Milky Way over White Sands National Monument, New Mexico*
MOTHER’S DAY POEM
I remember my mother, her old house,
the miracle of her love, her fingers
on my cheek brushing away the night,
the world coming home for breakfast,
her eyes asking if I’d been on the road
for long and was the traffic heavy.
Nothing speaks of love like her kindness,
not the birds swirling in the mountains
nor starlight in the trees. Nothing speaks
of hope like her silent prayers for me
in the morning before school or the bread
and soup she placed before me at night.
Some people seek comfort in a priest,
the way he washes his hands in holy water,
raises his chin to drink wine. But it’s mothers
who divide the loaves and fishes, collect
the crumbs, sweep the floors, and find lost coins.
One day they’ll call us home for the last supper.
~ John Guzlowski
I'm especially struck but “collect the crumbs.” Somehow that’s so emblematic of “woman’s work.”
“What’s the symbolism of the falling sandal?” Charles asked. “I don’t think there is any mystical symbolism here,” I replied. “It’s just a charming realistic detail.” Charles wasn’t buying that. “Mary is the one who’ll pick up the sandal and tie it back on, again and again” he said. “That’s why Mary is called Our Lady of Perpetual Help. A mother is a perpetual help machine.”
*
But because motherhood also has a metaphorical meaning, let me include another poem to honor those other kinds of motherhood.
INVISIBLE WORK
Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.
There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.
~ Alison Luterman, The Largest Possible Life
There are many excellent lines here. I especially love the second stanza:
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.
*
Mary: "the invisible work that stitches up the world"
In honor of mothers always and everywhere, we should remember they create and maintain the world with their labor, that "invisible work" of generation in the womb followed by all the endless, repetitive, necessary and unrecognized work women do. Not only here and now, but everywhere and forever. In our earliest hunter gatherer societies it was not the hunter that provided the bulk of the food, but the women with their children carried on their hips and their sharpened digging sticks...later, they would be the farmers, providing the essentials, but still uncelebrated. The hunters were the heroes, then as now, but the mothers have always done all those basic, invisible things that life depends on.
Oriana:
Well, the Great Mother Goddess was once worshiped . . . And I watched the nascent movement to bring her back. Also Isis, a female savior to Osiris and an overall nurturing goddess. One can also make the claim that Mary is basically a goddess of Mercy. But our era is basically too scientific for any religious movement to thrive in a sustained fashion . . . The closest we’ve come is Yoda and the Force in Star Wars. Imagine if Yoda were female — which would be quite Taoist (the Force has been compared to the Tao), with its acknowledgement that Yin is more powerful than Yang.
By the way, Invisible Work is an example of how an ending can open up into more and more. It illustrates what Stanley Kunitz said about his preferred endings:
I realize that this is a bit hard to read, to let me repeat the most important part:
Just as the truly great piece of architecture moves beyond itself into its environment, into the landscape and the sky, so the kind of poetic closure that interests me bleeds out of its ending into the whole universe of feeling and thought. I like an ending that's both a door and a window. ~ Stanley Kunitz
*
CAMUS, THE ANTI-TOTALITARIAN
~ “Today, it is not unusual to see Albert Camus celebrated as the debonair existentialist—the handsome hero of the French Resistance, a great novelist, and a fine philosopher. But this reputation was only recently acquired. For much of his life, and in the years since his untimely death in 1960 aged just 46, Camus was deeply unfashionable among France’s leading intellectuals. In many quarters, he remains so.
Camus did not take up arms in the struggle against the Nazi occupation, but during the war he was the editor of the underground newspaper of the Resistance, Combat. This job involved great personal risk and he would almost certainly have been imprisoned and shot, either by the Nazis or their French collaborators, had his role been uncovered. When the war ended, Camus gazed at the devastation of Europe and reflected. Over the subsequent years, his writing would change significantly as humanism and anti-totalitarianism became increasingly central to his thinking. His 1947 allegorical novel The Plague depicts not a solitary, alienated man, but a group of people struggling together against a plague in a small Algerian city. Here, human beings are willing to confront the absurdity of the universe, but they remain compassionate nonetheless, and strive to be kind and to care for each other. Then, in 1951, Camus published The Man in Revolt (later published in translation as The Rebel). Horrified by the crimes of Stalin and by the apologetics for his regime published by some of the Western Left’s most influential intellectuals, Camus sought to understand the justification of mass murder. It is a rich book, and not easily summarized, but two of Camus’s arguments proved particularly antagonizing to his peers.
First, Camus argued that commitment to a single, distant purpose endangers us all. The struggle for a perfect society in the future leads to as ruthless consequentialism that allows us to sacrifice countless people in the present. This fear is what led him to describe Marx as “the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbeliever’s plot at Highgate Cemetery.” The faith of the Marxist in the promise of utopia, he observed, is every bit as powerful and irrational as that of the religious fanatic.
Second, Camus defended the proposition, explicitly denied by Marxists and Existentialists, that there exists a universal “human nature”—traits shared by all people, from which we can infer what is better or worse for all people and common ground upon which to form social bonds. Sartre, on the other hand, argued that we are the product of our choices and nothing more. Simone de Beauvoir summarized the Marxist view as her peers understood it: “There is no authentic human essence to be realized, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organized wholeness to be achieved. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time.”
From his universalist humanism and skepticism about utopian ideologies, Camus developed an ethics in Man in Revolt that rejected revolution. Instead, Camus argued that moral progress arises from a rejection of injustice by people united in their recognition of that injustice. This kind of “revolt” is more restrained than the revolutionary impulse and shows mesure—it recognizes and respects human nature, attempts to improve things now, and accepts no limits on free speech and expression. When revolt is combined with the misguided belief that history has some unifying purpose and that human beings can be reshaped in the manner of wet clay, it declines into revolution. Revolution is unrestrained, it is démesure, and it leads inevitably to violence and cruelty.
Sartre and Beauvoir edited the leading French intellectual journal of their day, Les Temps Moderne, and they invited the activist and philosopher Francis Jeanson to review The Man in Revolt. The result was scathing. Jeanson’s article was mostly a series of ad hominem attacks which made no attempt to interpret Camus’s text charitably. Camus’s sins were clear: he had attacked Marxism, he had attacked revolution, and he had attacked the idea that human beings were infinitely malleable. For this, he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary.
Sartre then published an open letter addressed to Camus, that began, “Our friendship was not easy, but I will miss it.” Most of Sartre’s letter ignores the arguments in The Man in Revolt, and concentrates instead on itemizing Camus’s alleged personal failings, including the accusation that he was bourgeois. Camus did not respond to this criticism, because he did not see it as important. After all, it was the Marxists, not him, who believed that class determines what one may say. But it was a petty and laughable accusation even so: Sartre grew up in privilege, and he let other people manage his domestic matters all his life. Camus grew up in Algeria in poverty, where as a child he lived in a two-room apartment with his brother, uncle, grandmother, and deaf widowed mother who worked as a cleaning woman to support all of them.
Beauvoir’s attack on Camus was perhaps the most vicious of all. Her 1954 Goncourt Prize-winning novel The Mandarins is a fictionalized account of her life in post-war Paris, populated by characters closely based upon the intellectuals in her political and literary circles. A long section describing her alter-ego’s travels with an American lover is simply lifted by Beauvoir from her diary of her travels with the novelist Nelson Algren. But the novel contains one very important deviation from real life: the character based on Camus has an affair with a young and insipid Nazi sympathizer. To prevent this lover from being prosecuted for her treasonous beliefs and activities, he lies under oath in a court of law in order to have her released from prison.
That Beauvoir’s shameful treatment of her former friend elicited no outrage is evidence of how unfashionable Camus has become. I have been unable to find a single critical mention of his mistreatment in the academic literature about Beauvoir’s novel.
The criticisms of Camus grew more heated as the insurgent war in Algeria intensified. Camus’s position on the war seemed impossibly naïve to Sartre and his followers. Camus hoped that some kind of peaceful solution would be possible, and that both the descendants of colonists and the various indigenous people of Algeria could continue to live together. The situation in Algeria soon grew too violent and divisive for Camus’s hopes for a peace to remain realistic. However, history would prove Sartre’s revolutionary romanticism to be even more reckless.
But arguments for a revolution, it turned out, were considerably more titillating to the intelligentsia than Camus’s earnest pleas for moderation, peace, and solidarity. As a thinker, he now seemed to be out of step with the age. Many years later, Susan Sontag would describe Camus as a “literary husband,” boring but dependable, unlike “literary lovers,” who are exciting even if selfish and brutal. But, exciting as Sartre and Fanon may have been, history proved them wrong: killing Frenchmen and colons did not transform the Algerian people, nor did it unite them into a peaceful nation. Once the French withdrew, the violence just continued, only now it was turned inward.
The vitriolic attacks on Camus reached their crescendo after an angry Algerian student denounced him at a public talk, and Camus was misquoted—perhaps intentionally—by Le Monde as saying, “I will choose my mother over justice.” Sartre and Beauvoir and the intellectuals of their circle gloated that this confirmed Camus as a sentimental reactionary. But what Camus actually said was something like, “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” Camus recognized that indifference to individual human suffering is essential to all forms of political extremism, and his statement was nothing more scandalous than a rejection of the idea that terrorism is justice.
If Camus is correct, moral progress depends upon revolt, and just revolt begins with the recognition, and the assertion, of our shared human nature. As Camus put it, a just act of revolt “grounds its first value on the whole human race.” And so the rebel cries out, “I revolt—therefore we exist.” This is a cry not only against inequality, but also against division.
https://quillette.com/2019/03/26/albert-camus-unfashionable-anti-totalitarian/?fbclid=IwAR0lWjKpO10Ef7fTVKWX1nnkjySXqDfDSuJq3QUnggZle6PjSowA4ZNTaUo
Camus, Paris, 1957; Loomis Dean*
Eventually I came to see that intellectual brilliance wasn’t the most important quality I wanted in a partner. There had to be kindness. A special subcategory of kindness was a capacity for tenderness, an unconditional emotional support so you don’t feel abandoned and alone when dealing with a crisis.
*
“It’s not hubris to notice that humans are not just another species. Having language sets us far apart from the rest, far above them in foresightful ingenuity and delusional destructiveness.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
CAN EXTREMISM BE PREVENTED?
~ “It may seem surprising, but Exit does not begin the rehabilitation process by targeting the ideology. In his book Healing from Hate, Michael Kimmel studies, amongst others, two Exit organizations – Exit Sweden and Exit Germany. He argues that contrary to his initial presumptions ideology is not an important factor for many of the young people who join extremist far-right organizations. He struggled to get participants to be able to even explain the ideology of the organizations they were part of, with participants instead talking about the importance of being “part of something, part of a group”.
Kimmel acknowledges that there are critics of this approach, with many arguing that focusing on non-ideological reasons for people to get engaged lets people off the hook for past or even current extremist views and behavior. But if our goal is to get people out of violent organizations, he argues, we must be practical in our approach, engaging with a member’s own experiences in order to further motivation to get them out.
Robert Örell, who works for Exit Sweden, says that this affiliation with the group grew from teenage delinquency and, as his self-esteem plummeted, he started getting into fights and conflicts with people around him. As he got into his later teen years, he joined a violent right-wing organization. “I grew up in central Stockholm, which was quite middle class, fairly wealthy Swedes,” Örell explains. “We got into conflicts with suburban gangs which came in on Friday, and on Saturday evenings we’d go the youth club to fight.”
Far-right organizations, Örell says, successfully exploited the feelings of isolation he was having as a teenager. He describes this as the "The Extremist Mindset", which includes three separate elements.
First, there is the promotion of black-and-white thinking. Örell argues that groups work to define an opposition between “us” and “them”, or “good” versus “bad”. In this case the “us” is white people and “them”, any people of color, immigrants or Jewish people. This is linked with the second element, a feeling of superiority. Örell says that extremist groups frame themselves as being superior to other individuals or groups, primarily as a way for members to regain their self-esteem, as well as their sense of power, belonging and community. Finally, extremist groups engage in a process of dehumanization. They give their opposing groups animalistic characteristics (like labeling immigrants as a “swarm of rats”). This reinforces the “us” vs “them” mentality, and also legitimizes violent actions.
Örell argues that the main outcome of the extremist mindset is to create a strong sense of belonging: “In these groups you have a very strong sense of purpose and cause. I think this goes for a range of groups, whether it's white power groups or violent Islamic extremist groups, or gangs. What I see for a lot of people, essentially, is having been part of a group where you have this very strong commitment, you feel you have the brothers who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for you, you have a cause that's so important you are prepared to risk your life for it. These mechanisms are quite unusual and build together a very strong sense of 'us'.”
So what caused him to leave? He says he began to see hypocrisy in the group’s standards – which included a culture of drinking, partying and steroid use despite allegedly celebrating discipline. His feelings of distance increased when he joined the military, which helped to offer the discipline and sense of purpose without the toxic ideology. And the physical distance – of being away from his old acquaintances for longer periods of time – helped him to make the break.
“The military gave me a sense of competence and self-esteem that I missed earlier, which I see clearly decreased the need of feeling superior, of de-humanizing others and the power and control that the involvement in the movement gave me,” he says today. “By cognitively and emotionally opening up I started to be less intolerant and had different experiences with the people I previously hated.”
Örell’s story matches academic research on why people leave far right organizations. In his book Racist and Right-Wing Violence in Scandinavia, Tore Bjørgo argues that there are a range of "push" and "pull" factors that can lead to people exiting extremist organizations. Push factors often include a loss of faith in the organization’s ideology, disillusionment with the organization’s strategy, leadership, membership or action or simply burnout, while pull factors can include intimate relationships, employment, or imprisonment.
Consider the story of "Sarah" (not her real name), a former member of a far-right organization in the United States. Sarah explained to Horgan and his colleagues that her parents were extremely religious, yet at the same time had a very undisciplined lifestyle, with both being alcoholics. She had a turbulent relationship with her father, leading, at least in part, for her to be involved in a range of anti-social behaviors from a young age. As a teenager, she began to develop a sexual interest in other girls, leading to further distance from her family. Confusion, anger and prejudice was building up inside her. In high school Sarah encountered a group of skinheads, which she joined as a way to channel these feelings. Once she joined, she began to become more committed.
Sarah’s process of exiting was both physical and psychological. It started when she was imprisoned over a robbery, creating physical distance from her former friends. She then became psychologically disengaged when she became friends with Hispanic and African American women in jail, a process that led her to question her previous beliefs. Örell, referring to his own experiences, describes this as an “unexpected act of kindness”. These are acts of kindness from people who people previously saw as the enemy, acts which in turn can help people find motivation to rethink their beliefs and actions.
Whatever the initial trigger to leave, both physical and psychological distance is needed, the researchers argue, to remove the person not just from the ideology – but from all those other motivations for joining the group in the first place.
A similar trajectory can also be seen in members of other extremist groups, such as radical Islamists. In his book Jihad and Death, for example, Oliver Roy argues that modern jihadists, particularly those who have engaged in terror attacks in Europe, are initially less motivated by the ideology of radical Islam than by a sense of nihilism: a malaise formed from social isolation, fantasy and rebellion.
While motivations for joining are different between jihadists and far-right extremists, Roy further highlights that ideology is often not the driving cause of extremism, but that it is often due instead to deep social causes such as social alienation and isolation.
It is for all these reasons that organizations such as Exit prefer to examine the underlying motivations; it’s simply a more effective way to help people to leave than directly confronting the ideology, which can backfire. As Orell puts it: “We see that confronting, going into debate or arguments [about ideology] very seldom leads to change, rather the opposite – it strengthens the need to justify, explain and stand up for the ideas which leads to the opposite of what we want.”
Instead, they encourage clients to “think about and understand how they got involved in the movement, how this affected and influenced their way of thinking and reasoning, and how the movement helped them interpret everything they experienced through an ideological lens which by time became the only lens they used”. Secondly, they work with clients to build new experiences, primarily in the social sphere. “This helps us to create new perceptions of how to relate to the world, to different sources of information, to other people and to ourselves lived through experiences and interpretations of events. This way we create more nuances and less distance which makes the need for violent extremist ideas decrease and less attractive.”
As we grapple with the reality of extremist and violent right wing organizations, one thing we can learn is the necessity of actually trying to understand the motivations for joining. That is not to undermine the abhorrence of their beliefs, but to recognize the complex underlying factors behind their behaviors appears to be the best way to prevent more people following the same path.” ~
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190501-how-do-you-prevent-extremism?ocid=fbfut&fbclid=IwAR2YVRDCykegHKDHIHOf61fXvlfjKeXxdCX5EWsvkosh8ieUH8jEObQJDSU
The back cover blurb for Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, 1935*
HITLER: NOT AN EVIL GENIUS, BUT A LAZY, INCOMPETENT BUFFOON
“There’s an aspect to Hitler’s rule that kind of gets missed in our standard view of him. Even if popular culture has long enjoyed turning him into an object of mockery, we still tend to believe that the Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient, and that the great dictator spent most of his time…well, dictating things.
So it’s worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show.
In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people.
Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren’t actually wrong in their assessment of his competency—they just failed to realize that this wasn’t enough to stand in the way of his ambition. As it would turn out, Hitler was really bad at running a government. As his own press chief Otto Dietrich later wrote in his memoir The Hitler I Knew, "In the twelve years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilized state."
His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His "unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair," as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.
There’s a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff. Dietrich himself came down on the side of it being a cunning tactic to sow division and chaos—and it’s undeniable that he was very effective at that. But when you look at Hitler’s personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a workshy narcissist in charge of a country.
Hitler was incredibly lazy. According to his aide Fritz Wiedemann, even when he was in Berlin he wouldn’t get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn’t do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him, the press cuttings being dutifully delivered to him by Dietrich.
He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as "the greatest actor in Europe," and wrote to a friend, "I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history." In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table, and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat "prodigious amounts of cake" and "put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea.”
He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked). But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him.
Little of this was especially secret or unknown at the time. It’s why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren’t wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it’s possible to get.
Hitler’s personal failings didn’t stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don’t actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things.
We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It’s understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn’t an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can’t immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine.
But history suggests that’s a mistake, and it’s one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them.
https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-government-clown-show-opinion-1408136?utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=NewsweekFacebookSF&utm_medium=Social&fbclid=IwAR3GkEPQ8RM32uDxISJtKWWbUnTQ0nOw05G3drfBD4Y0uCtsTpaXlQdy6IE
“I have the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations.” ~ Hitler quoted by Auden
*
HOW TO LIFT YOUR MOOD INSTANTLY
~ "Smile. It’s cheesy, but apparently it’s true: The act of smiling really can turn a frown upside down.
Jump around. Get happy-making endorphins pumping fast with some jumping jacks, jump rope, or random flailing around (hey, no judgment here).
Sniff certain scents. Inhaling the scent of orange (or essential orange oil) or lavender can reduce anxiety and improve mood.
Chew gum. The repetitive action of gnawing on gum can promote relaxation and reduce anxiety and stress.
Ogle (or buy) some flowers. Studies find flowers provide an instant—and lasting—mood boost. Bonus: they can also make us more productive.
Visualize your best self. Let’s be honest: None of us are exactly the person we want to be all the time. But imagining our “ideal” selves—calm, confident, movin’ like Jagger—can make us feel better, even when we’ve got miles to go before we get there.
Expose yourself to green. Color psychologists say green symbolizes happiness—and can create the feeling of it, too. Throw on a green sweater, pick up a green pen, deck yourself out like the most dedicated of Leprechauns, and it’s possible your mood will be over the rainbow.
https://greatist.com/happiness/34-ways-bust-bad-mood-ten-minutes
Oriana:
I can't jump, but a spurt of gardening exposes me to green and to flowers too, and provides some exercise as well (unblievable how much watering plants demand to thrive).
Also, I suggest increasing the amount of seafood in the diet, or taking fish oil supplements that provide a high dose of DHA (see the health article near the end of this blog)
Perhaps the most surprising suggestion here is chewing gum. Just make sure the gum contains xylitol rather than sugar (sucrose). Xylitol gum will actually improve your dental health. There is also a licorice-derived digestive-aid tablet you can let dissolve in your mouth — DGL (pure licorice can raise blood pressure). My personal experience confirms that the mood-lifting effect of chewing gum or sucking on a DGL tablet. If you like dark chocolate, you can also try letting a small rectangle of chocolate dissolve in your mouth.
And let’s not forget that a classic study showed that something as simple as slowly repeating the word “One” had a significant soothing effect.
The point is this: Don’t let yourself stew in bad mood. It’s not worth the rise in blood pressure and other stress-related damage. There are so many ways to lift your mood almost instantly. The young often lack the motivation to do so; but as you grow older, you begin to understand that you no longer have infinite time . . .
*
THE CAPGRAS IMPOSTER SYNDROME AND OUR DIGITAL “REALITY”
~ “We start with the case of a woman who experienced unbearable tragedy. In 1899, this Parisian bride, Madame M., had her first child. Shockingly, the child was abducted and substituted with a different infant, who soon died. She then had twin girls. One grew into healthy adulthood, while the other, again, was abducted, once more replaced with a different, dying infant. She then had twin boys. One was abducted, while the other was fatally poisoned.
Madame M. searched for her abducted babies; apparently, she was not the only victim of this nightmarish trauma, as she often heard the cries of large groups of abducted children rising from the cellars of Paris.
As if all this pain was not enough, Madame M.’s sole surviving child was abducted and replaced with an imposter of identical appearance. And soon the same fate befell Madame M.’s husband. The poor woman spent days searching for her abducted loved ones, attempting to free groups of other abducted children from hiding places, and starting the paperwork to divorce the man who had replaced her husband.
In 1918, Madame M. summoned the police to aid her in rescuing a group of children locked in her basement. Soon she was speaking with a psychiatrist. She told him she was the direct descendant of Louis XVIII, the queen of the Indies, and of the Duke of Salandra. She had a fortune of somewhere between 200 million and 125 billion francs, and had been substituted as a toddler in a conspiracy to deny her this money. She was constantly under surveillance, and most, if not all, of the people she encountered were substituted doubles, or even doubles of the doubles.
The psychiatrist, Joseph Capgras, listened patiently. It’s delusional psychosis—disordered thought, grandiosity, paranoia—he thought. Pretty standard fare. But then again, no one had ever described the particular delusion of a loved one being replaced by an identical double. What could that be about?
“Capgras delusions,” as psychiatrists eventually called the belief that loved ones have been replaced by identical imposters, are not just archival oddities. Our modern understanding of the disorder tells us much about how the brain has separate modules for analyzing the cognitive aspects of recognition, and for feeling the emotional aspects of familiarity. It shows us that while cognition and emotion can be neurobiologically dissociated, behavior makes a lot more sense when they’re left alone to intertwine.
Over this century, it has come to be recognized that every thought, emotion, or behavior is the direct end product of the material brain. The ways in which Capgras delusions are the product of such materialism tells us much about the differences between the thoughts that give rise to recognition and the feelings that give rise to familiarity. As we’ll see, these functional fault lines in the social brain, when coupled with advances in the online world, have given rise to the contemporary Facebook generation. They have made Capgras syndrome a window on our culture and minds today, where nothing is quite recognizable but everything seems familiar.
Capgras himself, in his earliest writings, briefly speculated that the delusions could reflect some sort of brain disease, before jumping on the psychodynamic bandwagon [i.e. since we feel ambivalent about our loved ones, we may splitting them into the good loved one and the bad one; in extreme cases, the bad loved one then becomes an impostor]. An obscure paper in 1930 tentatively suggested brain damage rather than psychodynamics, and was roundly ignored. It wasn’t until a spate of studies in the 1970s that two facts came to be appreciated.
First, if you examine the brains of people with Capgras delusions, you’ll often find clear evidence of brain disease. As more sensitive techniques came on board, such as functional brain imaging, it became clear that a substantial percentage of Capgras sufferers had organic brain diseases, usually centered around damage or atrophy of the frontal cortex.
A good example is seen in a 2013 study of a woman who had suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage in her right frontal cortex. After years of rehabilitation, she had mostly recovered function, having some residual spatial orientation problems. And while she readily recognized most people in her life, including her daughter and grandchild, she insisted that her husband had been replaced by an imposter. Yes, yes, she’d admit, he looks just like my husband, and he has been very helpful during my recovery, but he is most certainly not my husband; my husband is elsewhere. She readily identified pictures of her husband, but this man before her was not him. She also believed that her home had been replaced with an exact duplicate.
Capgras delusions had become the province of acute neurological insults. Discrete damage to the brain can produce someone who can identify the features of a loved one, yet who insists that the living, breathing person in front of them is an imposter. Which turns out to tell us a lot about one of the great false dichotomies about the brain.
Starting at least with Descartes, there has been the dualist distinction between “mind” and “brain,” or in a spinoff that has particularly engaged neuroscientists recently, between “cognition” and “emotion.” In the standard view, the latter two are functionally and neurobiologically separable, and are in some sort of perpetual, epic struggle over the control of your behavior. Moreover, this dichotomizing has typically given rise to the view that one of the two, in some sense a mixture of ethics and aesthetics, should dominate the other.
A dichotomy between cognition and emotion, we now know, is false, clearly explored in neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s 1994 book, Descartes’ Error. The two endlessly interact, both functionally and neurobiologically. And most importantly, they’d better, because what we view as normal function requires extensive integration of the two.
Identification is at the intersection of factual recognition and a sense of familiarity. In this framework, Capgras delusions arise when there is selective damage to the extended face processing network, impairing the sense of familiarity. Factual recognition is intact; you know that this person looks just like your loved one. But they just don’t feel familiar.
The terrible and complementary dislocations of Capgras delusions and prosopagnosia [inability to recognize faces] show what happens when you pry apart the conjoined balance of cognition and emotion. The separate modules of our brains underlie dissociable functions, but we rarely fare well when those functions are dissociated. The dissociation of cognition and emotion, of recognition and familiarity, is what makes Capgras delusions a metaphor for the state of our minds today.
For 99 percent of hominid history, social communication consisted of face-to-face interactions with someone you’ve hunted and foraged with most of your life. But then the recognition and familiarity components got pried apart by modern technology. By “modern technology,” I mean a newfangled invention that came along a few millennia ago—you could communicate with someone by putting scratches of ink on a piece of paper, and then sending that paper a great distance where they’d decode it. Wait, you know someone by their microexpressions, their pheromones, their totality—not by implicitly assessing word frequency in their letter or the scrawl of their signature. This was a first technological blow to the usual primate sense of familiarity. And the challenges have accelerated exponentially from there. Is this text message from my loved one, does it feel familiar? Well, it depends. What emoticon did they use?
Thus, not only has modern life increasingly dissociated recognition and familiarity, but it has impoverished the latter in the process. This is worsened by our frantic skill at multitasking, especially social multitasking. A recent Pew study reported that 89 percent of cell phone owners used their phones during their most recent social gathering. We reduce our social connections to mere threads so that we can maintain as many of them as possible. This leaves us with signposts of familiarity that are frail remnants of the real thing.
This can lead to a problem; namely that we become increasingly vulnerable to imposters. By any logic, this should induce all of us to have Capgras delusions, to find it plausible that everyone we encounter is an imposter.
But something very different has occurred instead. This withering of primate familiarity in the face of technology prompts us to mistake an acquaintance for a friend, just because the two of you have a Snapchat streak for the last umpteen days, or because you both like all the same Facebook pages. It allows us to become intimate with people whose familiarity then proves false. After all, we can now fall in love with people online whose hair we have never smelled.
Through history, Capgras syndrome has been a cultural mirror of a dissociative mind, where thoughts of recognition and feelings of intimacy have been sundered. It is still that mirror. Today we think that what is false and artificial in the world around us is substantive and meaningful. It’s not that loved ones and friends are mistaken for simulations, but that simulations are mistaken for them.” ~ Robert Sapolski
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/to-understand-facebook-study-capgras-syndrome?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Joseph Capgras Mary:
The current sort of inversion of the Capgras syndrome, where friends and family are not seen as imposters, but imposters seen as friends, and where the suspicion arises that all may be imposters, is unsettling and, I think, actually dangerous. It's like the "fake news" assertion...constant rejection of just about anything that doesn't fit the agenda of one party or another leads inevitably to mistrust of all reported news as biased, invented, false. Nothing can be depended on. Everything is an attempt to conceal the truth with a pack of distracting lies. Such shifting sands soon become quicksand, leaving nothing to trust as solid ground.
In a dissociative state nothing seems familiar, and soon the unfamiliar becomes sinister — just as the imposter wearing your husband's face surely has some evil intent, and your infant replaced by a changeling elicits only horror. As we don't see and touch our many Facebook friends, these relationships are already less “real” — less grounded in the world, and this in some ways invites inauthenticity.
I was astounded to hear of “sock puppets” — invented personas used to pursue purposes less than the acceptable...masks to hide behind, and perhaps say things cruel, false, contemptible or manipulative. Who has this kind of time, and why would you want to do this?? And yet it's apparently frequent and widespread enough that you might see a little sign appear when you post a comment that says "posting as yourself."
I think these are negative developments, and not unimportant. They point to a kind of dissociative disorder, or at least dissociative symptoms in our social interactions. And people seem to prefer these interactions to the usual face to face ones. So you get the group at the dinner table, all focused on their phones and their private digital lives rather than on the physical presence of those around them. A picture of profound alienation.
Like anything, our digital lives also have the potential for making real and living connections between people. It will be, in the end, what we make it.
Oriana:
Definitely. Thanks for the enlightening comment about the dissociative state: “In a dissociative state nothing seems familiar, and soon the unfamiliar becomes sinister — just as the imposter wearing your husband's face surely has some evil intent, and your infant replaced by a changeling elicits only horror.”
And yet, crazily, when it comes to digital media, some people who otherwise seem normal fall for impostors with astonishing ease. I suspect it’s because in this case the impostors know how to create the illusion of adoring their victim — and this may be easier online than when you see the person (note especially their body language) and hear their voice (which will often reveal the tension of pretending better than the face — we learn early how to control our facial expressions).
Of course real-life impostors have always been with us. Just saw Red Joan, an example of how a young woman’s great need for love and friendship make her an easy target for manipulation. But she is smart, gets to experience being truly loved, and above all gains clarity about her strong moral values — and eventually she becomes very much her own person. But not everyone has these resources.
Judi Dench as "Red Joan"*
FAVORITISM TOWARD THE REPENTANT SINNER
“I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” [Luke 15:7] This is the ending of the parable of the one stray sheep — the shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep in search of one that got lost, finds it, carries it back on his shoulders, then calls his neighbors and friends to rejoice with him. We can imagine the sheep being petted and given little treats.
Of course in the parable the sheep left alone while the “good shepherd” looks for the one lost sheep do not fall prey to wolves. Nor do they feel abandoned and unvalued — or so we assume. But it’s different with humans, who’d like to feel appreciated for a lifetime of sticking to rules, especially if those rules are oppressive. But no — the great rejoicing is reserved for the strays and the prodigals. This is obviously propaganda aiming to convert those who valued having a good time (e.g. the young St. Augustine, who didn’t care for chastity in his youth), and may think it’s too late now, not realizing if they change their ways, even in the last moment, they are the special treasure, and not those who strove to be “good” all their lives.
While we understand the joy of the shepherd, and that of the father of the prodigal son, only now I realize why those parables used to upset me. We all like to be appreciated and justly rewarded — and dislike favoritism. We all like to feel loved and important, rather than be taken for granted and ignored.
And not just people. If you have two dogs, start favoring one with treats and affection — and see what happens. Of course you wouldn’t do that, because you have empathy and a sense of justice — and so do all social animals.
THOSE FABULOUS OMEGA-3 FATS: WHY WE NEED DHA
~ “There are two types of omega-3s that play major roles in good health: docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosatetraenoic acid (EPA). And studies show DHA omega-3s are the most important for your heart, brain, and eyes.
Yet, the average American gets only about 120 mg of DHA per day. In other countries, like Japan, the average DHA intake is 600 mg per day—which researchers theorize helps to contribute to the good heart health experienced by many people in Japan.
Why Your Body Need DHA Omega-3s
Studies show that DHA omega-3s are vital to every cell and system in your body.
Blood Pressure Support: DHA fats have a more profound effect on normal blood pressure levels than EPA fats.
Arterial Health: In a study of postmenopausal women, those with the highest levels of DHA had better coronary artery health.
Circulation: In research, DHA did a better job than EPA in improving vasodilation and endothelial function.
Mental Processing: In a nine-year study, DHA was correlated with better brain function and cognitive health.
Eye Support: Your eyes need DHA, too. It makes up 30% to 40% of the fatty acids found in the photoreceptors in your eyes, so DHA is critical to your eye health. Plus, research shows omega-3 fatty acids help with natural tear production, keeping your eyes moist and hydrated.
As essential as omega-3s are for your health, your body can’t manufacture them. So, you need to get them through foods or supplements that are high in DHA omega-3s. This is important because while your body can easily convert DHA to EPA, it has great difficulty converting EPA to DHA.
Fatty fishes can be good sources of DHA omega-3s, including wild caught salmon, herring, small Atlantic halibut, and mackerel. A great source of omega-3s is calamari (squid). It’s naturally high in DHA and is sustainably sourced from squid in deep ocean waters. Plus, the squid are harvested small and only live up to 450 days, so they are clean.
https://www.drsinatra.com/fish-krill-or-calamari-oilwhich-has-the-most-dha-omega-3-benefits?
Carribbean reef squidOriana:
Even if your diet is heavy on seafood, it's still not easy to obtain optimal amount of DHA. NOW has the best price on DHA (DHA 500).
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ending on beauty:
I always wake up before I get caught
always before I hit the ground
as I wake up on the ground
I don’t know what the work will look like
but I’m sounding more like my Hungarian grandmother
who refused to speak English
I’m not worried at this stage
when you reveal where inside you
you carry your light
handshake or vague humor
(multiple endings with deep image)
~ Craig Czury
Adam Hunter Caldwell: The Funeral
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