It is worth mentioning there is a difference in general how people think in new authoritarianisms and in those that have been ongoing for decades. Here someone dreams that dreams are forbidden and does it anyway. When one's lived their entire life under authoritarian rule one's dreams are often already self censored. When your next door neighbor is dragged out of his flat at 4am by secret service never to appear again and You think that is how things should be any manifestation of "reactionary" thought is unbearable. This makes the fact we have diaries and books written even in places like Russian gulags in which people record such thoughts even more astonishing. Long time ago as a teenager I hated being forced to read those "horribly depressing" books, but now I think it should be required reading in schools specially in countries that did this stuff to their citizens and others.
Dostoyevsky is a good example of that - he was caught taking part in (relatively innocent) freethink anti-carist meetings and got sent for 8 years to a severe Siberian labor camp for it. While staying there, he gradually converted to being pro-carist and pro-regime, a stance that was not just a fake to potentially get him out of there sooner.
The conversion is not fake, that is a pretty common trajectory. BTW, he was scheduled for execution, brought to the gallows and pardoned at the last second. That alone changed him.
>"but now I think it should be required reading in schools"
Let me up the ante. Put real unedited war / oppression / prison / etc. etc. footage including most gory stuff on youtube and TV and feed it to people every day "specially in countries that did this stuff to their citizens and others."
It had come to [Squealer's] knowledge, he said, that a foolish and wicked rumour had been circulated at the time of Boxer's removal. Some of the animals had noticed that the van which took Boxer away was marked "Horse Slaughterer," and had actually jumped to the conclusion that Boxer was being sent to the knacker's. It was almost unbelievable, said Squealer, that any animal could be so stupid. Surely, he cried indignantly, whisking his tail and skipping from side to side, surely they knew their beloved Leader, Comrade Napoleon, better than that? But the explanation was really very simple. The van had previously been the property of the knacker, and had been bought by the veterinary surgeon, who had not yet painted the old name out. That was how the mistake had arisen.
Authoritarian regimes often come from revolutions and present themselves as revolutionary, even many decades after the revolution. So anyone suspect of being against the regime is described as being reactionary.
Iran's IRGC - Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (i.e. the ones guarding the revolution from interior and exterior threats) - is perhaps the most literal extant example of this phenomenon.
"Left" and "Right" are some of the least specific terms used to describe political views, so detouring through them to muddy up a more precise term would seem to cloud understanding.
I used to find them completely meaningless, until I saw a piece of writing advice about making realistic characters from the other side of the political spectrum. The advice was,
"If you're right-wing, you want the state to be a dad. If you're left-wing, you want the state to be a mom".
Which is a weird take the first time you hear it, but I've yet to find even one example of a policy position that doesn't fit this filter. And of course, it leaves plenty of room for those of us who don't think the state should be a parent without invalidating the polarity itself.
Left and right are incredibly well defined and understood if people are being genuine. Left wing politics generally believe that the government and central planning are good in varying degrees, right wing politics generally believe that government is a necessary evil and should be given as little responsibility as possible with economics and social planning.
With that aside, they were socialist revolutionaries. Terms are only imprecise because of people trying to redefine it when it's inconvenient for their views. Whether it's in the original interpretation in europe, they literally killed their russian royals... or in the modern interpretation of the word they were socialists who believed in the power of the state and central planning as being tenants of a good society.
>Left wing politics generally believe that the government and central planning are good in varying degrees, right wing politics generally believe that government is a necessary evil and should be given as little responsibility as possible with economics and social planning.
Under this definition, the Drug War is left-wing, as are restrictions on access to abortion or contraception, restrictions on children's attendance or participation in beauty pageants or drag shows, and restrictions on either public nudity or traditional religious garb. Now if you really believe all of those policies are left-wing, fine, but I think it's not as simple as you want to make it seem.
Also there is currently no left wing in the US. What's often called left by the right is people who disagree with them.
What we actually have is a supermajority who believe in typical US values like publicly funded education, providing modest social safety nets and one person one vote. A small minority on the far-right leaning towards secession. And a small minority on the left so disenfranchised that their well-meaning causes like unionization and protecting the environment are portrayed as little more than punchlines on the evening news.
Which brings up the importance of media in political discourse. In journalism, one always punches up, doing investigative reporting on politicians, religious leaders, titans of industry, etc. Propaganda punches down at immigrants, the poor, the less fortunate.
Which means that we also don't have news in the US, just infotainment that endlessly distracts and denies. A handful of outlets like FSTV and Public Television try to get at the truth, but have such small viewerships that they're tolerated so the big players have something to point to as alternative. Which is by design, to suppress any left-leaning sentiment among voters.
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished. Left-wing politics are also associated with popular or state control of major political and economic institutions.
Right-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, authority, property or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies.
Sorry, but no. Those things used to be like that, but they aren't any more. It seems even ironic(no doubt you didn't mean it as such). Let me give you Poland as an example where the "right wing government lead by an ex-banker" has established the biggest system of social benefits we've ever had in the country(and won its second election as a result). Why are they considered right wing? Because they are social conservatives, pro religion in schools, against "lgbt culture", abortion etc. Then there is one of the oldest parties of the "left" (descendants of the old communist regime). Despite a lot of talk about social equity, "working people" etc, when they did rule the benefits available were one of the lowest since the transformation (that however may have been more a function of them being a band of thieves rather than ideology, but I digress), at the same time that "left" party had many people in there that used to be openly homophobic not that long ago. These are just two examples which many people will no doubt a lot to add to. Also, why are those terms of left/right so meaningless in my country today? Mainly because two opposing camps now are not divided between left and right, but those that don't want the thieves to get back in power(even if they disagree with a lot of actual policies of the ruling party at least most of them are not thieves), and the other camp that is convinced the ruling party tries to establish a fascist dictatorship so they prefer pretty much anything else. There are more nuanced points to make, but this is the gist of it.
In a sense you can see it applied to the entire EU. Social conservatives are described as fascist, homophobes etc while the other side is portrayed as horribly corrupt, inefficient, nepotic. And both sides of course say the other is the one that breaks the rule of law(which they both do). The economic policies disappear in all of this.
> Left wing politics generally believe that the government and central planning are good in varying degrees, right wing politics generally believe that government is a necessary evil and should be given as little responsibility as possible with economics and social planning
Sorry, no. You're cherry picking the aspects of left-right that make for a favorable argument. In a different context, one could point out how leftists favor decentralization while rightists are fans of centralized control. Rather than getting bogged down in painting with a broad brush, just so the two contemporary "left" and "right" teams can duke it out over who gets to take blame/credit for the past, it's better to stay focused on specific beliefs and dynamics.
I agree that in this case, the revolutionaries are appropriately described as leftist. However once they've taken power and become entrenched, it's appropriate to describe those attempting to preserve the status quo of that power structure as reactionaries - just as it would be appropriate to describe any group (rightist or different leftist) attempting to overthrow that leftist-branded power structure as revolutionaries.
Another definition is that the left wing generally believe that a society's wealth should be more evenly distributed to those of the right. This can be done by taxation not necessarily by socialist central control. Also the right wing can believe in the inherent superiority of one section of society, e.g. a class or a "race".
I am not sure what are you confused about: who are Marxists who read Marx's works? It's literally the definition. Or what works are by Marx? He is not Banksy, is he? Attribution of his works is well established.
Under authoritarianism people stop seeing things. "Percepticide" is
what Diana Taylor calls it [1] and what Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
refers to as the "Spiral of Silence" [2]. Dreams contain unprocessed
experience and suppression pushes that down into the unconscious where
it is processed and expressed in a creative and safe way. Such
sublime, symbolic expressions are extremely powerful weapons against
the suppressing force, and this is why (real not imitative) art,
writing and Psychoanalysis is feared by all mechanical and
authoritarian regimes.
[1] Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and
Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War.
[2] Noelle-Neumann, The spiral of silence: Public opinion, our social
skin, University of Chicago Press (1973)
I wonder what authoritarian[0] evangelicals' sleeping dreams are like. I have read theories[1] that suggest their waking dream of establishing Gilead is because they fear the the outside world[2], and considering that even I don't care much for this XXI, I suppose they must be near paranoia with progress.
[0] the adjective is very important here; supposedly Carter has complained in public about the hijacking of US evangelical churches by godbotherers, but while plausible I haven't confirmed the quote.
[1] Bob Altemeyer had academic studies of correlation between fear levels and willingness to follow authoritarian leaders; to me it sounded awfully like the phenomenon of fear-biting in dogs (a vice to be avoided if one is looking for a good hunting prospect).
[2] evidently never having heard « Il faut de tout pour faire un monde » ?
If you explain which assumptions you find cloudy, I can either justify or reëvaluate them.
If you explain which wordings you find propaganda terminology, I might attempt to restate them.
====
Edit: following Linebarger's injunction from Psychological Warfare[0]:
> The point will invariably arise: "This tells me how to listen to a foreign radio. Okay, I'll get the news, the lectures, the plays—all the rest of it. But so what? How am I going to know what's the truth and what's propaganda? How can I tell 'em apart? Tell me that!"
> The answer is simple: "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
let's do an analysis of my post:
Source: 082349872349872 (ostensible, first-use, and, I claim, also the true source), transmitted on HN
Time: Monday morning, no retransmission, non-peculiar time.
Audience: HN
Subject: query on the relation between fear, dreams, and authoritarian evangelicals
Mission: white propaganda soliciting information about content of dreams outside the author's social circles, and informing about the existence of academic studies relating fear and following authoritarian leaders. potential ostensible second-use wrt James "Jimmy" Carter.
Exercise: perform your own analysis, according to the STASM model or your own.
He’s probably talking about the Gilead reference. This is the peril of reading fiction - you get some version of the author’s weird fantasies and dreams rattling around in your head. What you have is Atwood in your head. Indeed I originally just downvoted the beginning of this thread, because it seemed really inflammatory, but it seems like you’re posting in good faith.
In real life, approximately zero evangelicals want some kind of Gilead. If you talk to them, the most ideological want some sort of idealized, non-racist high-tech version of the 1950-80s. No doubt there are some cranks out there, but they’re about as common as Westboro Baptist Church members (one family) or the series of weird niche western US cults. The generalization is totally wrong and informed by propaganda.
I’ve thought a lot about how strange it is fiction can have such a powerful effect on people’s perceptions, and people often seem unaware of the propagandistic nature of it. Another example is Atlas Shrugged.
At any rate, being fascinated by the subject of dreams, I have talked to a lot of evangelicals about their dreams and have not noticed any deviation from the norm.
Thank you. [Edit: and thank you very much for the dreams! that's very reassuring, assuming you've also talked with representatives of the authoritarian subset]
Of the approximately 55m conservative evangelicals who don't want some kind of Gilead [edit: is there a proper evangelical term for lone cranks who do wish to immanentise the eschaton, so I can use less loaded vocabulary?], how many would you say:
* believe the US is a secular nation
* believe in maintenance of the separation of Church and State
(yes, just like the Haskell weenies?)
If there are substantial numbers who don't (after all, someone is electing the representatives espousing the opposite — but maybe someone else?), what is the difference between their position and my head-canon for Gilead (to be clear: a theocratic state, eg Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, Saudi, the Vatican etc.)?
PS. Being partial to disco, and neither Argentinian nor El Salvadoran nor Pakistani, of that range I'd be happiest with an idealised non-racist high-tech late 1970s. As it appears that even Baptists dance in the twenty-first century, who are the evangelicals with whom I could find common ground on this project?
PPS. Upon reflection, if I were to roll back time, how about the 1990s but part of the idealisation is we actually get a Peace Dividend?
PPPS. ...and neither Canter&Siegel nor Eternal September nor the Yugoslav wars ever happened. maybe idealisation is not as easy as it appears...
P4S. was it at least clear that "authoritarian" was meant to constrain, ie pick out a subset, not generically describe, "evangelicals"?
The US currently implements (and I support) one of the most thorough versions of religious egalitarianism anywhere in the world, which dates to the work of James Madison (whose writing on the topic is instructive). The UK, on the other hand, has a state religion (Anglicanism), and many countries in Europe (including Germany and Sweden) retain a "church tax". Does that qualify as "Gilead"?
> In real life, approximately zero evangelicals want some kind of Gilead. If you talk to them, the most ideological want some sort of idealized, non-racist high-tech version of the 1950-80s.
I talk to a lot of american evangelicals and this isn't true either. A fair portion of them do want the racism back in the form of segregation, they just know not to use either term to describe their ideal.
They also do want moderate-to-heavy restrictions on or punishment for abortion, birth control, homosexuality, miscegenation, divorce, women owning property. It's not quite gilead but it's a lot closer to that than to "the 80s without racism."
You'll probably rarely run into people who are actively and openly pursuing a government that would implement all of those policies. But framed individually and neutrally for example "should no-fault divorce be removed" these are mainstream positions.
I didn't get my opinion here from fiction or the internet. I've lived a lot of my life among american evangelicals and am a practicing christian even now. I have a lot of ties to this world still for complex reasons. Walking back and cracking down on a lot of the social freedoms gained in the last few generations are unfortunately popular ideas that you can't dismiss as "just some cranks."
Yeah seems likely. I don't want to get too much into the details but I know a lot of "George W." type christians; converted under hardship, their core belief is likely sincere but they aren't necessarily invested in nuanced understanding of its role in a broader public life. They look to their church leadership for that, locally but also in the vast mainstream of evangelical bookstores, podcasts, radio stations.
A domain that is becoming more narrow in its understanding of scripture and extreme about applying it. Look at someone like Beth Moore, a highly prominent figure in this world and by no means a liberal or progressive, viciously chased out for openly holding a view on marriage¹ that would have been easily accepted by evangelicals even a generation ago, and that many probably do privately hold still.
So yes it's entirely possible our evangelical acquaintances have little overlap. But still, these are mainstream views right now and growing more so. You can find dominionist books by prominent christian authors in the window displays of christian bookstores. It may not be the majority of evangelicals, but it is a significant portion and making it the majority is explicitly one of their goals. Dismissing this movement as fringe is irresponsible imo.
¹: The view is "egalitarianism" the idea that both genders have equal privileges and responsibilities within marriage. This is not "wokeism" my southern baptist grandparents believed this.
If you are from the commonwealth(?) yank religion might be strange. I don't know how your country does things; my adopted country requires preachers of whatever religion to have accredited degrees (DTh? I don't know how strict). But as mentioned elsewhere, there is (in light of this year's news, ought to be?) an arm's length relationship between church and state in the States, and so anyone is free to hang out their shingle as a Pastor, eg https://www.ulc.org/minister-store/doctor-of-divinity-degree
The problem with generalizations about “evangelical christians”, which often means unaffiliated baptists, is that you can’t generalize them… there’s no meaningful governance.
Most people of faith are just people who are trying to make sense of the world. But sometimes Pastor Bob is a controlling Nazi, and uses faith and religion as a way to spew his worldview and poison those around them.
Political operators and others exploit that faith too. The Giliad stuff gets pitched as faith adjacent, so parents or faith leaders who don’t know better get it in the hands of kids etc. It’s one of the reasons why keeping politics away from religion is important.
> The problem with generalizations about “evangelical christians”, which often means unaffiliated baptists, is that you can’t generalize them… there’s no meaningful governance.
Indeed. I grew up in a church that called itself "Evangelical Lutheran". Most of the stories I read about "evangelicals" online are completely alien to me. Like evangelicals supposedly taking the Book of Revelations seriously.. my pastor described it as ancient science fiction, allegorical at best but mostly incoherent nonsense. Any "mark of the beast" talk was considered raving lunacy in my evangelical church. That position on Revelations doesn't square with what the internet says evangelicals believe.
I've also never heard the word 'Gilead' before this thread. I'm not sure what it means.
An example I thought of this evening: compare and contrast Joel Osteen with Jimmy Carter. (or even just the house of the former with the houses of the latter)
Both evangelical, but living very different theologies.
I tried to reply but hn stopped me because 3 comments in 15min is too much so had to wait hours.
Consider the term "evangelical authoritarian" and the conclusion you cane up with about fear and paranoia in their dreams.
The propaganda interpretation is a reductive "basically white americans who support trump" but in reality if you took time to understand what that phrase means perhaps you will see how your conclusion or the phrase itself make no sense at all.
My intention was to nudge to the direction of critically examining your assumptions not to say you had bad intentions or that I was free from incorrect assumptions myself.
Why would the term "evangelical authoritarian" be nonsensical? There are some very hierarchical evangelical subcultures, that frown on criticizing higher ups have very strict rules and do nurture "us vs them" way of looking at the world.
The "evangelical authoritarian" does describe them well.
And I am saying that as someone who grew in evangelical church. Mine was significantly less authoritarian then it gets to be, but I still read enough texts produced by authoritarian ones and had enough contact to know it is not made up construct.
No worries, unfortunately I've passed the time limit when I can edit the original post to clarify.
[e for e in evangelicals where authoritarian(e)]
Assuming ~100m US evangelicals, only ~55m are conservative, and presumably only some fraction of those are authoritarian, in the sense that they could willingly support the kind of authoritarianism under which dreams change. Trump support was, at 74m, substantially higher than the number of people I had been intending to discuss.
(Also feel free to directly point out my errors next time; I married into a culture which is far more direct than the anglophone and may have gone native in areas)
Useless comment. Brings absolutely no new information to the table.
Anyone can accuse anyone of speaking in propaganda terminology, it doesn't mean anything in itself, as there's no clear distinction between "propaganda terminology" and "non-propaganda terminology" - propaganda often uses terminology that is also used in non-propaganda conversations.
And our assumptions are always influencing our views, that's kind of a given - you can't have views without assumptions. Are you implying that you, yourself, don't have any assumptions, but instead rely on some kind of divine truth?
> ... don't have any assumptions, but instead rely on some kind of divine truth?
No. But I would appreciate it when others point it out when my conclusions are incorrect because of my assumptions. It helps me self-reflect, that was my intent when commenting.
You didn't point anything out though. I'm sure in your mind there was a meaning to "propoganda terminology" but that set of associations doesn't exist outside your head. So from our perspective, all that you expressed was, "I don't like your ideas, I think you should rethink them, but I'm not going to offer you any criticism or point you in what I think is the right direction."
If your statement hinges on understanding the working of someone's mind, it should be rephrased to rely on the ideas expressed in their comment; your opinion on whether someone's thinking is "clouded by assumptions" isn't worth discussing because it's not something you could possibly know. If you're right about it, you're right like a stopped clock.
If you nebulously posit someone is wrong without highlighting specific views and indicating why you believe they're wrong, you haven't made a criticism, you've made a swipe. This is a more wordy was to say, "you're dumb."
Pointing out someone's conclusions are incorrect is useless unless you also point out why they're incorrect. Everyone has an opinion, it's the reasoning that matters.
In some fields, like mathematics, pointing out "this result is incorrect" can be useful in itself, but that's because of the deeply technical nature of mathematics itself - mechanical verification of correctness is feasible.
In ordinary conversation, things aren't that black-and-white, and pointing out that something is wrong doesn't in itself provide valuable input for self-reflection. Providing some more information why is always more helpful than just saying "you're wrong, figure it out".
"propaganda" is overstating it, but it's hardly a respectful engagement (e.g. "godbotherers"). They appear to have no deep engagement with real evangelical Christians, preferring to argue from stereotypes and pure conjecture arising therefrom.
Anyway, you're not entirely correct, but they're pretty clearly bordering on trolling.
Sorry. To me, a "godbotherer" is someone who is more Churchy than (in this case) Christian. Would pharisee be better? (I had avoided this choice originally due to the slur on actual Pharisees) Or something else?
(see also the note in sibling thread about the importance of the adjective "authoritarian": the godbotherer reference was not meant to be respectful, but neither was it meant to refer to real evangelical Christians.)
In my experience, "godbotherer" is a pejorative description of religious people generally, usually Christians. If "authoritarian" is referring to the "subsetting" p4s, no, it was not at all clear that it was intended to subset rather than describe. I definitely see it as describing rather than subsetting.
This read mostly as a "those damn Evangelicals, am I right?" which is a common enough sentiment, especially in tech circles.
Sorry, I had thought the footnote highlighting the importance of the adjective, the mention of Carter (for those unaware of last century's US politics: an evangelical who became President) as being in a different camp from the authoritarian camp, and the image of real evangelicals as having been hijacked, would all have sufficed to convey the subsetting usage, but I erred. peccavi
To me, "godbotherer" is a pejorative term specifically referring to people who try to convert others to their religion (in annoying and intrusive ways), not religious people in general.
In another, the woman found herself surrounded by workers, including a milkman, a gasman, a newsagent, and a plumber. She felt calm, until she spied among them a chimney sweep. (In her family, the German word for “chimney sweep” was code for the S.S., a nod to the trade’s blackened clothing.)
Terrific example of how dreams are an idiolect (a dialect of one person).
(Edit) In case it's not clear:
The point I am trying to make is that you wouldn't know why a chimney sweep would be an upsetting image without the part in parentheses clarifying what that meant to her. Dream imagery is a symbolic language drawn from our life experiences and much of it will not be obviously meaningful to an outsider who doesn't know the backstory.
The various tradesman here remind me of the Germans seen in Don't Be a Sucker (1945), a piece of war propaganda produced by the US Army: https://youtu.be/vGAqYNFQdZ4
Interesting, I’ve never noticed such symbolism in my dreams (that I remember), neither enough reasoning abilities to relate something symbolic to a real phenomenon.
One of my recent dreams was about me in a room full of indifferent people and one with a knife looking at me. I took a knife away from him, pushed him onto a window sill and carved crosses on his knees.
It's not enough info to interpret it. You would need to start by breaking down some of the symbols.
Crosses are a Christian symbol. Are you Christian or not?
Crosses were used by the Roman Empire to punish people and were so painful they had to invent a new word for it: Excruciating.
Crosses get used in popular fiction as protective symbols against monsters, like vampires and werewolves.
But what does a cross mean to you?
Knees can be a symbol of humbleness, a la "get down on your knees." They can also be a symbol of a point of vulnerability.
But what do knees mean to you?
A window might be a "window of opportunity" -- ie a time frame in which something could occur. Pushing a person onto a window sill could be putting something in place for a particular time frame.
But what does a window sill mean to you?
Dreaming of individuals you actually know rarely is about that person. Instead, that person symbolizes something to you or sometimes your description of them in the dream is a play on words. When I had a corporate job, dreams of my ex husband were really dreams about my job. I was "working for The Man" and "married to my job," so my job was "The Man in my life."
Feels like something about the bystander effect, about feeling attacked or threatened while everyone around you is indifferent. And how in such a situation, you want more than just defence or neutralizing the threat, but some sorta vengeance? Ensuring that it won't become a problem again? Taking power/agency to do so, in a situation where noone else will?
This is just what kinda popped into my mind. Nightcap guru (from the other top post) suggested this:
> This dream likely symbolizes a feeling of helplessness and vulnerability in your current life.
> The indifferent people in the dream could represent a lack of support or understanding from those around you. The figure with the knife symbolizes someone or something that is causing you fear and anxiety. By taking the knife away from them and carving crosses onto their knees, you are asserting your power over the source of your fear and taking control of the situation. This dream could be interpreted as a sign that you have the strength and courage to overcome whatever is causing you fear and anxiety.
I tend to just write it off as a hallucination driven by too-wandering associations.
But there is a recent knowledge I could add to this. From my therapy sessions I learned that direct interpretations, even when they come from your own mind, may be very far from your issues or thoughts that may have produced a dream (in case it really is a subconscious experience at least partially). I have found very unusual multi-tier connections between events and my panic attacks, that I could never interpret myself into in a straightforward way. If you're familiar with chess, it feels like your mind looks several moves forward and wide, but a conscious interpretation is just a take on direct attacks.
Trying to interpret dreams logically is unlikely to generate explanations that are helpful: there are so many possibilities, and even when one finds an explanation that makes sense, one is left wonderingwhat to do with it. A much more potent approach seems to be to re-explore the dream as image, being mindful of the resonances you can feel in the body, and letting it develop the way it wants, without focusing too much on "understanding" or any specific goal. This might sound a bit abstract, but here is a two part blog post which I think explains this pretty well (I am not the author):
(Note: I was quite familiar with "imaginal meditation" when I first found this post, so to me this made a lot of sense and was immediately applicable. But I hope and think that it is even if one is not familiar with those practices)
"In the early 20th-century Age of Empire, when European colonies stretched across the world, psychoanalysis was the novel technique of the moment. In an attempt to better understand their colonial subjects in those years, officials in the British empire undertook a curious and little-known research project: to collect dreams from the people of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific."
> Whether in Freudian or Jungian perspective, Seligman saw that the colonial subjects’ dreams pointed in the direction of one unexpected conclusion. As he put it in 1932 : ‘The savage mind and the mind of Western civilised man are essentially alike.’
That this was a novel conclusion shocks me, less than a century later!
Linebarger makes similar points to what the British discovered here in his Psychological Warfare book I've cited in another thread; reading between the lines he makes a strong, if implicit case, for desegregating the US Army in the 1940s edition (something they would eventually do ~Korea — but still in advance of much of civilian society) and for taking decolonisation seriously in a later, domino-theory-era, edition.
How do you even distinguish dreams (plans or visions of future) from dreams (experiences your have while sleeping) in English language? In my mother tongue there are different words for these things
Context clues, it's rarely an issue in practice for native speakers:
- "I dreamt about you last night" - clearly a sleeping dream
- "I dream of being a doctor" - clearly a future desire
- "It's a dream come true" - ambiguous but the difference isn't important
In my experience there's also a cultural implication/expectation that the different meanings are often intertwined, i.e. desiring something so strongly you have dreams about it.
There are different words in English, too. You yourself have used a few; e.g., "plans". It's just that the standard term for the night hallucination is "dream" and a standard metaphorical use of this term is roughly "ideal future". Generally context is sufficient to determine whether you are using the term literally or metaphorically. If you are determined to make it absolutely clear which use is intended, you can crack open a thesaurus, but when you would want to do this -- in a psychology paper, say -- is precisely when the context is particularly good at disambiguating the two uses.
I wrote a paper on dream interpretation that explains the neurology of REM sleep. It is common for us all and I believe has a consistent impact on the content of dreams. If you'd like to read it you can check it out here: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz
Not formally (as in a formal experiment), but the theory has remained consistent from my interactions. I'm training to become a psychotherapist so I will be curious to see how things hold up in the consulting room
Really cool to see that the libraries have preserved this book. It's out of print for so long that the copies on Amazon are 400$ upwards, but I was able to fetch a pdf from LibGen - someone has digitised a copy from a Turkish university library.
Speaking of dreams, I have friends who tell me that they never dream. (Or perhaps they never remember their dreams.)
I know that Vipassana meditation increases dreaming. And weed decreases dreaming. And maybe intense mental labor or media-consumption has an affect on it too.
Sleep apnea is a big cause of people not dreaming. They're not consistently getting into deep sleep cycles due to the constant breathing interruptions is how I had it explained to me.
Regular cannabis consumption can suppress dreams. Quitting cold turkey may subsequently cause a week of intense vivid dreams, followed by a return to normal dreaming.
But how would a person know if their dreams had changed before & after they started paying attention to them?
Yesterday my partner and I walked past a restaurant and the sign had changed from whatever it was to “Rosie’s” and I said, “Oh look, that’s different” and she said, “it’s been like that for years”.
Dreams always change if you pay attention to them. Focusing on dreams by nature changes/develops your consciousness. So that you can’t attribute these changes to outer conditions.
Your example with the restaurant sign doesn’t work because your consciousness didn’t alter the signs. But looking at your dreams will.
Until Googlr, Facebook, Disney or Time Warner run their own countries the sozr of a continent, times still are different. Not that some of those companies don't want to, especially Thiel certainly would, but we are not even close to what the East India Co. was and did.
It's not them but the ruling class shareholders and fund-raiser donating class of people that for example pressure meta and fb to filter some content or maybe not filter it and ler civil wars happen and governments get toppled.
I agree with you that the New Yorker's classification of authoritarianism is lazy and I think it nullifies its credibility. I also agree that some powerful people have it in their best interest to hide the costs of democracy because they have the means to influence voters through emotion.
But you lose a lot credibility when you talk about Trump (I think?) using "authoritarian" as a defining term (the guy relatively easily could've taken on so many emergency powers during the pandemic but largely left it up to the states), as if Obama and literally every other president didn't also have mostly authoritarianism in their policies.
Also, most so-called democratic societies don't value democracy at all costs. E.g. courts with appointed judges are less democratic than mob justice.
I said trump because he refused to concede power and admit loss as well as called for termination of the constitution so he can regain power. An unsuccesful authoritarian is still one. He could have grabbed emergency powers but there are none that place him above removal from office by the senate or his cabinet (25th).
If you read about all the ways people justified shitting all over Africa in the 1800s (white man's burden, "we're going to civilize them", other garbage like that) you'll find some uncomfortably strong echoes in modern mainstream upper middle class viewpoints. That's what he's getting at.
I think "neo-colonial" is a bad choice of wording because the word "colonial" comes with too much specific implication that is not quite relevant at present but the whole implied and unquestionable inferiority of other groups culture and methods of societal organization is very much alive and well.
If that's what he means, I actually sympathise with the viewpoint (neoconservatism and neoliberalism intersect in US hegemony, something JFK specifically spoke out against), but am completely clueless as to how we got here from dreams under authoritarianism.
(FWIW I've proposed some better wording for concepts in my original thread if they would help avoid derailment)
Presuming authoritarianism to be this one thing was the starting point, a worldview shaped by neo-colonial "democracy or else" is my theory as to why the alternatives in types of government as seen from a western view point are either authoritarian, communist or democratic (even putin and dprk are democratic lol). In reality, putin's russia, dprk, china, vietnam, etc... are all different from each other. You can't be succesful like china by being communist alone for example or end up poor like nk simply because one family of dictators ruled over a few generations (the british monarchy of dictators ruled for over a millenium and had the largest empire ever).
British/english monarchy still has a few decades until its millennium (2066 and all that) but yes, "democracy or else" is remarkably reductive (I doubt the 2k+ representatives to this year's 二十大 went there if they weren't going to be voting on party business and positions, and on the other hand there are "good monarchies" just as in 1970 there were still "good fascists", so the categories might be worse than reductive; they could easily be mistaken).
I would rather blame ignorance than malice: western viewpoints are oversimplified because by and large we westerners do not care to learn about the important distinctions to be made. However, I suspect that will slowly change over the course of this century. (In 1985, it only took the G5 to have enough corner to manipulate the exchange rate of the USD. Today it would probably take almost the entire G20 to do so.) Pushing my thumbs that it will change for the better.
You are right about the first part. Neo-colonialism is a word I chose because regime change and installment of a western friendly regime is the goal of the people I talk about. Including many on HN that think circumventing restrictions in other countries by legitimate governments is good because it supports some internal faction of that country more aligned with their views. The result would be a country open to western views and more open to trade and influence. Colonialism is when you install rulers of a country that are your subjects, essentially making that country a province and the goal being to "improve" and "civilize" that country to your standards and allow "trade" beneficial to you. Neo-colonialism isn't of course exactly that, but as you said, there are strong parallems which is why the term is used (and abused by some). The presumption that you get a say in what type of a government and what type of laws exist in a foreign country can only when you see yourself as part of a powerful force that can affect those changes and has the right to do so. If US and europe were broke 3rd world countries that don't have powerful militaries there wouldn't be all this talk about replacing governments in other countries and supporting by finance and technology revolutionaries that seek to install western friendly regimes in those countries.
It is important to label it and call it out because since grade school we are indoctrinated to think this is the correct way.
When there were terrible things happening in Syria, trump bombed them with popular support. When terrible things happen elsewhere like China, they're left alone because they can fight back. Preying on the weak and installing friendly regimes is a modern way of colonizing those deemed inferiror or uncooperative.
I suspect many of these "ex-colonies", by popular referendum - if they had this option - would choose to be a "province" again. People just want peace and prosperity.
This doesn't mean that systematic abuses didn't happen in the past but contradicts clearly the thoughts of the enlightened elites.
No, I know plenty of immigrants and they would not want to be subjugated again, but you sort of proved my point there. You fail to realize that even now, the reason many former colonies (US being an exception) do so poorly is because the post-colonial countries were formed by colonizers, their original countries were erased. Now, I blame them for not defending their homeland to begin with but my point is that to this day they fight against each other (and I know I am overly generalizing here) because mainly mistrust between each other. You maybe familiar with tutsi's and hutu's in rwanda for example, they did not trust tutsis because they feared subjugation. You think they would be ok with europeans subjugating them when they have civil wars because their neighbors might subjugate them?
Colonialists were greedy, they could have made a lot if money just by trading and establishing trade routes. Everyone wants to profit. Their greed was they wanted it all and fast, because they developed superior militaries they used that power for greed.
Again I suspect if "ex-colonizers" allowed open frontiers, an avalanche of "ex-colonized" people would come to get peace and prosperity, leaving their elites preaching to themselves about "subjugation". Past is past. Abuses were made but "colonialism" doesn't have to be a zero sum game. Actually it never was.
It is just another point of view - an unpopular one among the elites - to be aware of.
The thing is what do you do about people that refuse to accept colonisation? Even if you are right and people vote to be colonized, you have to kill or imprison the millions who resist. And even if that wasn't the case and they somehow prosper in a few decades, why would they not want independence then? Even texas wants to secede from america and the whole south fought a war. Either way, you will have a lot of bloodshed.
Also, this means a lot more of the people you colonize will immigrate to the homeland as you can see in Europe, can your people handle that give the birth rate difference and cultural incompatibility and all the "purity" xenophobes? Business is business. In case you don't know, majority of black people in the UK immigrated in colonial mid-20th century to work in child care,NHS,etc...from the carribean and africa (which is great) because local talent was short and expensive. The same will happen in any new colony.
It is best to be friendly trade partners and allies than master and slave. There are those who want peace and profit and there are those who are filled with violence and greed.
>leaving their elites preaching to themselves about "subjugation"
It's usually the elites who inherited the colonial extractivist machine and are keeping it running. If they preach about "subjugation" it's only to avoid responsibility for failing to reform the country in a way that doesn't benefit them. People who tried actual reforms quickly found their countries intervened by foreign powers.
The last sentence of the article mentions Trump and it is likely triggering to some of his supporters. Neo-liberal is a term frequently used in that circle.
> In modern times, what makes authoritarian rule difficult and unstable is the western nations' neo-colonial ruling class (most on HN) who are hell bent on exporting their superior democratic ways.
The attempted colonization of the Spanish language by Westerners who are offended by its gendered terminology is a real-world illustration of this.
I live in a Spanish speaking country where some people take issue with the fact that groups of people are male by default, unless they are all female. Using "e" is preferred to "x" since you can actually pronounce it. Anyway, the clue that this is an American thing is not the fact that they try to make the language inclusive, it's that they don't even think about getting rid of the racist term "Latino" in the first place. A businessman from Ciudad de Mexico and a farmhand from northern Chile have so little in common that it's senseless to lump them together for most purposes, yet as soon as they step into the US they become part of this group labeled "Latino" and treated as as single unit (for "Asians" it's even worse). Most Americans, even many that self-define as "progressive" are so used to this racist framework that they don't see anything wrong with it
I saw Hateful 8 here at home, and was often the only person in the theatre laughing. If one hasn't grown up with the racist framework, how is one supposed to get all of Tarantino's gallows humour references to it?
I've been checking this thread and what amused me so far is the amount of down and up votes, it seems what I said was very controversial as opposed to just unpopular.
I said what I said in good faith, I am open to an honest and respectful discussion for those of you who disapprove of my comments.
It sounds deep, but it really doesn't mean anything. Propaganda has a wide range of techniques, deployment, and permeation into society - some do it more than others, some do it differently than others.
This is a quote from the article it it wasn’t actually quoted. The last sentence mentions Trump and it is likely triggering to his supporters who would immediately scratch off the entire contents as propaganda against him.
