Introduction:

In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid took the unusual step of hiring a market research firm. Their brief was simple. Understand what Americans desire most in a work of art.

Over 11 days the researchers at Marttila & Kiley Inc. asked 1,001 US citizens a series of survey questions.

What's your favourite colour? Do you prefer sharp angles or soft curves? Do you like smooth canvases or thick brushstrokes? Would you rather figures that are nude or clothed? Should they be at leisure or working? Indoors or outside? In what kind of landscape?

Introduction

Hello, I'm Dr. George Simon and welcome to another edition of the new, Character Matters. This is the program where we talk about all things pertaining to character and character disturbances. And over the past couple of programs, we've been talking about, what I term, in the upcoming book on the subject, the second commandment of character which has to do with overcoming any sense of entitlement and developing a profound sense of gratitude and the resulting obligations that come with feeling inherently indebted for the many gifts that we have, that are in fact, unearned.

Now, today I would like to focus a little bit more on some of the impediments that there are - especially in our day and time - to feeling grateful. And the reason I would like to spend some time on it is because the research on gratitude, conducted by several researchers at the University of California at Berkeley - and others in conjunction with the lead investigator Robert Emmons, who has written several books on the topic. The research is very clear. Gratitude, it turns out, is really good for and in many different ways.

Obstacles to Gratitude

These days, in our culture of entitlement, it's very hard to develop any feelings of gratitude. But the research is very clear, gratitude is good for you. And as the rhyming phrase suggests, gratitude is purely a matter of attitude. You don't have to make a laundry list in your mind of all the things that we enjoy and that you can feel grateful about, gratitude is more a pervasive attitude of how to approach life and the totally unearned gift that it is.

Can our entanglement with online life be redeemed?

My grandmother carried a book with her for as long as I can remember: The Lives of the Saints. She was deeply religious, a devout Catholic, and would often read to me from the book in the evenings. The story of Saint Barbara, patron of miners, was the one she treasured most. It helped her make her peace with the perils my grandfather faced working in one of Romania's most dangerous coal mines. The powerful example of Barbara's equanimity and martyrdom got her through three major mine collapses, including one in which my grandfather was trapped under the rubble for over a week, had his back broken, and was thought dead until he was miraculously pulled out from next to a ventilation shaft. He had to go back into the mines a few months later. Throughout it all and until the day she died, the figure of Saint Barbara was a comfort and guide to my grandmother.

Though veneration of the saints seems like a world away from most of our current preoccupations, it speaks of a universal human need. This need has been best crystallized in the ideal of the imitation of Christ, but in our time it has been highlighted and explored by thinkers such as René Girard, who propounded the idea that humans are fundamentally mimetic creatures — that our desires are not our own, but the product of the desires of others. We see others seeking an object, a partner, or a lifestyle, and we are entranced. The need for role models, patterns of life, and aspirations are all natural outgrowths of our humanity.

The collapsing of American higher education presents us with a unique and novel opportunity to begin to recover what has been lost, and to revitalize both our heads and our hearts.

"Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all." — Aristotle

American higher education, in its present form, is completely lost. There is no going back. That much is clear.

From Buckley, to Bloom, to Horowitz, to Sowell, to Boghossian, to Peterson, and others, the gradual degeneration of American academia has been well-documented, and for some time now; its death throes more spastic, comedic, and outlandish with each passing month.

Given the rapid, aggressive, and unremitting bleed-out of the Left's pernicious ideas and ideologies straight from the ivory tower directly into the rest of America's cultural institutions, an otherwise normal attitude of mockery and dismissiveness should now be replaced by one of stark seriousness and righteous indignation. The degeneration of American higher education tracks with the degeneration of the American citizen in general. And a republic lacking in the necessary attributes of proper education and proper citizenship cannot stand for much longer.

Accordingly, for those of us concerned about the next chapter in America's history, both with respect to the culture generally and higher education specifically, the crucial question now in need of proper answering is what comes next?

Authorities want to require vaccines in order to buy, sell, or trade. Christians are alarmed. Anyone else with a brain should be, too.

The new totalitarianism is getting a test run in the wake of COVID-19. Across the globe, every person must submit to "health and safety." So long as officials "can save just one life," any draconian policy is justified. In response, millions of Christians are refusing the 'rona vaccine for fear it's the Mark of the Beast. Their refusal has invited waves of weaponized condescension from dogmatic doctors and Rainbow Xians alike.

On September 9, Joe Biden demanded that the entire nation receive the jab — young or old, with or without natural immunity. Addressing unvaxxed Americans, the nominal Catholic warned, "We've been patient. But our patience is wearing thin."

For many Christians of all races and nationalities, the supposed president's aggressive tone carried the weight of prophecy fulfilled. They see present-day history as manifesting the Bible's symbolic structure.

Are they wrong?

Evidence for Lukianoff's reverse CBT hypothesis

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn't want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional "safety" of students — appeals that the students themselves didn't buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen "cognitive distortions," such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.

borderline personality disorder: BPD is characterized by emotional dysregulation, impulsivity, and cognitive-perceptual impairment. "Strangely enough, people with damage to the dorsolateral and nearby ventromedial areas can have normal intelligence but have no common sense — they are unable to make reasonable decisions." (Oakley, Evil Genes, p. 203) Subclinical borderlines seem to have greater executive control, possibly facilitating their success in the social sphere. As with paranoid personality disorder, some researchers do not consider borderline a valid personality-disorder construct. Many of its features are symptoms, not personality traits, making diagnosis inconsistent; some diagnosed with BPD have internalizing (neurotic) traits, others externalizing (antisocial); some respond to treatment, others don't; there are too many comorbidities; and its three main components are probably best understood as separate conditions: a genetic component linked to bipolar, and two others linked mainly to childhood abuse: emotional dysregulation syndrome and antisocial behavioral. It is also possible that psychopathy (especially in women) may be (mis)diagnosed as BPD (the two are strongly related in women). Colin Ross argues that BPD is a trauma response and should be grouped with the other Axis I disorders, perhaps as "reactive attachment disorder of adulthood."

In my previous post on ableism I wrote: "There is a substantial minority of people who are not reasonable." BPD falls into that segment of the population. Case in point:


Amber Heard defecated on Johnny Depp's side of the bed after an argument. Then denied it and blamed their tiny dogs. She gaslighted him repeatedly, abused him physically and emotionally — and then publicly accused him of doing all the things she had demonstrably done to him. I watched highlights from the trial above as it happened, and even my jaw dropped at times. Heard's behavior was audacious. It defied common sense.

Neuroticism is "a tendency toward anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and other negative feelings," as succinctly defined by Psychology Today.

One thing you notice living abroad in certain (not all) non-Western countries, coming from the West, is the neuroticism differential.

Westerners in Bangkok, for instance, get super mad when the bus doesn't come on time. To cope, they verbally berate minimum-wage workers who have no control over the matter whatsoever. In contrast, the locals shrug their shoulders, chalk it up to fate or whatever, and take the punches as they come.

One comes away with the awful impression that the bus tardiness is not, in the ultimate analysis, the source of the farang's consternation ("farang" being local jargon for "white foreigner").

Carl Jung, famed psychoanalyst of posterity, agrees.

Animal consciousness should not be thought of as a light switch, which can be on or off, Bochum philosophers say. They advocate a different approach.

There are reasons to assume that not only humans but also some non-human species of animal have conscious perception. Which species have consciousness and how the subjective experience of various species could differ is being investigated by Professor Albert Newen and PhD student Leonard Dung from the Institute for Philosophy II at Ruhr University Bochum. To do this, they characterise consciousness with ten different dimensions and work out which behaviours indicate the presence of each of these consciousness dimensions. They describe their approach in the academic journal Cognition, published online on 21 February 2023.

Consciousness is not like a light switch

There is a debate within research as to which animals have consciousness. There are also various views as to how consciousness can be expressed. "According to one view, consciousness is like a light switch, which is either on or off: a species either has consciousness or it does not," explains Albert Newen. A more refined idea is that consciousness can be thought of as a dimmer switch: it can exist in varying degrees.

Albert Newen and Leonard Dung do not agree with either of these theories. According to them, ten dimensions, or aspects, of consciousness can be distinguished, which cannot necessarily be placed in a ranking. These include, for example, a rich emotional inner life, self-awareness and or conscious perception. "It is not necessarily worthwhile to ask whether a mouse has more consciousness than an octopus," clarifies Albert Newen. "You may get a different answer, depending on the aspect of consciousness that you are looking at."

The researchers from Bochum suggest distinguishing between strong and weak indicators of consciousness and allocating each of these to certain aspects of consciousness. "We hope to ultimately make it possible to measure how the subjective experience of various species differs between species and compared to humans," summarises Leonard Dung.

I have probably used the word 'evil' more, in these last three years of Corona Fascism, than I had hitherto ever employed the term. It has been my way of attempting - not so successfully, as I will show - to explain how so many people can have been so blithely subjected to the genocide we are experiencing now, with its attendant consequences - consequences that include the subversion of long-standing ethical and medical principles, the inversion of the meaning of formerly well-understood concepts such as vaccination, and the facile depredation of human rights by State powers.

The perpetrators of the universal lockdowns, the imposition of useless masks, the destruction of businesses and livelihoods by these measures and then by the mandates to be inoculated with an unnecessary and dangerous medical intervention - these perpetrators are the people I call evil; and I call evil also those who, knowing better - doctors, for example - went and continue to go along with the horrific charade.

In a recent essay, Naomi Wolf writes that 'the madness we saw unveiled since 2020 could not have been brought about by normal history, or by ill-intentioned individuals, using human agency'. And in a recent book Matthias Desmet declares that this madness and the totalitarian measures that shut down the entire globe in short order were not the result of a conspiracy of power-mongers but rather of an organically developing process.

I disagree wholeheartedly.