{"id":242115,"date":"2023-08-14T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2023-08-14T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=242115"},"modified":"2023-08-12T06:03:26","modified_gmt":"2023-08-12T05:03:26","slug":"do-people-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/08\/do-people-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Do People Change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

11 Aug 2023 – <\/em>Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.<\/p>\n

This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses.\u00a0 This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years.\u00a0 People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is dismissed as irrelevant.<\/p>\n

The United States is very much a psychological society.\u00a0 Sociological and historical analyses are considered insignificant to people\u2019s identities.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if economics, politics, culture, and propaganda are beside the point.<\/p>\n

Yes, it is often admitted that circumstances, such as illness, death, divorce, unemployment, etc. affect people, but such circumstances are not considered central to who people are and whom they become.\u00a0 These matters are rarely seen contextually, nor are connections made.\u00a0 They are considered inessentials despite the fact that they are always connected to larger social issues \u2013 that biography and history are intertwined.<\/p>\n

In writing about what he termed the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills put it clearly when he described it as \u201cthe idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.\u00a0 In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without learning it, one cannot know who one is or whom one might become if one chose to change and were not just blown by the winds of fate.<\/p>\n

We now live in a digital world where the uncanny nature of information pick up sticks is the big game. Uncanny because most people cannot grasp its mysterious power over their minds.<\/p>\n

What was true in 1953 when Ray Bradbury penned the following words in Fahrenheit 451<\/em>, is exponentially truer today:<\/p>\n

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of \u2018facts\u2019 that they feel stuffed, but absolutely \u2018brilliant\u2019 with information. Then they\u2019ll feel they\u2019re thinking, they\u2019ll get a sense of motion without moving. . . . Don\u2019t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That it is all noise, all signal \u2013 no silence.\u00a0 That it prevents deep reflection but creates the habit of mental befuddlement that is consonant with the mental derangement of the mainstream media\u2019s 24\/7 news reports.<\/p>\n

When almost everything you hear is a lie of one sort or another, it becomes barely possible to keep your wits about you.<\/p>\n

These bits of bait are scattered all over the mind\u2019s floor, tossed by an unknown player, the unnameable one who comes in the night to play with us.\u00a0 Their colors flood the mind, dazzle and razzle the eye.\u00a0 It is screen time in fantasy-land.<\/p>\n

This summer\u2019s two hit movies \u2013 \u201cOppenheimer\u201d and \u201cBarbie\u201d \u2013 while seemingly opposites, are two sides of this same counterfeit coin.\u00a0 Spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle<\/em> as Guy Debord put it:<\/p>\n

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cOppenheimer,\u201d while concentrating on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer who is called \u201cthe father of the atomic bomb,\u201d omits the diabolic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if there were no innocent victims, while \u201cBarbie\u201d plays the coy game of satirizing the doll that celebrates women as sex objects while advertising its same sex doll status.\u00a0 It\u2019s just great \u201cfun.\u201d\u00a0 Colorful salt water taffy for a summer hoot.\u00a0 \u201cLittle Boy\u201d meets sexy sister in the land of dreams where existential crises lead to expanded consciousness.\u00a0 Yes, Hollywood is the Dream Factory.<\/p>\n

There is so much to attend to, multi-colored tidbits begging to be touched carefully, to grab our full consideration as we delicately lift them into the air of our minds.\u00a0 So many flavors.\u00a0 Call it mass attention disorder order or paranoia (beside the mind) or digital dementia.\u00a0 The names don\u2019t matter, for it is a real condition and it is widespread and spreading madly.\u00a0 Everyone knows it but represses the truth that the country has become a comic book travesty sliding into quicksand while bringing the world down with it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOppenheimer\u201d plays while a mumbling and bumbling U.S. President Biden pushes the world toward nuclear annihilation with Russia over Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\u201cBarbie\u201d struts on her stilettos while men receive guidance from the CDC on \u201cchest feeding\u201d and millions of young people are not sure what sex they are.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s up?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all noise, all signal \u2013 no silence.<\/p>\n

The instinct of self-defense has disappeared.\u00a0 \u201cNot to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close,\u201d this, Nietzsche told us, is the instinct of self-defense.\u00a0 But we have let all our defenses down because of the Internet, cell phones, and the digital revolution.\u00a0 We have turned on, tuned in, and dropped into computerized cells whose flickering bars note signal strength but not mental bondage.\u00a0 Not the long loneliness of distant signals barely heard, but \u201cCause\u201d<\/a> what Rodriquez sings for us:<\/p>\n

Cause my heart\u2019s become a crooked hotel full of rumours
\nBut it\u2019s I who pays the rent for these fingered-face out-of-tuners
\nand I make 16 solid half hour friendships every evening<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s all noise, all signal \u2013 no silence.<\/p>\n

I recently had the arduous task of reviewing nearly fifty years of a writer\u2019s personal journals.\u00a0 The thing that stood out to me was the repetitive nature of his comments and analyses of people he knew and the relationships he had.\u00a0 His political, literary, and historical comments were insightful, and his keen observations into the decades long diminution of the belief in existential freedom captured well the growing domination of today\u2019s deterministic ethos with its biological emphasis and its underlying hopeless nihilism. But it was also very clear that the people he wrote about were little different after forty to fifty years.\u00a0 Their situations changed but they did not \u2013 fundamentally.\u00a0 They were encased in long-standing carapaces that protected them from change and choices that would force them to metamorphosize or undergo profound metanoias. Most of them saw no connection between their personal lives and world events, nor did they seem to grasp what William James, in writing about habits, said, \u201cif we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are \u2026 but two names for the same psychic fact.\u201d<\/p>\n

The notebooks, of course, were one man\u2019s observations.\u00a0 But they seemed to me to capture something about people generally.\u00a0 In the notes I took, I summarized this by the words \u201csocial addiction,\u201d a habit of living and thinking that has resulted in vast numbers of people locked in their cells, confused, totally bamboozled, and in despair.\u00a0 This condition is now widely recognized, even by the most unreflective people, for it is felt in the gut as a dazed death-in-life, a treading of water waiting for the next disaster, the next bad joke passing for serious attention.\u00a0 It is impossible to fail to recognize, if not admit, that the United States has become a crazy country, mad and deluded in the worst ways and leading the world to perdition on a fool\u2019s dream of dominance and delusions.<\/p>\n

The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, an intriguing writer who questioned his own profession, put it well in his 1973 book How People Change<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway\u2026 Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He correctly warned that insight does not necessarily lead to change.\u00a0 It may help initiate it, but in the end the belief in freedom and the power of the will is necessary.<\/strong>\u00a0 This has become harder in a society that has embraced biological determinism as a result of decades of propaganda.\u00a0 Freedom has become a slogan only.\u00a0 We have generally become determined to be determined.<\/p>\n

To realize that one has choices is necessary and that not to decide is to decide.\u00a0 Decisions (from Latin de <\/em>= off and caedere <\/em>= to cut) are hard, for they involve deaths, the elimination of alternatives, the facing of one own\u2019s death(s) with courage and hope.\u00a0 The loss of illusions.\u00a0 This too has become more difficult in a country that has jettisoned so much of the deep human spirituality that still animates many people around the world whom the U.S. government considers enemies.<\/p>\n

Such decisions also involve the intellectual honesty to seek out alternative voices to one\u2019s fixed opinions on a host of public issues that affect everyone\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n

To recognize that who we are and who we become intersect with world events, war, politics, the foreign policies of one\u2019s country, economics, culture, etc.; that they cannot be divorced from the people we say we are.\u00a0 That none of us are islands but part of the main, but when that main becomes corporate dominated mainstream news pumped into our eyes and ears day and night from little machines, we are in big trouble.<\/p>\n

To not turn away from what the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this propaganda machine \u2013 the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATT) \u2013 is a choice by default and one of bad faith in which one hides the truth from oneself while knowing one is doing so.<\/p>\n

To not seek truth outside this complex is to deny one\u2019s freedom and to determine not to change even when it is apodictic that things are falling apart and all innocence is being drowned in a sea of lies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all noise, all signal \u2013 no silence.<\/p>\n

Change begins with desire, at the personal and public level.\u00a0 It takes courage to face the ways we have all been wrong, missed opportunities, shrunk back, lied, refused to consider alternatives.\u00a0 Everyone senses that the U.S. is proceeding down a perilous road now.\u00a0 Everything is out of joint, the country heading for hell.<\/p>\n

I recently read an article by Timothy Denevi about the late writer Joan Didion who, together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles a few days previously, had died.\u00a0 The thing that struck me in the article was what Didion described as the sickening indifference of so many vacationers to the news about RFK\u2019s death and funeral.\u00a0 Because television reception was sketchy in Hawaii, Didion and Dunne, not Kennedy supporters, were only able to watch a three-hour ABC taped special on June 8 that covered the assassination, funeral, and train ride of the body to Arlington Cemetery as millions of regular people kept vigil along the tracks. \u00a0A television had been set up on a large veranda where guests could watch this taped show.\u00a0 But few vacationers were interested; the opposite, actually.\u00a0 It angered them that this terrible national tragedy was intruding into their vacations.\u00a0 They walked away.\u00a0 It seemed to Didion and Dunne that something deep and dark was symbolized by their selfish indifference.\u00a0 As a result, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea and was prescribed antidepressants after psychiatric evaluation.\u00a0 She felt the 1960s \u201csnapping\u201d as she too snapped.<\/p>\n

I think those feelings of vertigo and nausea are felt by many people today.\u00a0 Rightly so.\u00a0 The U.S.A. is snapping. \u00a0It is no longer possible to remain a normal person in dark times like these, no matter how powerfully that urge tempts us.\u00a0 Things have gone too far on so many fronts from the Covid scam with all its attendant<\/a> deaths<\/a> and injuries<\/a> to the U.S. war against Russia with its increasing nuclear risks, to name only two of scores of disasters.\u00a0 One could say Didion was a bit late, that the snapping began in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA<\/a>.\u00a0 As Billie Joel sings, \u201cJ.F.K. blown away, what more do I have to say?\u201d\u00a0 And why was he assassinated?\u00a0 Because he changed dramatically in the last year of his life to embrace the role of peacemaker despite knowing that by doing so he was accepting the real risk that he would be killed.\u00a0 He was courage and will personified, an exceptional example of radical change for the sake of the world.<\/p>\n

So I come back to my ostensible subject: Do people change?<\/p>\n

The short answer is: Rarely.\u00a0 Many play at it while playing dumb.<\/p>\n

Yet is does happen, but only by some mixture of miracle and freedom, in an instant or with the passing of time where meaning and mystery can only exist.\u00a0 Where we exist.\u00a0 \u201cIf there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic,\u201d the English writer John Berger muses, \u201cthen prophecy and destiny can coexist with freedom of choice.\u201d\u00a0 Time always tells.<\/p>\n

The last entry in the writer\u2019s notebooks that I reviewed was this:<\/p>\n

I read that Kris Kristofferson, whose music I love, has said that he would like the first three lines of Leonard Cohen\u2019s \u201cBird on a Wire\u201d<\/a> on his tombstone:<\/p>\n

Like a bird on the wire
\nLike a drunk in a midnight choir
\nI have tried in my way to be free<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seemed apposite.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Edward Curtin, Ph.D. <\/em>is a widely published author and a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>.<\/em> His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/em><\/a> – email: <\/em>edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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