Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

[Sharky]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

So true. Only normally its 6 year olds acting this way, not adults. I say find out why some people won't grow up and you'll have your answer. Or at least part of it. Perhaps its too easy today not to grow up? Less consequences for your actions? Get fat, there a pill for that. Cancer from smoking? We treat that too. But we had this same type behavior in the past. Perhaps not so many though. Today its an epidemic.

I think the epidemic we're seeing today is the subordination of emotions to thought. People readily come to believe that they cannot control their emotional impulses, and that they must "learn to live with them" instead (in other words, give in, but have an excuse).

Emotions come from ideas. People come to ideas by either thinking or non-thinking, and this is a choice. This means there is a volitional acceptance, though not necessarily a conscious acceptance of those ideas. Free will is the choice to be conceptually conscious or to lapse toward the perceptual level.

"Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make." (in other words, acting on emotional impulse).

[Chris Coles]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

But who did you post your comment towards?

[Jill Nephew]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

This is simple, please, do tell, what do i believe? I will be surprised if you get a single answer right. You need to step back and see how you have projected a set of beliefs onto me. If you can see how you are doing this, you will have an amazing tool to use for the rest of your life. If you want to debate, start the debate there.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

While reading the above, I was reminded of that first, spectacular, Apple Advert, where a nobody from the audience runs forward, down the centre isle of the theatre with a huge sledge hammer and throws it through the screen; except that, perhaps we are witnessing the same thing, but for real, with the collapse of US foreign policy with regard to the Middle East and North Africa.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

CI: Your book idea?

EJ: It explains how the American media operates today. Two objectives. Objective one is to arm readers with a tool for self-defense, to prevent them getting sucked into the latest scam, whether it’s like the New Economy scam of the dot com era, the dream of home ownership scam of the housing bubble, or the weapons of mass destruction scam of the Iraq War. Objective two is that you can’t fix a broken system if you don’t know how it’s broken. It’s not simply an issue of media ownership concentration. The system is more subtle than that. I haven’t seen any book that adequately explains it, and going into the Peak Cheap Oil era it will be critical for Americans to understand how opinion formation is accomplished by special interests, else the public policy response is likely to be highly unconstructive, with the vast majority of Americans passionately pushing for policies that are completely against their own interests.

Joe Bageant (RIP 2010):

http://www.alternet.org/story/146888...ican_hologram/

Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world's a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state's 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.

This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.

For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.

However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape. Go live in a shack in the woods. Call that escape. But everything in the outside world continues to run in accordance with the humming energy of the hologram. There is no cutting our umbilical link to the womb of this illusion, this mass hallucination. There is only getting a longer umbilical cord, closing your eyes, and pretending that what the rest of the nation does has no effect on you. We were all born and raised in that womb. We can no more divorce the neurochemistry and consciousness it shaped in us, than we can deny that we had an earthly mother and are of her tissue. Our consciousness is born of the hologram's connective neural and electrical tissue.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2007/0...eat-ameri.html

In effect, the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel, the shopping channel, and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction. The economy becomes our life, our religion, and we are transfigured in its observance. In the absence of the sacred, buying becomes a spiritual act conducted in outer space via satellite bank transfers. All things are purchasable, and indeed, access to anything of value is through purchase. Even mood and consciousness, through psychopharmacology, to suppress our anxiety or enhance sexual performance, or cyberspace linkups to porn, palaver and purchasing opportunities. But most of all, the hologram generates and guides us to purchasing opportunities.

[..]

Through advertising and marketing, the hologram combs the fields of instinct and human desire, arranging our wants and fears in the direction of commodities or institutions. No longer are advertising and marketing merely propaganda, which is all but dead. Digitally mediated brain experience now works far below the crude propaganda zone of influence, deep in the swamps of the limbic brain, reengineering and reshaping the realms of subjective human experience.

Yet we are the hologram, because we created it. In a relentlessly cycling feedback loop, we create and project the hologram out of our collective national psyche. The hologram in turn manages our collective psyche by regulating our terrors, cravings and neurological passions through the production of wars, whores, politics, profits and manna. Like legions of locusts, we pray before its productive engines of commerce and under the shifting aurora borealis of the hologram's drama and spectacle. It is us. We are it. The psychology of the individual becomes irrelevant as the swarm relentlessly devours the earth.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/1...-b-so-dum.html

Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.

The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. In a nation that equates democracy with everyman's right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable. After all, dumb people choose dumb stuff. That's why they are called dumb.

But throw in sixty years of television's mind puddling effects, and you end up with 24 million Americans watching Bristol Palin thrashing around on Dancing with the Stars, then watch her being interviewed with all seriousness on the networks as major news. The inescapable conclusion of half of heartland America is that her mama must certainly be presidential material, even if Bristol cannot dance. It ain't a pretty picture out there in Chattanooga and Keokuk.

The other half, the liberal half, concludes that Bristol's bad dancing is part of her spawn-of-the-Devil mama's plan to take over the country, and make millions in the process, not to mention make Tina Fey and Jon Stewart richer than they already are. That's a tall order for a squirrel brained woman who recently asked a black president to "refutiate" the NAACP (though I kinda like refutiate, myself). Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it, may be a pretty good reason not to "misunderstimate" her. After all, we're still talking about her in both political camps. And the woman OWNS the Huffington Post, fer Christsake. Not to mention a franchise on cultural ignorance.

[Boerg]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

A lot has happened since Feb. 17 and nothing new from EJ?

[cjppjc]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

People who drink too much.
People who smoke too much.
People who eat too much.
People who make others miserable.
People who participate in financial bubbles.
Have they all willfully suspended their consciousness? Or are they slaves unable to breakout of their prison? If I'm not one of them, is it because I have free will? Or is there another prison that maybe I need to breakout of?

[flintlock]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Engaging in behavior that is knowingly negative doesn't happen because of a lack of free will.

The primary cause is a willful suspension of one's consciousness; the refusal to think. It's a form of evasion; not blindness, but a refusal to see. It's not automatic, or imposed; it's a conscious choice.

The motivation is wanting to have your cake and eat it too -- to want things that are contradictory, such as smoking and health, or overeating and being skinny, etc. Since it's impossible to deny reality, people evade it instead; if they don't think about something they don't like, then they can pretend it's not real. If they do this enough, it can appear automatic (although it isn't), but that doesn't change the fact that the behavior is ultimately there by choice.

So true. Only normally its 6 year olds acting this way, not adults. I say find out why some people won't grow up and you'll have your answer. Or at least part of it. Perhaps its too easy today not to grow up? Less consequences for your actions? Get fat, there a pill for that. Cancer from smoking? We treat that too. But we had this same type behavior in the past. Perhaps not so many though. Today its an epidemic.

I'll tell you one thing, people were a lot more serious in the past. Death was common happening, not just something that happens to old people or the very unlucky. That has a way of sobering up even the worst case of Peter Pan syndrome.

[ST]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

It's most interesting to consort with people from the East. In the West one might say, for example, to a spouse with whom one is arguing, "You made me so angry!" The idea makes no sense in the philosophy of my Eastern friends. They think, "I have allowed myself to react to this other person in a way that does not benefit me." The first thing you learn in acting school is that acting is not about pretending to be a character, but the art of reacting to others in the story and to the story itself in a way that is psychologically plausible. Free will is a very Western idea, as naive as the West is young. We are a collection of our emotional reactions to the outside world. It defines our inside world. An adult is self-aware, and understands how he or she is reacting in the moment and remains in control of the process. Children simply react without thinking. Most people are somewhere in between.

This is precisely the thing I most admired in those I met during my travels throughout China/SE Asia/Indonesia. They seem to realize that 90% of our behavior is unconscious & impulse driven, not free will driven. To control those impulses to one's benefit is to be truly in control of oneself... or at least closer to control.

[Ghent12]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

So making a choice - even when you don't know you had a choice - is a decision?

I agree that inaction in certain circumstances is also an action, but to say that all actions or inactions are choices immediately removes the possibility that all choices are made to an individual's best interest.

The biggest criticism of any centralized government is that the government must make all decisions. This simply isn't possible - and gets worse if the government is a tyrant.

Conversely, however, it is equally impossible for an individual to make correct decisions on everything. There are simply too many to make - both long and short term.

That's why individuals look to their friends, family, trusted figures, society, etc for guidance on many issues - without actually thinking about said issues.

What you say is correct, but you must be careful when equating "acting in one's own best interest" to "making a decision from one's own will." People do not necessarily will something that will be in their own best interest by any given metric ("one's own best interest" is subject to multiple criteria and varies based upon the subjectivity of the analysis). People will what they will--that is, in a general sense, people will what they want or what they perceive to be best for them utilizing their own, unique (and impressionable) decision calculus which includes all the various criteria they care to consider.

"One's own best interest" is not some universal standard, nor is it applicable to free will except as one small aspect. I think this is where the confusion comes from.

[Jay]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Engaging in behavior that is knowingly negative doesn't happen because of a lack of free will.

The primary cause is a willful suspension of one's consciousness; the refusal to think. It's a form of evasion; not blindness, but a refusal to see. It's not automatic, or imposed; it's a conscious choice.

The motivation is wanting to have your cake and eat it too -- to want things that are contradictory, such as smoking and health, or overeating and being skinny, etc. Since it's impossible to deny reality, people evade it instead; if they don't think about something they don't like, then they can pretend it's not real. If they do this enough, it can appear automatic (although it isn't), but that doesn't change the fact that the behavior is ultimately there by choice.

If I bang on your patella tendon and you are healthy, you will straighten your leg, whether you want to or not. A healthy newborn will turn its head towards a brushed cheek. As a conscious adult you may choose to run or seek out food. The dichotomy between reflex and volition is not as stark as you wish to make it.

[EJ]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Free will is an illusion. If we make a decision can it be attributed to free will. If so then I'm wrong.

It's most interesting to consort with people from the East. In the West one might say, for example, to a spouse with whom one is arguing, "You made me so angry!" The idea makes no sense in the philosophy of my Eastern friends. They think, "I have allowed myself to react to this other person in a way that does not benefit me." The first thing you learn in acting school is that acting is not about pretending to be a character, but the art of reacting to others in the story and to the story itself in a way that is psychologically plausible. Free will is a very Western idea, as naive as the West is young. We are a collection of our emotional reactions to the outside world. It defines our inside world. An adult is self-aware, and understands how he or she is reacting in the moment and remains in control of the process. Children simply react without thinking. Most people are somewhere in between.

[cjppjc]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Free will is an illusion. If we make a decision can it be attributed to free will. If so then I'm wrong.

[c1ue]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

The choice to "go with the flow" or to "go along to get along" is still a choice. Choosing inaction is still a choice. Making a choice in ignorance is still making a choice.

So making a choice - even when you don't know you had a choice - is a decision?

I agree that inaction in certain circumstances is also an action, but to say that all actions or inactions are choices immediately removes the possibility that all choices are made to an individual's best interest.

The biggest criticism of any centralized government is that the government must make all decisions. This simply isn't possible - and gets worse if the government is a tyrant.

Conversely, however, it is equally impossible for an individual to make correct decisions on everything. There are simply too many to make - both long and short term.

That's why individuals look to their friends, family, trusted figures, society, etc for guidance on many issues - without actually thinking about said issues.

[Ghent12]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

You'll note that I've never said you cannot control your own will.

What I've said is that most people do not.

The choice to "go with the flow" or to "go along to get along" is still a choice. Choosing inaction is still a choice. Making a choice in ignorance is still making a choice.