[FRIAM] Narrative bending

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

 

I am ambivalent about AA.  There are many people I know whom I feel it has saved from death, but, at the same time, it doesn't seem to be able to move them beyond being "Alcoholics".  It's like you’re put on some crazy cruise from Hell to Bliss, which, three days out, you discover is only circling aimlessly in the Atlantic.  You're glad you're no longer in Hell, but you're getting awfully tired of Shuffleboard and Whist, and wouldn't be nice to actually get somewhere?  

 

I think there is a lot to be said for self-help groups, much though they make my skin crawl.  I think, for instance, the hearing aid industry could make more use of them.  However, that industry profits from treating each deaf person as a totally new phenomenon entirely disconnected from all other human beings, each of whom can only be cured by the purchase of $5,000 miniturized differential amplifiers.  Sharing the banalities of being deaf and the ingenuities of others dealing with it cannot be a bad thing.  Here's a heads-up for those of you who still hear well:  in my kultcha, one of the ways to bond with others is to slip sly comments back and forth under a conversation.  All that goes away when you're deaf.  "who is that guy over there who looks like a pickeled frog?" "PICKLED FROG?" "'PICKLED FROG', YOU SAY?  LOUDER, FRIEND, I CAN'T QUITE HEAR YOU!"* just doesn't work in polite company.   I imagine that some lightly organized group settings for exchanging strategies for dealing with deafness might be useful.  

 

Nick 

*in larger font, for those of you not in html. 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2019 11:03 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Narrative bending

 

In light of the news from Denver:  <https://ballotpedia.org/Denver,_Colorado,_Initiated_Ordinance_301,_Psilocybin_Mushroom_Initiative_(May_2019)> https://ballotpedia.org/Denver,_Colorado,_Initiated_Ordinance_301,_Psilocybin_Mushroom_Initiative_(May_2019)

 

And coming off our recent discussions of phase transitions, narrativity, experts' tendency to dig in under failure, etc, I found this essay interesting:

 

 <https://aeon.co/ideas/how-jungs-collective-unconscious-inspired-alcoholics-anonymous> https://aeon.co/ideas/how-jungs-collective-unconscious-inspired-alcoholics-anonymous

 

> Wilson (who was receiving the ‘Belladonna Cure’ at Towns) reported that the room lit up with a great white light and he experienced a frightening ecstasy. He described ‘a new world of consciousness’ and of ‘God and His world’. Following discharge from the hospital, he never drank again.

 

Of course, at least here in Oregon, our liberalism is being exploited by hucksters posing as alcoholism treatment specialists. If you're arrested for DUI, the court forces you to pay $$ to a treatment program, which seems chock full of sleazy people making money off others' misfortune. Many of these victims are low income and *must* have a car in order to keep their job. The sleazy huckster "counselors" then foist Alcoholics Anonymous on these people, relying on the heartfelt anecdotes of the ex-alcoholics who comprise the majority of the staff. 

 

My favorite mathematician (Raymond Smullyan) has a good argument that Christianity, absent all the sleazy stuff associated with it, is a defensibly spiritual conception (if you subtract Hell from the mythology). And I buy his interpretation. So I'm not a fan of trashing Christianity. However, if these sleazy court-appointed ... [ahem] ... therapists would ... were competent enough to ... talk about the deep psychological changes that have been (scientifically) demonstrated to change one's behavior, and presented AA as one (questionable) method by which to achieve a spiritual experience capable of such deep changes, then I'd be OK with it.

 

But they do not, for the most part.

 

Luckily, more reasonable voices are getting louder:  <https://psi-2020.org/> https://psi-2020.org/

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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