Some people appreciate the freshness of the "naive realism" of the Africans, and other Third World ethnicities. It contrasts starkly with the restrained persona of the ethnic Swede or Englishman, whose attitude of reservedness derives from a constant occupation with the inner world. We are still looking inwards, an attitude which the medievals instilled in us. However, as I will point out in the following lines, a psychology of "naive realism" will cause great social damage, and in the end pose a threat to the democratic order. Therefore it is imperative that the Western world remains true to the perspective of interiority. The notorious propaganda against the "Dark Ages" must cease. We must begin to appreciate the enormous impact of European Middle Ages in our lives today. In fact, in a sense, we need to go back to the source, to reawaken the Middle Ages, to replenish interiority. As Westerners have slowly begun to understand, Muslims moving to the West have a curiously anti-Western way of looking at things. Sharia is very much about regulating reality. For instance, this curious idea that women must always hide themselves behind large sheets of fabric—what's all that about? The focus on ego-protection is very central to the phallic-narcissistic level of culture. If women are allowed to show how attractive they are, the male is gripped by desire—he wants to own that woman who happens to pass him. But as he cannot have her, he experiences this as a violation of his ego. His ego must needs suffer constant narcissistic injury in a society which has not been adjusted according to very strict norms of control. This deep feeling of offence is difficult to comprehend for Westerners who do not suffer from a narcissistic syndrome themselves. Such a psychology has much in common with the chronic neurotic type. These people experience it as a violation of their ego if there exists another person in a discussion group who surpasses them intellectually, but who refrains from mutual narcissistic reinforcement (vulg. "butt-licking"). The latter ritual is very common among neurotics, and they seem to enjoy it as it is very gratifying to their ego. It is interesting to discuss the neurotic type as an atavistic phenomenon, a throwback to the phallic-narcissistic stage, perhaps influenced by genetic factors. The phallic-narcissistic psychic economy is inferior, while a modern psychic economy is more advanced and adaptable to the modern society. I posit the idea that neurotics tend to fall back on the primitive phallic-narcissistic way of functioning as a form of atavism. It's the same notion as an advanced machine, e.g., an airplane that is governed by computers and electric signalling. Should the advanced system malfunction, then it can be steered with mechanical wires. Likewise, a malfunctioning human psyche can fall back on a more primitive mode of functioning. Psychoanalysts have always observed that neurotics appear infantile in diverse ways. So they have always thought that the neurotic is stuck in a childhood way of functioning. This is another way of putting it, of course. But what if this "infantile" psychic economy represents an atavism, and what really happens is that the neurotic makes use of the "backup system"? In a sense his illness is rooted in childhood, but it is really a throwback to an earlier epoch in our history. Arguably, had the neurotic existed in that earlier epoch, he would not be neurotic, but his psychic economy would harmonize with the surrounding. There would be no disruptive modern people around who insist on thinking freely and questioning things. Society is wholly regulated and all people always keep to the olden ways. Now and then, every 100 years or so, the priest or medicine man presents a new idea. Otherwise society is like a big Kindergarten, where people are fitted into their respective roles, and there is really no such thing as true individuality. Arguably, this is the reason why neurotics are so keen on creating a regulated Kindergarten society. They want society to follow the olden ways, that harmonize with their own inferior psychic economy. In the Muslim world and elsewhere, women who reject their suitor sometimes gets acid thrown in their face. This is another way of destroying their attractive power and thus healing the ego of the offender. Those who, for instance, have power of intellect or beauty, and who won't lower themselves to mutual narcissistic reinforcement, are experienced as deadly threats to the weak ego. This could help to explain the unthinking nature of the phallic-narcissistic societies, and their cultural inferiority in everything that concerns the intellect. Arguably, the idea is to remove everything from society that risks harming the ego, thereby creating a harmonious society. As people at the phallic-narcissistic level are extremely prone to suffer narcissistic injury, society must be built on very strict control; rules, rules, rules, control, control, control. Beautiful women must be imprisoned behind four walls or their faces scorched, intelligent people must be removed, one way or the other. This will create an orderly society without incessant injury to the ego and adherent narcissistic explosions of rage. (Continued...)
(Continues...) Arguably, the Islamic ban on iconic representation, especially of the human form, is predicated on the very same ego defensive tactic, to remove that which stirs the acquisitiveness of the ego. At this cultural level, the personality lacks the powers of control present at the Western level. Therefore, control must remain external, in the form of 'sharia' law, for instance. The "locus of control" is different. To Western man, with the exception of the neurotic type, "desire", "beauty", "fear", etc., are experiences that derive from the inside. To dwellers of the Third World, it's the other way round. Most notably, Africans typically experience that fear comes from without. If a black man passes a stranger he might experience a sudden fright. This means that he has been hit by something from outside, namely a form of evil emitted by that stranger. From this moment, he knows that the stranger is evil, some way or the other, and he has to take measures to defend himself. In Europe today, black people think they can return the evil spirit, and make it bounce back, by staring at the person who evoked their fright. They return the effects of the "evil eye" by reflecting it back as a mirror, they believe. In this way disease can be avoided, etc. The president of the Association of African-Swedes stated publicly that "-I see evil in the eyes of Swedes". For the same reason it is common to spit after Swedes, similar to the practice of spitting at black cats. To the Westerner the locus of control is different as we are endowed with the capacity of "projection". A characteristic of projection is that it can be withdrawn. If something evokes a feeling of fear, we are capable of withdrawing it immediately. So, yet again it is decided that a projection has emerged from the inside. As control has thus been internalized, there is less need for control on the outside. There is no need for the primitive ritual defenses that are so damaging to the social situation. I contend that the capacity of interiority is a necessary condition for the establishment of democratic society. There is an underlying expectation that the individual can take charge of himself. A Westerner who sees an attractive woman wearing a short skirt knows, in the general case, that the sexual attraction he experiences comes from the inside. It is his own sexuality which is stirred and he can therefore control it. In fact, his feeling of attraction has nothing to do with her. That woman likes to be beautiful and attractive because it strengthens her well-being. To a man lacking in interiority, however, that woman has emitted her sexual power which has hit him from the outside, and that's what causes his sexual arousal. It is tantamount to a sexual invitation. This psychological discrepancy creates immense social problems in Europe, today. It is also the reason why many immigrants experience European women as "whores". The capacity of interiority was cultivated during the European Middle Ages, when it decidedly took root in the human soul. The interior psychological perspective has its roots in Antiquity. It began to take shape around 600 BC(?) with the introverted ascetic traditions. Via pre-Christian Gnosticism, Stoicism, and Platonism, it blossomed out as Christianity, as formulated by Jesus, St Paul, St Augustine, etc. In history books, it is again and again pointed out how "inferior" Europe was during the "Golden Age" of Islam. The "ignorant" Europeans took recourse in faith, while the Muslims successfully cured many ills thanks to the teachings of Avicenna. It is a correct observation that Europe was lagging behind in the area of external knowledge. But this is a necessary consequence of the strong focus on interiority. This capacity, largely an effect of the strong devotion of the medievals, is what underlies European psychology today; our internal control locus, our democratic mentality, our capacity of not rushing to conclusion, but methodically to extract the truth. The Third World has never undergone such an era of interiority, which partly explains their backwardness today. Although medieval Europe is portrayed as inferior, in reality it was superior in terms of interiority, undergoing great suffering from the plague, etc., learning to withdraw projections from the world. Thus, faith became firmly rooted in the soul, as well as all other passions. When there exists no inner faith, there is a call to establish it on the outside, i.e., to institutionalize and regulate faith according to religious law. When passions grip the ego from outside, there is a call to create a perfectly regulated and undemocratic society, to take control of the demons. In this context it is relevant to discuss European-American cultural clashes. Ethnic Europeans can have projections and swiftly withdraw them, without even noticing that they occurred. They expect this capacity of the Americans, too. But it seems like the Americans (in very general terms, of course) have started to move away from the perspective of interiority. They expect other people to make them feel good, i.e. not to brusquely tell them the truth, but rather to make a false pretense, smiling when you ought to say what's on your heart, etc. Europeans, for their part, like to "tell it to your face" without much ado. Should the other party experience it as "evil", we expect him to withdraw the projection within a second. As a consequence, Americans can experience Europeans as overly frank and lacking in esteem. European businessmen experience the American attitude of pretense as extremely frustrating. They travel back to Europe and wonder why the order never arrives. In fact, the Americans only wanted him to feel good, they never intended to place an order. In fact, this very attitude is very outspoken among primitives. To the frustration of the anthropologists primitives tend to say the things they believe that the researcher wants to hear, in order to make him happy. This movement away from interiority is a worrying development. We begin to see a similar pattern in Europe, today. I have observed that some people have taken to smiling at every black person they meet, to convince him that he is not an evil demon, i.e. a racist. Traditionally, this is known as a false smile as it is just a mask of pretense. However, to the average African immigrant there is no such thing as false pretense since reality is what the outside impresses on you. If a person smiles at you it will make you happy, and this means that something good has come from the outside. It is a wholly uncritical and unthinking attitude, completely foreign to the European consciousness. If we are going to handle the looming social problems of society it is high time to abandon the homologous view of humanity. A good understanding of human variety will aid us in confronting future social problems. Psychological understanding, in itself, will have a good therapeutic effect on the very many people who are made to suffer due to the changing psychosocial patterns in society. W.
Sometimes I think psychologists and such overanalyze things. I've reread this treatise at least 5 times and some of it makes a lot of sense, but most of it comes across as a bit ethnocentric and even racist and leaves huge gaps. For instance, there is no evidence of such phallic narcissim taking place in Germanic Barbarian cultures who had no concept of Platonic philosophy and teachings. Women were not covered, or abused(other than in war) and in fact, one may argue that the medieval ideal of chivalry and protection of women, especially the highly attractive kind, as a valued, cherished and protected resource, even at the expense of the males life grew not from the Roman tradition, but from the barbarian Germanic tradition, which had little or even no contact with earlier Greek thought. In fact, in Gothic cultures, the women were often the drivers of warfare. Once, after a huge defeat of the Goths by the Romans, as the Gothic men were streaming back into the village, the women berated their men as weak and cowardly for retreating from such small men(the typical roman being 5'5" tall and the average Goth being closer to 6'). One can study today in the primitive Mek Culture in New Guinea, where the women are often the drivers of social decisions by the men. The women do most of the labor work of farming, etc.. while the men don **** corks, etc. but when food runs short and the children begin to suffer from malnourishment, the women can and do exert an amazing amount of control over the men, berating them into actions they may not want to take(such as supplicating to a nearby hated village for food). There is a display of the phallic narcissism of a primitive culture on display, and yet they do not abuse their women, cover them up, but cherish and care for them just the same and would never think of disfiguring them if rejected sexually. At least no evidence that I personally have seen would lead to this conclusion. I admit that my ignorance is great in this subject, but I am not as ignorant of the events of history, and the events that occured historically simply do not agree with this model and I think that this treatise leaves a lot to be desired and someone better trained on social psychology could probably crush most of these theories in a moment.
Thank you for calling it a "treatise". I see it merely as food for thoughts. I never put forth the argument that the "Germanic barbarian cultures" were phallic-narcissistic, but at one point in history they probably were. The general rule was that men ruled society while women ruled the home. Anyway, it is not really woman's position in society that decides whether it's a matriarchal or a phallic-narcissistic society. Many people believe that the matriarchal societies, such as the Minoan, were ruled by women. But this is not true. Men tended to be rulers also in those societies. It's just that the feminine principle, the Mother goddess, had precedence. Actually, the phallic-narcissistic society is covertly a matriarchal society, because all people really think about is material things, food, sex, status, power. The reason why women in those societies are repressed is because they have such great power over the men. The men are really mother's boys who must repress women to cover up the embarrassing fact of their dependency on the female principle. Islamic cultures tend to be paternalistic, not patriarchal, while behind the facade the mother principle rules. Everything tends to revolve around the ideal of the mother, including the motherly boons of safety, nourishment, and comfort. There is no marked heroism in such cultures. So it seems like the "tribal consciousness" is more pronounced. The individual and the tribe are one. Comparatively, Western culture is more "heroic". It reflects on the achievement and the emancipation of the individual, which, in a Hollywood film, also proves to be a great boon to the collective. Compare the centrality of the hero myth in historical Western society versus African cultures. You asked for some "evidence". Please have a look at this: "Contrasting Muslim And Western Psychologies: The Locus Of Control" "[Nicolai Sennels] writes the following about the different ways that Westerners and Muslims view the locus of control: There is another strong difference between the people of Western and Muslim cultures; their locus of control. Locus of control is a psychological term describing whether people experience their life influenced mainly, by internal or external factors. It is clear from a psychological point of view that Westerners feel that their lives are mainly influenced by inner forces – ourselves..." http://tinyurl.com/65ugf2y W.
Now this does make a bit more sense to me. The Germanic Tradition and the Roman one, which grew from a fusion of the Greek Platonism and Celtic beliefs, held fertility as one of the highest religious duties of society. For a society to remain highly fertile, as fertility goddesses would require, require a veneration of the womb as a religious object and hence the woman herself which all was tied to the concept of agriculture being the dominant economic form. Now I'm highly ignorant of early development of pre-Islamic thought but I'm not sure that Zoroastrianism, which was a dominant social and religious institution in much of the middle east pre-Islam, held such a belief. To a desert culture, where agriculture would be sparse, water extremely limited fertility culture would seem to be incompatible. Life would revolve around hunting/gathering to a larger degree, and therefore the value of the womb and women in general would be seen with much less value IMO. It seems to me, that European culture, being based around a semi-static agricultural society based in the need for fertility of the soil and linking religiously the fertility of the soil with the fertility of the womb, would make women far more valuable than a desert culture based on a nomadic way of life where fertility could often be "just another mouth to feed" and could be a detriment to the social unit. I don't think that any of this is linked to genetics, but from the region in which these cultures sprang from the mists of ancient times. The Egyptians for instance, being based primarily around the Nile delta and down the nile, also revered fertility and were based around an agricultural model of society, where as the desert cultures with which they fought constantly, seemed to not have linked the womb with any particular significance. It is my argument that the agricultural fertility of the region in which a culture springs makes the distinction between the value of the womb and the woman in the culture.
It's more complicated than that. It also depends on whether the earth is fertile, and whether Mother Nature is generous or not. On Crete they could also harvest the fruits of the sea. Nature was almost paradisiacal, with a good climate. No wonder that the principal goddess was maternal, because they lived in the bosom of benevolent nature. However, an agricultural society can live under harsh circumstances, warfare, etc. As Mother Earth isn't very friendly, they turn to Father Heaven instead. I think the patriarchal concept eventually paved the way for personal responsibility and the shaping of the modern individual. It necessitates a turning inwards, to meet the inner enemy. To learn to withdraw projections. W.
Primitive Superstition and fear of events that science at the time could not explain. Mass hysteria caused by innocent ignorance.
The witch-hunts occurred in the modern era, during the 17th and 18th century. This is the era they call the "enlightened", freed from the shackles of the Dark Ages. In the witch-hunt era they also started a lot of wars in Europe, the Thirty Years' War, etc. Of course, then came the Napoleon wars, the First and Second World Wars, etc. Why, then, is the medieval era so dark by comparison? Was it because Galileo had to say that the earth did not rotate around the sun? Truth is, the modern era is much darker than the Middle Ages. W.
Witch-hunts occured in the Roman Empire as well, often triggered by agricultural crisis and outbreaks of epidemics. Witch-hunts re-occured in the Late Middle Ages, following the Great Famine and the Black Death. Witch-hunts lasted two centuries during the Early Modern Europe, before the Age of Enlightment.
The Age of Enlightenment was a movement inaugurated around 1650 continuing throughout the 18th century. This was the era of the worst witch-hunts. Pogromes occurred also in medieval times, but the horrors of the modern age is far worse. "The classical period of witchhunts in Europe and North America falls into the Early Modern period or about 1480 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 executions."(Wikipedia) So it seems like the "liberation" of the human soul and intellect also meant the liberation of the devil. It was like opening Pandora's box. The book "Humanity" by Jonathan Glover is well worth reading. We are lying to ourselves when we keep harping on how enlightened and advanced we are. We project our own shadow on medieval dwellers, who were better people than us. W.
"There is no way to verify the figures reported by Roman historiographers, but if they are taken at face value, the scale of the witch-hunts in the Roman Republic in relation to the population of Italy at the time far exceeded anything that took place during the "classical" witch-craze in Early Modern Europe." (Wiki) It was during the Age of Enlightenment that the witch-craze started to fade and witch-hunts ended in Europe, along with many other irrational beliefs. The Enlightenment does not symbolise how advanced the West has become, but how retarded it was. The Golden Age is just a myth
I didn't know that witch-hunts were prevalent during the Roman republic. But I was talking about the Middle Ages and compared it with modern times, including the Age of Enlightenment. The latter implies a reawakening of the classical ideals of antiquity. That might explain why witch-hunts became much more prevalent than they ever were during the Middle Ages. W.
If we are to ignore Antiquity, then European witch trials were most prevalent between 1580 and 1630, but they had been increasing since the Late Middle Ages. By contrast, the Age of Enlightenment corresponds with a sharp decline of witch trials in much of Europe, which is not surprising since the Enlightenment emphasized the use of reason to scrutinize previously accepted doctrines and traditions and brought about many humanitarian reforms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunts_in_Early_Modern_Europe#History
People were tolerant towards witch-craft during the Middle Ages because it had its roots in the superstitions of folklore. However, with an increasing "enlightenment", people wanted to root out the olden ways. This mentality still dominates society today, the urge to root out of "unscientific" superstition. Witch-hunts continue to this day, especially in South Africa. "The witch-hunts of early modern Europe took place against a backdrop of rapid social, economic, and religious transformation. As we will see in the modern-day case-studies below, such generalized stress -- including the prevalence of epidemics and natural disasters -- is nearly always central to outbreaks of mass hysteria of this type." http://www.gendercide.org/case_witchhunts.html It is evident that it was the transformation into modern times, and "enlightenment", that amplified the persecutions. The new moral "freedom", our independence towards the church and God, also came to expression in warfare. The human willpower experienced a liberation from its former shackles. So let's make war and rob our neighbours of their treasures! W.
I study Latin and I've yet to hear of serious witch-hunts under Rome, though there were, of course, all sorts of persecutions that can be so interpreted. The best explanation I've heard of the witch-madness is that early capitalism meant that the rich, heads to the trough as now, neglected the traditional duty of 'hospitality' to the poor and felt guilty about it. Therefore, like current capitalists with their colonial attacks on Islam, they turned their hatred on those they had wronged, especially old women and such who couldn't fight back. We read the equivalent rantings on here every day, as the disciples of Witchfinder McCarthy scream about 'Muslims' in their furious guilt and ignorance. Plus ca change!
