On May 5, 3:35=A0am, pataphor <patap...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> So why are you reading this stuff?
Did you see where I said he is great on death? That is the longest
section of the book. It may be the best book on death there is. He
doesn't cover transhumanism.
> Is it because you need yet
> another excuse to escape facing the real issues?
You would have a hard time coming up with a more real issue than
death. Maybe taxes. He doesn't have anything to say about taxes, but
it's a safe bet he pays them.
> People thinking
> up terms like Alexithymia are just trying to corral the herd into the
> standard patterns.
Since I have never heard of the guy who coined that term I really
doubt he does much herd corraling. Maybe on vacation? Did you know
that you can pay a couple thousand bucks and wear yourself out herding
cattle on holiday? International flights are competitively priced now
thanks to the internet.
> Maybe if we remove all the forced compliance
> it will turn out that people have a lot more variation than what they
> are shoehorned into now.
Most people choose to comply. Yalom does cover this. It's in the
section on meaninglessness. He takes his cue from Victor Frankl about
whom he concedes the man wrote like he was a megalomaniacal jackass,
although he omits my own criticism that it is crass and disrespectful
to be over proud of surviving the death camps where 6 million
innocents croaked. It is isomorphic to me being jubilant over how much
money I made when my old city got swamped by the hurricane flood. On
some days I was quite jolly about it (to myself) but I cannot imagine
basing my autobiography on that rather sad fact.
Anyway about the compliance. Man craves meaning. This can be a
perplexing problem. Man sees everybody else joining the rat race,
joining the army, joining the revolution. Joining the m***** is an
easy solution to a tough problem, which is why people go that route so
very often.
You can refuse to be shoehorned. Great! You haven't solved the
problem, which remains staring stark straight at you.
What is the meaning of _your_ life?
> The greatest danger of the "thinking positive" meme is to think in
> ways that are only positive to some control freaks, instead of being
> ways of seeing things that work out positively for you.
Well that's one. Another parallel to that danger is the positive
thinking promoters are mostly marketing s***. Which is specifically
the reason I peruse what Yalom, Seligman, and Bandura say on the
topic. It may still be a gimmick of dubious truth value--they are
competing for prestige, for jobs, for page space in their journals of
choice--but it's not the same thing as Osho and his thirty rolls-
royces or Anthony Robbins and his private jet and private helicopter.
There is at least a presumption of scientific objectivity in the peer
reviewed journals.
> If you are in
> danger of being killed (or isolated and excommunicated which can lead to
> the same) is it positive to kill creativity and switch to blind
> obedience and conformity?
Yalom has a little bit to say on the subject of paranoia as well. He
would think you are trying to cheat death because you feel you are so
special. You might like the book. He is eloquent on death. The other
parts, not so much. But I repeat repeat myself self.
B.
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