deviations caused by various inherited or acquired factors which produce anomalies in perception, thought, and character. Many such people attempt to impart meaning to their deviant lives by means of social hyperactivity. They create their own myths and ideologies of overcompensation and have the tendency to egotistically insinuate to others that their own deviant perceptions and the resulting goals and ideas are superior.

When a few generations’ worth of “good-time” insouciance results in societal deficit regarding psychological skill and moral criticism, this paves the way for pathological plotters, snake-charmers, and even more primitive impostors to act and merge into the processes of the origination of evil. They are essential factors in its synthesis.

{I think that Lobaczewski is somewhat in the dark here. He assumes that pathology can only arise and come to power in a society that has already lost its way due to pathological behavior. I think that it is the pathology within specific individuals that is the first factor.}

... Those times which many people later recall as the “good old days” thus provide fertile soil for future tragedy because of the progressive devolution of moral, intellectual, and personality values which give rise to Rasputin-like eras.

The above is a sketch of the causative understanding of reality which in no way contradicts a teleological perception of the sense of causality. {Teleology is the supposition that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the philosophical study of that purpose.} Bad times are not merely the result of hedonistic regression to the past; they have a historical purpose to fulfill.

Suffering, effort, and mental activity during times of imminent bitterness lead to a progressive, generally heightened, regeneration of lost values, which results in human progress. Unfortunately, we still lack a sufficiently exhaustive philosophical grasp of this interdependence of causality and teleology regarding occurrences. {Actually, with the input of the Cs, we have a much better grasp of this problem and a theory that explains it: hyperdimensional manipulation. This also seems to be what The Odyssey is teaching us.} It seems that prophets were more clear-sighted, in the light of the laws of creation, than philosophers such as E. S. Russell , R. B. Braithwaite , G. Sommerhoff , and others who pondered this question. {Not to mention the Cs!}

When bad times arrive and people are overwhelmed by an excess of evil, they must gather all their physical and mental strength to fight for existence and protect human reason. The search for some way out of the difficulties and dangers rekindles long-buried powers of discretion. Such people have the initial tendency to rely on force in order to counteract the threat; they may, for instance, become “trigger-happy” or dependent upon armies.

Slowly and laboriously, however, they discover the advantages conferred by mental effort; improved understanding of the psychological situation in particular, better differentiation of human characters and personalities, and, finally, comprehension of one’s adversaries. During such times, virtues which former generations relegated to literary motifs regain their real and useful substance and become prized for their value. A wise person capable of furnishing sound advice is highly respected.

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Rousseau writes in his classic 1754 work "Discourse on the Inequality of Men", that modern living, with its abundance of philosophy, civilisation, and humanity, yields nothing but "a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. He felt that civilised society leads people inevitably to adopt hypocrisy and dishonesty in order to feed their selfish interests.

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Lobaczewski said:

...a typical product of conversive thinking: subconscious selection and substitution of data leading to chronic avoidance of the crux of the matter. ....

Information selection and substitution: ... Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible: including those generally described as conversive, such as subconscious blocking out of conclusions, the selection, and, also, substitution of seemingly uncomfortable premises.

We speak of blocking out conclusions if the inferential process was proper in principle and has almost arrived at a conclusion and final comprehension within the act of internal projection, but becomes stymied by a preceding directive from the subconscious, which considers it inexpedient or disturbing. This is primitive prevention of personality disintegration, which may seem advantageous; however, it also prevents all the advantages which could be derived from consciously elaborated conclusion and reintegration. A conclusion thus rejected remains in our subconscious and in a more unconscious way causes the next blocking and selection of this kind. This can be extremely harmful, progressively enslaving a person to his own subconscious, and is often accompanied by a feeling of tension and bitterness. {Which then leads to unhappiness and depression...}

We speak of selection of premises whenever the feedback goes deeper into the resulting reasoning and from its database thus deletes and represses into the subconscious just that piece of information which was responsible for arriving at the uncomfortable conclusion. Our subconscious then permits further logical reasoning, except that the outcome will be erroneous in direct proportion to the actual significance of the repressed data. An ever-greater number of such repressed information is collected in our subconscious memory. Finally, a kind of habit seems to take over: similar material is treated the same way even if reasoning would have reached an outcome quite advantageous to the person. {This seems to be the way science is operating nowadays.}

The most complex process of this type is substitution of premises thus eliminated by other data, ensuring an ostensibly more comfortable conclusion. Our associative ability rapidly elaborates a new item to replace the removed one, but it is one leading to a comfortable conclusion. This operation takes the most time, and it is unlikely to be exclusively subconscious. Such substitutions are often effected collectively, in certain groups of people, through the use of verbal communication. That is why they best qualify for the moralizing epithet “hypocrisy” than either of the above-mentioned processes.

The above examples of conversive phenomena do not exhaust a problem richly illustrated in psychoanalytical works. Our subconscious may carry the roots of human genius within, but its operation is not perfect; sometimes it is reminiscent of a blind computer, especially whenever we allow it to be cluttered with anxiously rejected material. This explains why conscious monitoring, even at the price of courageously accepting disintegrative states, is likewise necessary to our nature, not to mention our individual and social good.

There is no such thing as a person whose perfect self-knowledge allows him to eliminate all tendencies toward conversive thinking, but some people are relatively close to this state, while others remain slaves to these processes. Those people who use conversive operations too often for the purpose of finding convenient conclusions, or constructing some cunning paralogistic or paramoralistic statements, eventually begin to undertake such behavior for ever more trivial reasons, losing the capacity for conscious control over their thought process altogether. This necessarily leads to behavior errors which must be paid for by others as well as themselves. {We've often seen this process in action here on this forum. It is amazing to watch a mind deteriorate before your eyes!}

People who have lost their psychological hygiene and capacity of proper thought along this road also lose their natural critical faculties with regard to the statements and behavior of individuals whose abnormal thought processes were formed on a substratum of pathological anomalies, whether inherited or acquired. Hypocrites stop differentiating between pathological and normal individuals, thus opening an “infection entry” for the ponerologic role of pathological factors.

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By the middle of the nineteenth century, we seem to have had enough talk of the emotional supremacy of the happy and noble savage. Somehow this did not fit with the view we wanted of ourselves and the world. ...

As the anti-civilisation movement waned, fewer and fewer Westernised people were willing to accept that the life of the "savage" was what the good Lord ever had in mind for us. The Victorian era encouraged emotional inhibition, while intensifying criticism about the over-liveliness of the savage, all of which seemed depraved and dangerous. In truth, the "savages" lived with a much higher degree of spirituality, into which clear moral codes could be woven, than people of the Victorian age or the contemporary age.

The gathering momentum of science and technology {including a big dose of Darwin and "evolution"} helped to turn the evidence about happy "savages" into a myth. The time was right for another sort of myth {selection and substitution of premises} that saw "progress" as a new form of this-world salvation. ... soon indigenous peoples became once again nothing more than "backward". ... It did not help that some of the original accounts of native people painted them in an exaggerated way as beings of the highest virtue, without any corruption, malice, or selfish traits. When this turned out to be less than completely accurate, some people began to doubt the accuracy of the uncivilised happiness that was described by so many early anthropologists and explorers.

Yet... there was considerable truth to the claim that pre-civilised people were more peaceful and humane than their civilised counterparts. ...Anthropological and archeological evidence shows quite clearly that societies that went the route of domestication were in fact the ones that became subject to violent practices. Despite some exceptions, organised violence was almost non-existent among non-agricultural groups. ... It was not until the Late Paleolithic era that territoriality became much of an issue for human beings. Prior to that, there were few of the types of inhumanity that stemmed from rival groups pitted against one another for control of resources. ...

Modern-day primitivists ... credit the greater happiness of pre-modern people to their depth of spiritual awareness... This was bound up in their veneration of the natural world. Nature is the richest source of happiness for the human being. Thus it is not surprising that nature is often profoundly sacred in happy societies.

Gratitude {to Nature} is a distinctive trait in ... societies that are fused with the natual world and that have a resulting reverence for nature. ... Giving formal thanks and apolgising to any animal that they kill {for food}. ... a large number of thanksgiving ceremonies that took place at regular intervals... Gratitude {toward Nature} also fortifies spiritual meaning and directs people toward ways of living that are morally gratifying.

{Spiritual intelligence} is a skill that involves creativity, awareness, imagination, and flexibility of perception. This is what enables the person to comprehend the wholeness of life. ... this prevents divisions between the person, Earth, and the unknown.

... We now find ourselves victims of a "spiritually dumb culture" ... that interferes with the ability to experience the world in a unified fashion.

Impaired spiritual intelligence is one reason for the ongoing decline of compassion, which includes our growing detachment from nature.

{In paleolithic times}, the self was almost entirely social and spiritual in nature. Concepts such as ownership, profit, winning, losing, and success did not demand their attention and energies.

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Political Ponerology said:

At the same time, America, especially the U.S.A., has reached a nadir for the first time in its short history. Grey-haired Europeans living in the U.S. today are struck by the similarity between these phenomena and the ones dominating Europe at the times of their youth. The emotionalism dominating individual, collective and political life, as well as the subconscious selection and substitution of data in reasoning, are impoverishing the development of a psychological world view and leading to individual and national egotism. The mania for taking offense at the drop of a hat provokes constant retaliation, taking advantage of hyper-irritability and hypo-criticality on the part of others. This can be considered analogous to the European dueling mania of those times. People fortunate enough to achieve a position higher than someone else are contemptuous of their supposed inferiors in a way highly reminiscent of czarist Russian customs.

America’s psychological recession drags in its wake an impaired socio-professional adaptation of this country’s people, leading to a waste of human talent and an involution of societal structure. If we were to calculate this country’s adaptation correlation index, as suggested in the prior chapter, it would probably be lower than the great majority of the free and civilized nations of this world, and possibly lower than some countries which have lost their freedom.

A highly talented individual in the USA finds it ever more difficult to fight his way through to self-realization and a socially creative position. Universities, politics, and businesses ever more frequently demonstrate a united front of relatively untalented persons and even incompetent persons. The word “overeducated” is heard more and more often. Such “overqualified” individuals finally hide out in some foundation laboratory where they are allowed to earn the Nobel prize as long as they don’t do anything really useful. In the meantime, the country as whole suffers due to a deficit in the inspirational role of highly gifted individuals.

As a result, America is stifling progress in all areas of life, from culture to technology and economics, not excluding political incompetence.

When linked to other deficiencies, an egotist’s incapability of understanding other people and nations leads to political error and the scapegoating of outsiders. Slamming the brakes on the evolution of political structures and social institutions increases both administrative inertia and discontent on the part of its victims.

We should realize that the most dramatic social difficulties and tensions occur at least ten years after the first observable indications of having emerged from a psychological crisis. Being a sequel, they also constitute a delayed reaction to the cause or are stimulated by the same psychological activation process. The time span for effective countermeasures is thus rather limited.

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Laura said:

... certainly the more immediate experience of emotion ... resulted in tensions that needed to be resolved as they arose. It had not become profitable to suspend, delay, or avoid conflict ... A modern outsider looking in on their world might come away feeling they were not always being as nice as they could be. ... the absence of emotional dishonesty bore fruits in terms of their ability to experience happiness and avoid the build-up of toxic emotion. This meant that they probably had ongoing means of catharsis.

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Laura said:

This, of course, reminded me of some things in Lobaczewski's "Political Ponerology".

...
From time immemorial, then, man has dreamed of a life in which the measured effort of mind and muscle would be punctuated by well-deserved rest. He would like to learn nature’s laws so as to dominate her and take advantage of her gifts. {At this point, Lobaczewski does not make clear that this urge must be born of pathology; he seems to assume that it is just what human beings do if they have sufficient leisure. However, the archeology of Paleolithic times makes it pretty clear that living in peaceful societies for many thousands of years was possible.} Man enlisted the natural power of animals in order to make his dreams come true, and when this did not meet his needs, he turned to his own kind for this purpose, in part depriving other humans of their humanity simply because he was more powerful. {Again, the acts of pathological individuals.}...

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Laura said:

Is 9-11 the definitive crisis? Was launching the war against Iraq the "sign of emergence" from the crisis? If so, that puts the ten year rule at 2013.

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Laura said:

In any event, Odysseus' solution to the situation was radical and shocking. What is THAT supposed to teach us?

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