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Showing 11 similar quotes for quote #1106 from The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Publisher: kindle import (0)

I live close to a harbor packed with sailing-boats and luxurious cruisers which are seldom used, because seamanship is a difficult though rewarding art which their owners have no time to practice. They bought the boats either as status symbols or as toys, but on discovering that they were not toys (as advertised) they lost interest. The same is true of the entire and astounding abundance of pleasure-goods that we buy. Foodstuffs are prolific, but few know how to cook. Building materials abound in both quantity and variety, yet most homes look as if they had been made by someone who had heard of a house but never seen one. Silks, linens, wools, and cottons are available in colors and patterns galore, and yet most men dress like divinity students or undertakers, while women are slaves to the fashion game with its basic rule, 'I have conformed sooner than you.' The market for artists and sculptors has thrived as never before in history, but the paintings look as if they had been made with excrement or scraps from billboards, and the sculptures like mangled typewriters or charred lumber from a burned-down outhouse. (2) We have untold stacks of recorded music from every age and culture, and the most superb means of playing it. But who actually listens? Maybe a few pot-smokers. This is perhaps a Henry Millerish exaggeration. Nevertheless, it strikes me more and more that America's reputation for materialism is unfounded—that is, if a materialist is a person who thoroughly enjoys the physical world and loves material things. In this sense, we are superb materialists when it comes to the construction of jet aircraft, but when we decorate the inside of these magnificent monsters for the comfort of passengers it is nothing but frippery. High-heeled, narrow-hipped, doll-type girls serving imitation, warmed-over meals. For our pleasures are not material pleasures but symbols of pleasure— attractively packaged but inferior in content.

I believe,' said Tertullian of Christianity, 'because it is absurd.' People who think for themselves do not accept ideas on this kind of authority. They don't feel commanded to believe in miracles or strange doctrines as Abraham felt commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. As T. George Harris put it: The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss above you always punished any error, conditioned men to feel a chain of harsh authority reaching all the way 'up there.' We don't feel this bond in today's egalitarian freedom. We don't even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathers in the human family. So the average unconscious no longer learns to seek forgiveness from a wrathful God above. But, he continues— Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement in this life, without a God to damn or save it. Until man figures out the trap and hunts... 'the Ultimate Ground of Being,' he has no reason at all for his existence. Empty, finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this life has no meaning, and he sees no future life, he is not really a person but a victim of self-extinction. (2) 'The Ultimate Ground of Being' is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for 'God' and would also do for 'the Self of the world' as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or 'pretending' to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you're IT! Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalomania—an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity.

The Society of the Spectacle

Author: Guy Debord

Publisher: kindle import (0)

Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who have been dangerously brought together by the conditions of urban production. The constant struggle that has had to be waged against anything that might lead to such coming together has found urbanism to be its most effective field of operation. The efforts of all the established powers since the French Revolution to increase the means of maintaining law and order in the streets have finally culminated in the suppression of the street itself. Describing what he terms “a one-way system,” Lewis Mumford points out that “with the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” (The City in History). But the general trend toward isolation, which is the underlying essence of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs of production and consumption. This reintegration into the system means bringing isolated individuals together as isolated individuals. Factories, cultural centers, tourist resorts and housing developments are specifically designed to foster this type of pseudocommunity. The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell, where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the ruling images—images that derive their full power precisely from that isolation.

The spectacular consumption that preserves past culture in congealed form, including coopted rehashes of its negative manifestations, gives overt expression in its cultural sector to what it implicitly is in its totality: the communication of the incommunicable. The most extreme destruction of language can be officially welcomed as a positive development because it amounts to yet one more way of flaunting one’s acceptance of a status quo where all communication has been smugly declared absent. The critical truth of this destruction—the real life of modern poetry and art—is obviously concealed, since the spectacle, whose function is to use culture to bury all historical memory, applies its own essential strategy in its promotion of modernistic pseudoinnovations. Thus a school of neoliterature that baldly admits that it does nothing but contemplate the written word for its own sake can pass itself off as something new. Meanwhile, alongside the simple claim that the death of communication has a sufficient beauty of its own, the most modern tendency of spectacular culture—which is also the one most closely linked to the repressive practice of the general organization of society—seeks by means of “collective projects” to construct complex neoartistic environments out of decomposed elements, as can be seen in urbanism’s attempts to incorporate scraps of art or hybrid aesthetico-technical forms. This is an expression, in the domain of spectacular pseudoculture, of advanced capitalism’s general project of remolding the fragmented worker into a “socially integrated personality,” a tendency that has been described by recent American sociologists (Riesman, Whyte, etc.). In all these areas the goal remains the same: to restructure society without community.

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

371

Previously unheard-of manifestations of hypnosis can be found by simply informing subjects beforehand that such manifestations are expected in hypnosis, that is, are a part of the collective cognitive imperative about the matter. For example, an introductory psychology class was casually told that under hypnosis a subject's dominant hand cannot be moved. This had never occurred in hypnosis in any era. It was a lie. Nevertheless, when members of the class at a later time were hypnotized, the majority, without any coaching or further suggestion, were unable to move their dominant hand. Out of such studies has come the notion of the 'demand characteristics' of the hypnotic situation, that the hypnotized subject exhibits the phenomena which he thinks the hypnotist expects.5 But that expresses it too personally. It is rather what he thinks hypnosis is. And such 'demand characteristics,' taken in this way, are of precisely the same nature as what I am calling the collective cognitive imperative. Another way of seeing the force of the collective imperative is to note its strengthening by crowds. Just as religious feeling and belief is enhanced by crowds in churches, or in oracles by the throngs that attended them, so hypnosis in theaters. It is well known that stage hypnotists with an audience packed to the 5 This is one of the important ideas in the history of hypnosis research. See the papers of Martin Orne, particularly, 'Nature of Hypnosis: Artifact and Essence,' Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1959, 58: 277-299; in this connection David Rosenhan's important and sobering, 'On the Social Psychology of Hypnosis Research' in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Psychology. 386 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World rafters, reinforcing the collective imperative or expectancy of hypnosis, can produce far more exotic hypnotic phenomena than are found in the isolation of laboratory or clinic.

Is this consciousness...this enormous influence of ideas, principles, beliefs over our lives and actions, really derivable from animal behavior? Alone of species, all alone! we try to understand ourselves and the world. We become rebels or patriots or martyrs on the basis of ideas. We build Chartres and computres, write poems and tensor equations, play chess and quartets, sail ships to other planets and listen in to other galaxies - what have these to do with rats in mazes or the threat displays of baboons? The continuity hypothesis of Darwin for the evolution of mind is a very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology. The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering - are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?\n\n The chasm is awesome. The emotional lives of men and of other mammals are indeed marvelously similar. But to focus upon the similarity unduly is to forget that such a chasm exists at all. The intellectual life of man, his culture and history and religion and science, is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are. The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease. It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible. The question that becomes then the most important one that man can put to himself is simply this: how conscious is he of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism?

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Author: Erich Neumann

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

403

The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or those deemed desirable by the collective. Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality. The 'inner voice' is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values. The voice, the individual experience of the transpersonal, which is particularly strong in childhood, is renounced in favor of conscience. When paradise is abandoned, the voice of God that spoke in the Garden is abandoned too, and the values of the collective, of the father, of law and conscience, of the current morality, etc., must be accepted as the supreme values in order to make social adaptation possible.\n\n 'Whereas the natural disposition of every individual inclines him to be physically and psychically bisexual, the differential development of our culture forces him to thrust the contrasexual element into the unconscious. As a result, only those elements which accord with the outward characteristics of sex and which conform to the collective valuation are recognized by the conscious mind. Thus 'feminine' or 'soulful' characteristics are considered undesirable in a boy, at least in our culture. Such a one-sided accentuation of one's specific sexuality ends by constellating the contrasexual element in the unconscious, in the form of the anima in men and the animus in women, which, as part souls, remain unconscious and dominate the conscious-unconscious relationship. This process has the support of the collective, and sexual differentiation, precisely because the repression of the contrasexual element is often difficult, is at first accompanied by typical forms of animosity towards the opposite sex. This development, too, follows the general principle of differentiation which presupposes the sacrifice of wholeness, here represented by the figure of the hermaphrodite.

391

When the individual falls away from the cultural fabric like this, he finds himself completely isolated in an egotistically infalted private world. The restlessness, the discontents, the excesses, the formlessness and meaninglessness of a purely egocentric life - as compared with the symbolic life - are the unhappy results of this psychological apostasy.\n\n 'Following the collapse of the archeytpal canon, single archetypes then take possession of men and consume them like malenolent demons. Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, through the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere. Every conceivable sort of dominant rules the personality, which is a personality only in name. The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindelers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time. Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized - and admired. Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray achetypal content that has got them in its power. The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human. Worship of the 'beast' is by no means confined to Germany; it prevails whereever one-sidedness, push, and moral blindness are appluaded, i.e., whereever the aggravating complexities of civilized behaior are swept away in favor of bestial rapactiy. One has only to look at the educative ideals now current in the West.\n\n 'The possessed character of our financial and industrial magnates, for instance, is psychologically evident from the very fact that they are at the mercy of a suprapersonal factor - 'work,' 'power,' 'money,' or whatever they like to call it - which, in the telling phrase, 'consumes' them and leaves them little or no room as private persons. Coupled with a nihilistic attitude towards civilization and humanity there goes a puffing up of the egosphere which expresses itself with brutish egotism in a total disregard for the common good and in the attempt to lead an egocentric existence, where personal power, money, and 'experiences' - unbelievably trivial, but plentiful - occupy every hour of the day.\n\n '...Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics are exclusive determinants in the form of parties, nations, sects, movements, and 'isms' of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual. Far be it from us to compare the predatory industrial man and power politician with the man who is dedicated to an idea; for the latter is possessed by the archetypes that shape the future of mankind, and to this driving daemon he sacrifices his life. Nevertheless, it is the task of a cultural psychology based on depth psychology to set forth a new ethos which shall take the collective effect of these daemonic possessions into account, and this means also accepting responsibility for them.