Summary: Rehearsing positive versions of frequent nightmares before sleep and playing noises associated with positive daytime experiences during sleep helps reduce nightmare frequency, a new study reports.

Source: Cell Press

Nightmares, those fearful memories that re-emerge in dreams, can sometimes become regular occurrences, visiting people multiple times a week for months on end.

In therapy, dreamers may be coached to rehearse positive versions of their most frequent nightmares; however, in a study of such patients published October 27 in the journal Current Biology, researchers in Switzerland take this a step further.

"The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause."
— Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Over the last few weeks, climate activists in Britain have blocked highways (because cars emit carbon dioxide), poured milk onto the floors of supermarkets (because livestock emits methane), and thrown tomato soup at Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" (because climate change is more important than art. Or something). The activists are a kind of reboot of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) climate protests in the UK in the fall of 2019.

People in the UK are at risk of dying from natural gas shortages. Still, the climate activists with "Just Stop Oil" think it's outrageous that their government is desperately trying to produce more natural gas for its people. But without more natural gas, there could be three-hour-long blackouts, which threaten the operation of medical equipment, and thus the lives of vulnerable people.

So far the only remotely in-depth and critical review of Political Ponerology I've found is this one, from the keyboard of Ramon Glazov, written in 2020: "(((Bearded schizoidal fanatics))): pathologising character in the Trump era." I haven't run across Glazov before, but according to his bio he has written for Jacobin.

Some of Glazov's criticisms are valid. Most are not. Some are not even criticisms but rather knee-jerk emotion expressed in a verbalistic form. It's not a particularly good or serious review, but it's all there is, and I'm feeling argumentative, so join me as we journey into the weeds. In this post I'll cover the first part of the review, which I'll respectfully call the ad hominem section. In the next I'll respond to his criticism of the actual book.

Right out of the gate, Glazov's tone is sarcastic — the type which assumes a familiarity of feeling with the reader, a shared eye-roll, as if to say, "WE know this guy is crazy — am I right? It goes without saying." Well, I'll have some sarcasm of my own along the way.

Suppose that, riding the tram, you meet an elderly gentleman who claims to have been a psychologist in the old country and wants to tell you about a startling new truth he has discovered about history and world politics.

I'll begin with a provocative thesis: socialism is ideological and free market thinking, while involving myth, is nonideological. I will show why socialism is ideological and why free market thinking involves myth but is nonideological by defining the terms myth and ideology and distinguishing them from each other.

The term "myth" has several connotations. The most common connotation today is that myth represents false belief. Thus, we see many uses of the term myth in which some myth or other is figured as something to be debunked. We can point to hundreds of titles in which the word myth signifies a belief that is mistaken and which the article or book aims to overthrow with evidence and reasoning. When entering "the myth of" into the search field on Amazon.com, for example, titles beginning with the phrase are suggested, including The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Mate; The Myth of American Inequality, by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund et al.; The Myth of Closure, by Pauline Boss, and so on. Running the same search in an internet search engine yields similar results but includes articles on the myth of this or that, including a recent article by American Pravda (the New York Times), entitled "They Legitimized the Myth of a Stolen Election — and Reaped the Rewards," referring to the Congresspersons who sought to block the supposedly legitimate results of the 2020 election.

But one will also find, in both searches, titles like The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus; The Myth of Eternal Return, by Mircea Eliade; The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic, by Douglas Frame; and others. Or in a search engine one finds discussions of various Greek myths in encyclopedias and on YouTube. Clearly, these latter uses of the term myth are different from the usage in the debunking books and articles. Myth in this other sense draws on a different meaning. The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus is not an argument against the myth itself. Rather, myth in this sense connotes a kind of tale that conveys a truth, an aspiration, or a means of making sense of experience. It is a structuring device for seeing order, patterns, possibilities, probable outcomes, and so on. Myth in this sense also includes lessons to be learned and kept in mind when crafting a life or life mission. The myth of Icarus is a tale about human hubris, for example. The story of the Garden of Eden is generally understood in such terms — as a myth about seeking to be like God. The sinking of the Titanic has been seen in terms of such Greek myths as Icarus and other tales of human hubris.

It is this latter sense of myth that I use here — of myth as a means by which we structure experience, find meaning, and craft the trajectories of our lives.

PRESS RELEASE
ARPA-H Releases stunning new data on the PC program, eliminating 92% of all domestic terrorism.

New York, May 25, 2032:

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has announced a significant landmark event in its war against terrorism. In a massive undertaking, assisted by DARPA, DOJ, DOD, FBI, CCP and private sector partners, ARPA-H has just revealed that it's pre-crime program has prevented 92% of all potentially fatal domestic terrorist acts. From mass school shootings in major cities to homicides in sleepy country towns, the national program is being hailed a huge success. Over 1,026 terror attacks have been averted.

"We couldn't be more pleased," announced ARPA-H director Belinda Doors at today's press conference. "The data proves that our PC methodology and the swift action of the Department of Justice has saved hundreds, possibly thousands of lives, in the last 12 months," she said.

"Preemptive strikes to the very heart of terrorism works! Today we have irrefutable evidence that crime has been brought to its knees because of the PC program," announced the Attorney General via Zoom.

What started as an idea at the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA) known as Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes (SafeHome) in the early 2020s, has now matured into what we know today as Pre-Crime (PC).

New research has found that individuals who suffer physical or sexual abuse in childhood age faster than their non-abused peers. Published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, the researchers obtained participants aged 32-49 years and, using blood tests, found evidence to support the hypothesis that childhood trauma can shorten the lifespan.

Interested in the consequences of childhood trauma, Gloria Graf and colleagues sought to investigate if evidence of childhood abuse could be seen in the biomarkers of aging. Previous research has already discovered that individuals abused in childhood experience more health problems as they age. If this is so, Graf and colleagues hypothesized it could be due to faster biological aging. As biological age increases, so does vulnerability to disease.

To determine if those abused in childhood are aging faster than their non-abused peers, the researchers found 357 test subjects from a pool of individuals who had experienced court-documented childhood neglect and physical or sexual abuse. The study also included 200 control subjects who were matched with test subjects based on childhood economic and demographic similarities.

For the crime of teaching young men to assume responsibility for themselves, Jordan Peterson has been relentlessly attacked. But there's nothing wrong with telling boys to buck up — in fact, it's desperately needed.

The latest demonization of Peterson comes from actress Olivia Wilde. In an interview about a new movie she directed called Don't Worry Darling, Wilde revealed the film's misogynistic cult leader antagonist was actually based on "this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is the pseudo-intellectual hero for the incel movement."

Wilde suggests that incels — an online community of young men who feel rejected by women and often harbor hostile (and even violent) feelings towards them — think Peterson is "someone who legitimizes certain aspects of their movement because he's a former professor, he's an author, he wears a suit, so they feel like this is a real philosophy that should be taken seriously."

Now that the autumn semester is well underway, it is worth asking whether students have a chance to participate in free and open debate. The short answer is "No, they don't." They don't have a chance to explore unpopular ideas and controversial opinions. They are "protected" from ideas that might make them uncomfortable. What's being stifled here is more than speech. It's their education and, with it, their preparation to live in a tolerant society, where fellow citizens hold different views.

As Hanna Holborn Gray, one of America's finest university presidents, once observed:

"Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom."

She was absolutely right.

The opportunity that I had to study at Yale College as an undergraduate and later at Harvard University for my Ph.D., the chance I had to wander among the gothic buildings, to imbibe confidence and purpose, and to learn to think, learn how things work, from distinguished scholars, was a point of stubborn pride for me when I started my career as a professor, but that legacy had devolved into a nightmare, into a travesty.

I watched up close how the thoughtful and insightful men and women who were my classmates at Yale and Harvard, who were my colleagues as a professor, responded to the horrific institutional decay of the United States over the past two decades. Sadly, although I remember fondly the moments of deep insight and kind exchanges of those good old days, I observed how they, as intellectuals, as lawyers, doctors, engineers, executives, professors and government officials, how they betrayed their fellow citizens and buried the wisdom they had obtained at those temples of learning deep in the excrement of fraud and hypocrisy.

You see, they forgot the entire point of that elite education they had received. It was not supposed to be something you boasted about, or that you possessed like a yacht[P1] or a racehorse, a special key that got you into the club. No! That sort of thinking is the outgrowth of deep moral decay.

That education was a privilege alright, but one that brought with it an absolute obligation to serve society, to stand up bravely for the interests of the nation, and above all for the interests of those who have not had the opportunity to learn how the system works, to study about science and technology, about foreign lands and ancient things.

Occasionally, people who suffer intense turmoil and trauma undergo a profound change. They feel a new sense of wellbeing, purpose and appreciation of life. Their relationships become more authentic and intimate. They feel as if they've woken up and are living in a more intense way.

In my recent book Extraordinary Awakenings, I show that transformation often follows bereavement, cancer diagnosis, a period of depression or addiction or time in prison. However, I've found the most transformational event human beings can have is a near-death experience (NDE), when a person either comes extremely close to death or dies for a short time.

I was fascinated to read a recent new study, comparing the transformational effects of NDEs and psychedelics, conducted by researchers at John Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US.