Showing posts with label Reich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reich. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Prof Walter Williams Bit by Bit Strategy, or How Human Nuisances Become Tyrants

The Psych Tie In to Professor Williams Insights is linked at the bottom: a 2005 piece published in The New Yorker on the man behind the DSM, Robert Spitzer.

CNSNews has;
Bit By Bit Strategy

June 25, 2013 - 5:46 AM

There's a move on to prohibit Washington's football team from calling itself "Redskins," even though a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision said that it has that right. Now the name change advocates are turning to the political arena and intimidation. The NCAA has already banned the University of North Dakota from calling its football team the "Fighting Sioux."

This is the classic method of busybodies and tyrants; they start out with something trivial or small and then magnify and extend it. If these people are successful in banning the use of Indian names for football teams, you can bet the rent money that won't end their agenda. Our military has a number of fighting aircraft named with what busybodies and tyrants might consider racial slights, such as the Apache, Iroquois, Kiowa, Lakota and Mescalero. We also have military aircraft named after animals, such as the Eagle, Falcon, Raptor, Cobra and Dolphin. The people fighting against the Redskins name might form a coalition with the PETA animal rights kooks to ban the use of animal names.

Another example of the strategy of starting out small is that of the tobacco zealots. In 1965, in the name of health, tobacco zealots successfully got Congress to enact the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act. A few years later, they were successful in getting a complete smoking ban on planes, and that success emboldened them to seek many other bans. The issue here is not smoking but tyrant strategy.

Suppose that in 1965, the tobacco tyrants demanded that Congress enact a law banning smoking in bars, in workplaces, in restaurants, in apartments, within 25 feet of entrances, in ballparks, on beaches, on sidewalks and in other places. Had they revealed and demanded their full agenda back in 1965, there would have been so much resistance that they wouldn't have gotten anything.

By the way, much of their later success was a result of a bogus Environmental Protection Agency study on secondhand smoke. I'd like to hear whether EPA scientists are willing to declare that people can die from secondhand smoke at a beach, on a sidewalk, in a park or within 25 feet of a building.

During the legislative and subsequent state ratification debates over the 16th Amendment — which established the income tax — the political task of overturning the Constitution's prohibition of such tax was considerably eased by political promises that any income tax levied would fall upon only the wealthiest 3 to 5 percent of the population.

Most Americans paid no federal income tax, and those earning $500,000 or more paid only 7 percent. In 1913, only 358,000 Americans filed 1040 forms, compared with today's 140 million. That's the rope-a-dope strategy. To get the votes of the masses, politicians start out small and exploit the politics of envy by promising that only the rich will be taxed.

In 1898, Congress imposed a temporary federal excise tax on telephones as a revenue measure during the Spanish-American War. At that time, only the rich owned phones. Soon nearly all Americans owned phones. Both the rich and the poor paid the telephone excise tax. Congress repealed this "temporary" Spanish-American War tax in 2006. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman had it right when he said, "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."

The Tax Reform Act of 1969, called the alternative minimum tax, was created to raise revenue from 155 "rich" Americans who legally avoided federal income taxes by buying tax-free municipal bonds. Today more than 4 million Americans are hit by the AMT, and most of them hardly qualify as rich.

Here's another rope-a-dope just beginning. The National Transportation Safety Board recently recommended that states reduce the allowable blood alcohol content by more than a third — to 0.05 percent, as opposed to today's 0.08 percent.

The NTSB is calling it a recommendation just to test the waters. If the board doesn't see resistance, its next move will be to threaten noncomplying states with a cutoff of highway construction funds. Setting the legal limit at 0.05 percent is not these people's end objective. Their end objective is to outlaw any amount of alcohol in the blood while one is driving.


Thank You CNS and Professor Williams.


From the New Yorker, an Illuminating to say the least look at Dr. Robert Spitzer.

Get the Pepto ready.

Annals Of Medicine: The Dictionary of Disorder

Perfect, Couldn't be better;
"I was always unsure that I was being helpful, and I was uncomfortable with not knowing what to do with their messiness,” he told me. “I don’t think I was uncomfortable listening and empathizing—I just didn’t know what the hell to do.” Spitzer managed to graduate, and secured a position as an instructor in the psychiatry department, . "
He couldn't make the con work himself, so he got a job, Teaching other people, the con.

And if you don't already know who Wilhelm Reich was, you are in for a real treat.



Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Freudo-Marxism: Political Scum Embrace Cocaine Addicted Atheist

Wiki has;
Freudo-Marxism

Why did Marxists gravitate to Freud?

“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.”  

"America is a mistake, a giant mistake."

Sigmund Freud


Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation of several twentieth-century critical theory schools of thought that sought to synthesize the philosophy and political economy of Karl Marxwith the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud.
Freudo-Marxism seeks to use the tools of psychoanalysis to diagnose the ills of society. Just as Freudianism views an individual's ego and super-ego as shaped by his unconscious id, Marxism views a society's culture and institutions as shaped by its underlying economic system. Thus a society's economic system and its relations of production function as its unconscious id; a society's culture functions as its ego; and a society's legal system, police and military function as its super-ego. From this point, Freudo-Marxism aims to reveal the illness of a society's underlying economic system by analyzing its cultural products.

Contents

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[edit]Early Freudo-Marxism


Wilhelm Reich, pioneering Freudo-Marxist
The beginnings of Freudo-Marxist theorizing took place in the 1920s in Germany. After some discussions of the topic by the Soviet philosopherV. Yurinets and the Freudian analyst Siegfried Bernfeld, in 1929 the basic Freudo-Marxist text Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis byWilhelm Reich was published, both in German and in Russian in the bilingual communist theory journal Unter dem Banner des Marxismus. As the end of this line of thought can be considered Otto Fenichel's article Psychoanalysis as the nucleus of a future dialectical-materialistic psychology which appeared in 1934 in Wilhelm Reich's Journal Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie. One member of the Berlin group of Marxist psychoanalysts around Wilhelm Reich was Erich Fromm, who later brought Freudo-Marxist ideas into the exiled Frankfurt School led by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
For Wilhelm Reich, the principal point of contact between Marxism and psychoanalysis was the family. On the one hand, individuals' psychological development is critical during childhood – in particular as regards morality and sexual repression. On the other hand, e.g. Frederich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State criticised the family as the unit of cultural reproduction. Thus, among others, Reich wrote extensively about the “sociological function of the family.”[1]

[edit]The Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School (the "Institut für Sozialforschung") took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud. In the institute's extensive Studien über Authorität und Familie (ed. Max Horkheimer, Paris 1936) Erich Fromm was the author of the social-psychological part. Another new member of the institute was Herbert Marcuse, who became famous only during the 1950s in the USA.

[edit]Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955)

Eros and Civilization is one of Marcuse's best known early works. Written in 1955, it is an attempted dialectical synthesis of Marx and Freud whose title alludes to Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. Marcuse's vision of a non-repressive society (which runs rather counter to Freud's conception of society as naturally and necessarily repressive), based on Marx and Freud, anticipated the values of 1960scountercultural social movements.
In the book, Marcuse writes about the social meaning of biology – history seen not as a class struggle, but fight against repression of our instincts. He argues that capitalism (if never named as such) is preventing us from reaching the non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations". See also Bernard Stiegler, "Spirit, Capitalism and Superego".

[edit]Freud, Marx and humanism

Another member of the Frankfurt School was Erich Fromm, who left the group at the end of the 1930s.
The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of humanist, democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of personal freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism, and more frequently found in the writings of classic liberals. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing and bureaucratic social structures that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation.

[edit]Lacan and Marxism

Jacques Lacan was a philosophically sophisticated French psychoanalyst, whose perspective came to predominate in French psychiatry and psychology. Lacan saw himself as loyal to and rescuing Freud's legacy. Lacan's influence has created a new cross-fertilisation of Freudian and Marxist ideas.

[edit]Althusser

Louis Althusser is widely known as a theorist of ideology, and his best-known essay is Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation. The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phaserespectively, and describes the structures and systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable - it is impossible to escape ideology; to not be subjected to it. The distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not assured once for all by the epistemological break, term borrowed from Gaston Bachelard: this "break" is not a chronologically-determined event, but a process. Instead of an assured victory, there is a continuous struggle against ideology: "Ideology has no history".
His essay Contradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Gramsci's concept of hegemony).

[edit]Žižek

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has developed since the late 1990s a line of thought which uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian
philosophy and Marxism. Althusser is also among his references. Particularly important to note here is his The Sublime Object of Ideology, which deals with the original Freudo-Marxist perspective.

[edit]Commodity and sexual fetishism

Marx's theory of commodity fetishism has proven fertile material for work by other theorists since Marx, who have added to, adapted, or, as Marxistorthodoxy might see it, 'vulgarized' the original concept. Sigmund Freud's well-known but unrelated theory of sexual fetishism led to new interpretations of commodity fetishism, as types of sexually-charged relationships between a person and a manufactured object.

[edit]See also

[edit]Literature

  • Wilhelm Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, in Lee Baxandall ed., Sex-Pol; Essays, 1929-1934 (New York, 1972).
  • Otto Fenichel, Psychoanalysis as the nucleus of a future dialectical-materialistic psychology. In: American Imago, 1967 Winter; 24(4): 290-311
  • Palmier, J.M. (1969) Wilhelm Reich: Essai sur la Naissance du Freudo-Marxisme, Paris.

[edit]References

  1. ^ Boadella, David (1985) Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work, London: p. 62.

[edit]External links