Professor Vaknin begins the YouTube linked below by talking about “Jewish guilt.” In seminary we used to play a “game” by describing our religious origins (moral) in terms of the kind of guilt they defined. (Christian Science is the hardest to escape.) Since my childhood was Presbyterian, I still have traces of Presbyterian guilt. This is as severe as any, but also embraces predetermination, which claims that “God” predetermined everything and that you will already be destined for some fate and a judgement you can’t control. Nevertheless, you should do your best. (Though God is not thought to ever relent, gives no exemption for good behavior.)
But this point of view deeply embedded in me is sympathetic to that of Professor Vaknin. I regret ever joking around by calling him “Sam” though it was my grandfather’s name and I get a little irritated when people don’t call me Reverend unless the situation is clearly not one in which I have a title. I’ve had to accept students and congregants calling me just “Mary” though it often does mean — as Professor Vaknin notes — that they think of me as an equal . . . or less.
The first part of this vid is aimed at the over-familiar “levelers” out there who want to assert that if you want something to be true, it will be that, which is dysfunctional and psychotic. He will pay no attention to uninformed and childish people who have not studied, nor New Age nonsense either, though those folks write books (if they sell, which they do,)
I want to assert here that my kind of writing, which is largely blogging, is a base for research-informed writing, using online essays, books, and old university notes. I google everything and everyone, but in my own doodle-bug and eclectic way which separates me from Professor Vaknin. In his mid-Eurasian way, which is a version of what we call the Western World, he respects institutions and schools of thought more than I do. But he also knows people I haven't heard of. I will look them up.
He feels that academia qualifies as able to define authorities, who should be valued. Learning should be a stiff but "jointed" armature for knowledge and disciplines are to be valued as close to permanent. I disagree. I respect the value, but I disagree. Disciplines are boxes, pigeon-holes.
What changed me was in part one strategy that was proposed by Paul Tillich, who stood between an unyielding Christianity and the new sciences of relativity and expansion. He suggested that in the war between “being” and “non-being” there had to be an inclusive concept of “ground of being.” The best we can do with mutually exclusive concepts is to imagine something bigger than what we know, including both being and non-being, regardless of how unreconcilable they may seem. Some might think "God" does that job.
We’ve been in a long line of Western Thought that values individual being and authorities that certify them as an alternative to the non-being of crowd anonymity, put down as not mattering, which can subject a person to abuse and destruction. The alternative has been seen as obedience and oppression. This can be enforced with incarceration, as Professor Vaknin knows personally. (Lest you think all incarcerated people are wicked, I urge you to think of Nelson Mandela. They did not quite dare to kill him.)
But this line of thought has corrupted Christianity — as the Old Testament warns — to be a strategy to get wealth through "virtue" and to confuse the two. The wealthy -- alas -- can buy endorsing documents, diplomas and titles that are empty. Anyway, the uneducated dominate politics right now. Those who are excluded realize they have moral power, and it is the morality of experience, not rules recorded in Leviticus. I’m searching for ways to be in community without compromise and enforcement.
Rather by accident — since I simply happened upon the Blackfeet Reservation and saw it as a good place to be, not arriving with some agenda about saving everyone — much of my life has been between two systems of thought, ways of being. They are oil and water. To many indigenous people the Euros remain invaders who have murdered and stolen what the People hold dear. To white people — not just here but all across the US — the indigenous people are primitive, little more than animals. They have lost the meaning of the word “primitive” which comes from “prime” — number one, indivisible prime numbers.
What is the “ground of being” for these two kinds of people and their thinking? It is the land. Even before the “Word” and even before humans, it was the land. The ultimate guilt is not killing “God” who had aged out anyway and will reincarnate only to be killed again. What is worse is killing the land. That is the ground of human being.
Professor Vaknin has perhaps had less experience directly with land than I have. We could not find a lot of commonality there, though the land in Eurasian Russia is similar to mid-America. Even more so in mid-Canada which accepted so many Ukrainians. Too much history has been different.
Many of the psych experts I know are the same and continuous with the ones Professor Vaknin names, like Piaget or Spinoza or Bettelheim. I understand his impatience with some humanist, third-force, and gimmicky theories. But I also know people who say that the very discipline of psychology is comparatively new and possibly already obsolete. The abstract and crucial ideas that Professor Vaknin names will probably persist but with different names because they are produced by experience. The discipline itself will probably become much broader and include things like biochemistry of brains, which may or may not support the medicalizing tendency of today’s disciplines as a route to legitimacy in terms of the Western World. In fact, the medical world is having to redefine itself. The beauty of being a science is that redefining is progress.
The last time I read a rant like this one, it was from a man with quite different point of view that I can’t name without endangering him. It comes from a sub-culture that is denied, not-known, and yet about which we profess curiosity and even a desire to participate, much as people wonder about the rarified world of "intellectuals." It is largely a person-to-person world, partly because this version has formed around adolescent males who are only in that “place” for a decade.
They do not want to be observed or analyzed, each carrying the guilt and shame of their existence itself. The best hope is for them to find something worth living for, without any institutions trying to grab them, without being pressed into the military, without having to turn to Mafia, without even turning to female compatriots. This is close to defining a ground of being that is not quicksand. The days when academics were protected have also disappeared. Being an adjunct professor is pretty much the same as being homeless, like these boys. What a shock. How enlightening and challenging.
They do not want to be observed or analyzed, each carrying the guilt and shame of their existence itself. The best hope is for them to find something worth living for, without any institutions trying to grab them, without being pressed into the military, without having to turn to Mafia, without even turning to female compatriots. This is close to defining a ground of being that is not quicksand. The days when academics were protected have also disappeared. Being an adjunct professor is pretty much the same as being homeless, like these boys. What a shock. How enlightening and challenging.
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