Thanks. I try to take the medicine from the poison with regards to JP. Maps of Meaning really helped me fling myself out of a depression as an aspie-kind of a guy. I had such calm and reasoned thoughts of meaninglessness, a kind of zen-depression-nihilist-nothingness. I wasn’t crying or staying in bed all day, but I couldn’t be bothered to care about any aspect of my life. I already don’t like people, hobbies were pointless, work a sisyphantian task, etc. His book was great because it was an academic look into why meaning is important at the basest level of existence, and how it is basically ones responsibility to have a full life by /injecting/ meaning into the world—the more the better! Then I kind of saw through to the anti-progressive undertones and hung up the phone as it were, but I owe him a lot.
I am really really glad I replied to your comment. My day is better for hearing that you got yourself out of a shitty time, and I'm kinda touched by your story :) Thanks a ton for sharing it!
Well if you’re still here to read my response, he believes really strongly that a strong sense of individual responsibility and personal freedom (as in liberty) is the only path to happiness. I live in a kind of a commune and I’ve never been happier, so I know that this is false first-hand, and it shows that he’s using his science to promote his political agenda. This is fine, but he really plays off his ideas as fundamental truths instead of opinions.
It isn’t any single thing he says but kind of the underlying ideology of his writing and speech. He says bad things about the right wing but the. mostly says it’s due to personality differences. Right wing people are less open, more conscientious, etc. But when he says something bad about left wing thinking it isn’t due to personality but a giant moral failing and disaster of democracy. It’s kind of like attribution error but applied to political thinking.
I can’t rally point to any one thing but if you listen to his lectures on personality you’ll get what I’m talking about. He really does have so much worthwhile to say about ontology and social interaction that I think he’s worth it, he just shouldn’t be anyone’s guru.
I don't understand how. JP is best known for being a (believe it or not, relatively left-wing) psychologist teaching young adults the virtue of responsibility. What is wrong with that?
Progressives don’t like responsibility because it is complicated to balance talk of personal responsibility with that of social justice. The hardest part of being a minority is that one can blame almost all of ones ills on the state of society, and be correct to do so, but in doing so one loses personal control over ones life in the day-to-day. We have to act as if we have responsibility even if we don’t, just to be sane. It’s the same line of thinking as believing in free will. If you don’t believe in it deep down you will almost certainly fall into a depression.
But right-wing rhetoric flips the script and says of course we have to act with responsibility, because we /really are/ responsible at the lowest level of reality. If your life isn’t going well then that’s your responsibility to fix it and yours alone. Minorities and poor people hear this and either beat themselves up or reject it outright, since it is a half-truth at best.
So now talking about responsibility is tied up with bigotry, which I think is really unfortunate.
The Hitlers speaches about aryan strength centered on aryan strenght and history and such. They had feel good and feel powerfuly strong element. They were motivating to target audience. He was in business of building powerful Reich, that required vision of strength and victory, not just threat.
He did had also speeches about Jews being Marxists and pest and disease. That was favourite topic too.
But the sentence itself is just something someone who is bluffing and hoping for best would say.
I kind of suspect that part about disgust being oldest center of brain turns out similar "sounds good but not really" nonsense.
