Science of the SpiritS


People 2

New study suggests 'woke' people more likely to be unhappy, anxious and depressed

depression
A new psychological assessment has been developed to measure the endorsement of attitudes related to critical social justice. Findings from its application in a Finnish study reveal that stronger alignment with these so-called "woke" beliefs correlates with heightened instances of anxiety and depression, as detailed in a publication in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

The rise of critical social justice, which focuses on identifying and addressing systemic inequalities across various identity groups, has prompted discussions on its influence in academia, politics, and everyday life. This particular orientation towards social justice — often associated with concepts like intersectionality, antiracism, and, colloquially, "wokeness" — has been both lauded for its recognition of systemic barriers faced by marginalized groups and critiqued for its approach to identity and free speech.

Yet, despite the debate surrounding critical social justice, there has been a noticeable gap in empirical data regarding the extent and impact of it. Recognizing this, the author of the new study aimed to create a reliable tool for assessing critical social justice and to explore its prevalence and effects.

Roses

What deathbed visions teach us about living

death bed visions near death experience
© Amy Friend
Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr's childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr's shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. "I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing," Kerr told me.

As he moved to touch his father, Kerr felt a hand on his shoulder. A priest had followed him into the hospital room and was now leading him away, telling him his father was delusional. Kerr's father died early the next morning. Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn't delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada. And the priest, he feels, made a mistake, one that many other caregivers make, of dismissing the moment as a break with reality, as something from which the boy required protection.

Eye 1

Best of the Web: How to Fight the Censorship Mindset

sky field sunshine
© L.P. Koch
There's currently lots of hoopla about some crybabies who want daddy to keep Substack clean and safe.

They talk about "Nazis" on the platform, conveniently forgetting to define what they even mean, which, of course, is a feature, not a bug. Seriously, I doubt those who scream "Nazi" the loudest have ever read a serious book about the Third Reich or about Mustache Man. Not that this matters.

But what drives these people? Beyond being crybullies, I mean? I think there is a deeper point to make here about discomfort and wishing death upon those with different opinions.

SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: The Woke Psychopathology Taxonomy with David Abramowitz

abramowitz
David Abramowitz joins us once again, this time to discuss Michael Shellenberger and Peter Boghossian's Taxonomy of Woke Psychopathology. With Andrew Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology as inspiration, the taxonomy summarizes how certain Woke topics and causes express Cluster B personality disorder dynamics. While the topics themselves may not be pathological, the manner in which they're presented is, expressing such features as attention-seeking, grandiosity, emotional dysregulation, excess and lack of empathy, victimhood ideology, impaired reality testing, and splitting.

Join us as we take a broader look at political causes, the pathocratic function of ideology, and its role in creating a worldview that makes sense to the Cluster B personality. Pathocratic personalities then attempt to force everyone else to conform to the world they have created.



Running Time: 01:27:00

Download: MP3 — 119 MB


Cassiopaea

The recognition of reality destroys the dystopian dreams of The Borg

Borg ship
- The Borg are an alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are cybernetic organisms linked in a hive mind called "the Collective". The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other alien species to the Collective through the process of "assimilation": forcibly transforming individual beings into "drones" by injecting nanoprobes into their bodies and surgically augmenting them with cybernetic components. The Borg's ultimate goal is "achieving perfection"...

- SOURCE
You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

- The Borg
In an article last month, I mentioned virus expert Geert Vanden Bossche and his prediction of mass deaths soon going "exponential" in highly Covid-vaccinated countries.

Since posting that article, I've learned through one of my part-time jobs that two younger-aged people died within a day of each other. One was age 37 and the other was in their low forties. The younger of the two died of a heart attack and the 40ish person's death was, supposedly, according to the doctor, the result of a previously unknown congenital heart defect.

Eye 1

Optimistic mindset linked to poor decision-making

woman thinking
© Dean Drobot/Shutterstock
Although a positive mindset is often associated with success, a new study suggests that excessive optimism often leads to poor decision-making, especially when it comes to finances.

The study, conducted by the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, sought to determine whether people with an optimistic mindset had worse decision-making cognition than people who were more realistic. The researchers found that people with lower cognitive function tended to be more optimistic, which led them to make poor financial decisions.

Study Findings Explained

The study examined more than 36,000 individuals and found that people with realistic expectations and planning processes tend to make wiser decisions than people with a more optimistic mindset.

Researchers discovered that people with the highest cognitive ability were 22 percent more likely to be realists (or pessimists) when it came to financial planning. They also had a 34.8 percent decrease in optimistic tendencies compared with people with lower cognitive ability. Cognitive ability was measured based on various cognitive skills, including verbal fluency, numerical reasoning, and memory. The results suggest that optimism bias causes people to expect unrealistically positive outcomes in life decisions, especially regarding their finances.

Bizarro Earth

Embracing realism with an attitude of pessimism and a foreboding sense of fatalism

sisyphus
We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik's Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can't do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that's impossible unless we fix crime. There's no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted - but that's an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we're in deep denial.

- Straus and Howe (1997): "The Fourth Turning", FIRST EDITION page 2
The books "Generations" (1992) and "The Fourth Turning" (1997) by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe identified and categorized recorded cycles of history across multiple cultures and eras. Both books analyzed the timelines of historical events and correlated them to specific life cycles identified as generational "types". Strauss and Howe addressed the concept of time in the context of both circular and linear perspectives. In so doing, they described the "saeculum" as a "long human life" measuring approximately 80 to 90 years and comprised of four turnings, each lasting around 20 to 22 years.

Just as there are four seasons consisting of spring, summer, fall and winter, there are also four phases of a human life experienced in childhood, young adulthood, middle age and elderhood.

Comment:
A warrior acknowledges his pain but he doesn't indulge in it.
The mood of the warrior who enters into the unknown is not one of
sadness; on the contrary, he's joyful because he feels humbled by
his great fortune, confident that his spirit is impeccable, and
above all, fully aware of his efficiency. A warrior's joyfulness
comes from having accepted his fate, and from having truthfully
assessed what lies ahead of him.
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is
that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary
man takes everything as a blessing or as a curse.
The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence
of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of
the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks
impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The
average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked
only to infinity.
What seems natural is to think that a warrior who can hold his
own in the face of the unknown can certainly face petty tyrants with
impunity. But that's not necessarily so. What destroyed the superb
warriors of ancient times was to rely on that assumption. Nothing
can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of
dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under
those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to
withstand the pressure of the unknowable.
--- Quotes from the works of Carlos Castaneda


Stop

John Sailer: The DEI rollback

doorknob
© The Free Press/Getty ImagesDEI is slipping!
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices are still deeply entrenched at our institutions — but the retrenchment is well under way.

When he took office in 2021, Utah governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, made advancing "diversity, equity, and inclusion" a key priority. He appointed a high-level diversity officer to his administration. His senior leadership was put through a "21-Day Equity Challenge," which instructed them in microaggressions and antiracism.

The universities were on board. Utah State's annual diversity symposium featured talks such as "Decentering Whiteness." The university also required DEI statements from applicants to the faculty, explaining how they infused diversity and equity — a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of "marginalization" — into their work. Even for positions in fields such as insect ecology and lithospheric evolution.

Then, in December, Cox announced a different priority: reversing the excesses of DEI. At a press conference he said,
"We're using identitarianism to force people into boxes, and into victimhood, and I just don't think that's helpful at all. In fact, I think it's harmful." So harmful that he announced his intention to bar the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring, condemning the practice as "bordering on evil."

Cow Skull

A nation of non-compliers

black sheep
The train wasn't scheduled for another 20 minutes, so I had a chance to contemplate the official sign on the door of the huge elevator leading to the platform. It said that only four people are allowed in because we must all practice social distancing. There was a helpful map of the interior of the elevator with stick figures telling people exactly where to stand.

Yes, these stickers are still everywhere. I recall when they first went up, sometime in April 2020. They seemed oddly uniform and appeared even permanent. At the time I thought, oh, this is a huge error because within a few weeks, the error of the whole of this idiocy is going to be known by all. Sadly, my worst fears came true: it was designed to be a permanent feature of our lives.

Same with the strange arrows on the ground telling us which way to walk. They are still everywhere, stuck on the floor, an integral part of the linoleum. If you walk this way, you will infect people, which is why you have to walk that way, which is safe. As for masks, the mandates keep popping up in strange places and strange ways. My inbox fills with pleas for how people can fight this stuff.

Magic Wand

Resilience is a skill that can be cultivated, a psychologist explains

man climbing mountain
© mihtiander/iStock via Getty Images PlusSimilar to building up the skills needed to climb a mountain or perform another physical task, resilience can be learned over time, an expert argues.
The word resilience can be perplexing. Does it mean remaining calm when faced with stress? Bouncing back quickly? Growing from adversity? Is resilience an attitude, a character trait or a skill set? And can misperceptions about resilience hurt people, rather than help?

To sum it up in a sentence: Resilience is the ability to manage stress in effective ways. It's not a static quality or attribute you're born with, or a choice of attitude. Instead, it's a set of skills that can be developed by repeating specific behaviors. As a clinical psychologist, researcher and educator specializing in training people to cope with stress more effectively, I know that resilience can be developed.

But as with physical fitness, you can't get stronger abs by just wanting them. Instead, you have to repeat specific exercises that make your abs stronger; intention alone just won't do it.