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The first job will be to educate the young people as to the peril we have created with our technology. Moving from the specific to the general is what learning is all about. It is called inductive reasoning.

Yes I claim that schooling is training for production and consumption. I did not know that mensas had their own school. I think that the need for change represents the first challenge. In January of 1945 the world did not possess the technology that was capable of quickly destroying the human species. On August 6th 1945 the first atomic bomb exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima; the world witnessed the fact that we possessed the means to destroy the human species quickly. Our species has significantly broadened and extended that technical capacity since then. To educate the younger generation to this fact should be a simple task provided that they see others firmly recognize thus fact.

Internet Forum: a catalyst for change I claim that the educational institutions of all Western democratic nations are very conservative. They are designed to foster the status quo. As such they are focused upon graduating individuals with the means to maximize production and consumption. Our technology has provided us with the capacity to easily slip into a condition that will end human life. We must provide a means for our citizens to quickly recognize this fact and to develop a new path for human enlightenment following the end of school days. Only with a significant advance in our general intellectual sophistication can we hope to develop a basis for restructuring society and thereby save humanity from a quick extinction. I see no other vehicle than the Internet discussion forums presently available to provide that catalyst for change. If you find merit in this claim I would like to discuss it further.

Disinterested knowledge is play dough As far as knowledge goes I would say that our brain is filled with fragments and parts. A part is a collection of fragments and occasionally other parts. A part has coherence, i.e. organization. That organization can be meaning induced or science induced. A science induced part has scientific organization; scientifically organized means a collection organized about an objective concept. A meaning induced part has coherence about a subjective meaning. This part has coherence because there is a meaningful juxtaposition of the part with me. The meaning induced part is special because it has importance to me; it has a meaningful relationship to me. A fragment of knowledge is just there, all alone, without coherence of any kind. It is easily lost and seldom missed when lost. Our educational system is designed to fill our heads as quickly and efficiently as possible with scientifically induced parts of knowledge. These parts of knowledge are useful for doing specific kinds of jobs. Our educational system wastes little time on meaning induced parts. I suspect that much of our educationally directed accumulated knowledge are fragments, not because it is intended but because of inefficient schooling. I suspect much of our testing processes result in such fragments. A few days ago I received a note from my grandson J. J said he had decided to join the Army Reserves. At that moment there developed a new connection between the Iraq war and me. At that moment the Iraq war became meaningful to me in a way far different from what it might have been before. Meaning happens when there develops a confluence of emotion and knowledge such that a domain of knowledge becomes part of me. Meaning happens when a domain of knowledge becomes a vital part of me. Understanding is the creation of meaning; it is a subjective happening, when there develops a confluence of emotion and knowing, which might be regarded as a tipping point. It happens in a moment and often only after a good bit of effort. We know many things but understand only a few. Our schools and colleges teach us what to know but seldom have anything to say about understanding. In our world of production and consumption understanding is a luxury that we must work at to achieve. A self-actualizing self-learning individual seeks meaning induced knowledge parts. Meaning is what self-learning is all about. It is meaning that makes self-actualizing self-learning delightful play. Unfortunately our educational systems have left most of us learning handicapped. This handicap displays itself in the alienation of the individual from the learning process. Instrumental knowledge is interested knowledge. Instrumental knowledge is the life blood of a value system that places the maximizing of production and consumption as “Number One”. Disinterested knowledge is the un-knowledge, it is the non-instrumental knowledge. Disinterested knowledge is an alien and clumsy word in a society that places maximum value on production and consumption. Disinterested knowledge is not a catalyst of production and consumption but it is the catalyst of creativity. Disinterested knowledge is the mixing bowl of creativity. Creativity is the synthesis of the known into a model of the unknown. The value of the unknown is yet to be determined. Creativity requires a comfort with the unknown. Disinterested knowledge is an intrinsic value. Disinterested knowledge is not a means but an end. It is knowledge I seek because I desire to know it.

Sapiens are fulfilled only in play Properly understood, Freud’s doctrine of infantile Xuality is a scientific formulation and reaffirmation of the fact that childhood innocence, as displayed in their delight with their body, remains wo/man’s indestructible unconscious goal. Children on one hand pursue pleasure and on the other hand are active in that pursuit. A child’s pleasure is in the active pursuit of the life of the human body. What then are we adults to learn from the pursuits of childhood? The answer is that children play. “Play is the essential character of activity governed by the pleasure-principle rather than the reality-principle. Play is ‘purposeless yet in some sense meaningful’…play is the erotic mode of activity. Play is that activity which, in the delight of life, unites man with the objects of his love, as is indeed evident from the role of play in normal adult genital activity…the ultimate essence of our being is erotic and demands activity according to the pleasure-principle.” As a religious ideal childhood innocence has resisted assimilation into rational-theological tradition. Although there is a biblical statement that says something to the effect that unless you become children you cannot go to heaven, this admonition has affected primarily only mystics. However, poets have grasped this meaning in its philosophic-rational terms. In his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” Schiller says that “Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.” Sartre says “As soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom...then his activity is play.” H. H. Brinton, modern American archaeologist, considers the essence of man is purposeful activity generated by desire. The perfect goal generated activity is play. Play expresses life in its fullest. Play as an end, as a goal, means that life itself has intrinsic value. Adam and Eve succumbed when their play became serious business. Jacob Boehme, a German Christian mystic, concluded that wo/man’s perfection and bliss resided not in religion but in joyful play. John Maynard Keynes noted modern economist, takes the premise that modern technology will solve wo/man’s need to work and thereby lead to a general “nervous breakdown”. He thinks we already experience a manifestation of this syndrome when we observe the unfortunate wives of wealthy men who have lost meaning in this driving and ambitious world of economic progress. He says “There is no country and no people who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without dread.” From the Keynesian point of view it will be a difficult task to transfer our ambitions from acquiring wealth to that of playing. But for Freud this change is not as difficult because beneath the habits of work acquired by all wo/men lay an immortal instinct for play. Huizinga, a noted anthropologist, testifies to the presence of a nonfunctional element of play in all of the basic categories of our sapient cultural activity—religion, art, law, economics, etc. He further concludes that advanced civilization has disguised this element of play and thereby dehumanized culture. The author, Norman Brown, concludes that psychoanalysis have added to these expressed statements regarding the importance of “The play element in culture provides a prima facie justification for the psychoanalytic doctrine of sublimation, which views ‘higher’ cultural activities as substitutes for infantile pleasures.” Quotes from “Life against Death” by Norman Brown

Ego says, HOLD IT, TIME OUT! The ego is our command center; it is the “internal gyroscope” and creator of time for the human. It controls the individual; especially it controls individual’s response to the external environment. It keeps the individual independent from the environment by giving the individual time to think before acting. It is the device that other animal do not have and thus they instinctively respond immediately to the world. The id is our animal self. It is the human without the ego control center. The id is reactive life and the ego changes that reactive life into delayed thoughtful life. The ego is also the timer that provides us with a sense of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. By doing so it makes us into philosophical beings conscious of our self as being separate from the ‘other’ and placed in a river of time with a terminal point—death. This time creation allows us to become creatures responding to symbolic reality that we alone create. As a result of the id there is a “me” to which everything has a focus of being. The most important job the ego has is to control anxiety that paradoxically the ego has created. With a sense of time there comes a sense of termination and with this sense of death comes anxiety that the ego embraces and gives the “me” time to consider how not to have to encounter anxiety. Evidence indicates that there is an “intrinsic symbolic process” is some primates. Such animals may be able to create in memory other events that are not presently going on. “But intrinsic symbolization is not enough. In order to become a social act, the symbol must be joined to some extrinsic mode; there must exist an external graphic mode to convey what the individual has to express…but it also shows how separate are the worlds we live in, unless we join our inner apprehensions to those of others by means of socially agreed symbols.” “What they needed for a true ego was a symbolic rallying point, a personal and social symbol—an “I”, in order to thoroughly unjumble himself from his world the animal must have a precise designation of himself. The “I”, in a word, has to take shape linguistically…the self (or ego) is largely a verbal edifice…The ego thus builds up a world in which it can act with equanimity, largely by naming names.” The primate may have a brain large enough for “me” but it must go a step further that requires linguistic ability that permits an “I” that can develop controlled symbols with “which to put some distance between him and immediate internal and external experience.” I conclude from this that many primates have the brain that is large enough to be human but in the process of evolution the biological apparatus that makes speech possible was the catalyst that led to the modern human species. The ability to emit more sophisticated sounds was the stepping stone to the evolution of wo/man. This ability to control the vocal sounds promoted the development of the human brain. Ideas and quotes from “Birth and Death of Meaning”—Ernest Becker Questions for discussion What is a symbol and why are symbols important for humans? Is language a grouping of symbols?

I suspect positive thinking is valuable but I am confident that Critical Thinking is absolutly better than any other kind of thinking. For a 12 to 18 years period from the age of 6 to our mid twenties we have lived constantly in an educational system wherein we seldom if ever learned to function intellectually independent of outside direction. How is it possible for such an individual to develop the internal processes (bootstrap) that allow him or her to become an independent critically self-conscious thinker? Like the PC setting in front of us we seem to have an automatic default position. Our default position is ‘reject’ when encountering any idea that does not fit in our already learned patterns and algorithms. Somehow the individual must find a way to change that default position from ‘reject’ to ‘examine critically’. Of course—how do we every not reject this message? Making good judgments is an important and complex matter. There are bad judgments, good judgments, and better judgments. To make better judgments requires many kinds of knowledge, skills, and character traits all working together. The neophyte learns the moves that each piece can make, plays a few games and wanders away bewildered as to why anyone could take the matter seriously. Like chess Critical Thinking is an asset that can influence the judgments one makes in all matters in their life. It can be a strategic tool or a tactical tool—it can change ones world view. It gives in accordance to the investment made.

Objectification of life The human world is filled with meaning, thus the theorist of the human sciences is concerned with causality and meaning, whereas the theorist of the physical world deals almost completely with causality. The human world needs understanding and interpretation, whereas the physical world requires knowledge and explanation. Herein lays the reason why human relationships cannot be intellectually embraced in the same manner as is physical relationships. Dilthey proclaims that the depths of human meaning and understanding are particularly accessible for interpretation in the works of art and literature. He called this work of interpreting the products of human activity which reveal the qualities of human life, the “hermeneutical art.” When the wind blows down a tree we seek a relationship between wind force and tree strength. A man fells a tree; we seek an understanding of intention. A woman slaps a man’s face; there is a world of intentionalities to be considered, because we are dealing with the actions of human beings. For Dilthey, “understanding is insight into the working of the human mind, the rediscovery of the ‘I in the Thou’…Thus I can understand why John paces up and down the room but not why my plant won’t grow. In the latter case I would have to say, ‘I know why it won’t grow’. The notion of understanding would also apply to what human beings have produced; thus I might understand a poem as well as a gadget.” Our insights that result from our own humanness allow us to understand other people. Therein lay the difference between physical science and human science; human science will never reach the precision of the physical sciences but there is the great advantage of moving within a world that is familiar to us. Human life is not only meaningful but it is also articulate in expressing its own meaning, which we can understand. As we reflect on our own life we can reflect on and understand the life of others. Their patterns are available to me just as my own patterns are available to me. I understand their meaning because I understand mine, more or less. Human life is not only meaningful but it can be articulated. The life of the individual must also be considered in light of the society. The context in which the individual stands is constructed from tradition, beliefs, and language. Everywhere there is human life there is pattern and meaning that can be articulated and understood, more of less. The process of comprehending individual units of life’s experiences, such as being in a chess club, or being a Catholic, or being a Republican, Dilthey calls an ‘objectification of life’. Dilthey makes no metaphysical claims here, these units are marks on paper or formed by bricks but they are units of created meanings and can be grasped by humans. Dilthey says ‘Poetry has influenced my life’…‘Protestantism is an important factor in the history of England.’ In other words these are units for understanding individuals and also for understanding community relationships. Ideas and quotes from “Pattern and Meaning in History”—Wilhelm Dilthey

Did you know that we are all neurotic to one degree or another?

I am a social person because I am yours “I am a social person because I am no longer mine: because I am yours.”--Freud One of life’s more urgent problems is learning to set the boundaries of the ego. Such control represents true maturity of character and personality; Sounds simple enough. Anxiety is the universal response of the organism to danger. For the child, anxiety becomes second nature when there is the slightest hint of separation from or abandonment by the mother. Freud’s whole psychoanalytic theory of neurosis is basically a study of how children control anxiety. Human reaction to the environment is delayed and controlled by the ego. Unlike all other animals the human can take some time to analyze and choose a response. It is obvious that the first concern for the developing ego is to learn how to control this ever present and overwhelming stimulus-response that can result from anxiety. The ego does this by ‘housing’ this anxiety within the ego, thus, no longer does the human organism respond directly to anxiety but the ego controls the response by ‘taking over’ this anxiety. A major revision of Freudian theory finds that while the child’s anxiety is based on helplessness; it is not based upon genetic instincts but is based upon the child’s life situation and in his social world. The restriction of experience is the heaviest price an animal can pay and it is the restriction of experience that the human animal pays to control anxiety. Freud tells us that the ego staves off anxiety “only by putting restrictions on its own organization”. The egos theoretical limits are limited from the very beginning during interaction with its parents. The mechanisms of defense thus become excellent techniques of self-deception. This is the fateful paradox we call neurosis: The child is given into humanization by giving over the aegis over himself. Freud says for the child “You no longer will have to punish me father; I will punish myself…You can approve of me as you see how well I do as you would wish me to…I am a social person because I am no longer mine; because I am yours.” Becker says “the conclusion of Freud’s work is that the humanization process itself is the neurosis”. Did you know that we are all neurotic to one degree or another? Ideas and quotes from “The Birth and Death of Meaning”—Becker Neurosis as defined in Wikipedia The term was coined by the Scottish doctor William Cullen in 1769 to refer to "disorders of sense and motion" caused by a "general affection of the nervous system." For him, it described various nervous disorders and symptoms that could not be explained physiologically. It derives from two Greek words: neuron (nerve) and osis (diseased or abnormal condition). The term was however most influentially defined by Sigmund Freud over a century later. Neurosis is no longer used as a formal term in modern psychology in English-speaking countries; the American DSM-IV has eliminated the category altogether. This largely reflects a decline in the fashionability of psychoanalysis, and the progressive expurgation of psychoanalytical terminology from the DSM. Those who retain a psychoanalytical perspective, which would include a majority of psychologists in countries such as France, continue to use the term 'neurosis'. [edit] Psychoanalytical account of neurosis As an illness, neurosis represents a variety of psychiatric conditions in which emotional distress or unconscious conflict is expressed through various physical, physiological, and mental disturbances, which may include physical symptoms (e.g., hysteria). The definitive symptom is anxieties. Neurotic tendencies are common and may manifest themselves as depression, acute or chronic anxiety, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, phobias, and even personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder or obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. It has perhaps been most simply defined as a "poor ability to adapt to one's environment, an inability to change one's life patterns, and the inability to develop a richer, more complex, more satisfying personality." [1] Neurosis should not be mistaken for psychosis, which refers to more severe disorders. The term connotes an actual disorder or disease, but under its general definition, neurosis is a normal human experience, part of the human condition. Most people are affected by neurosis in some form. A psychological problem develops when neuroses begin to interfere with, but not significantly impair, normal functioning, and thus cause the individual anxiety. Frequently, the coping mechanisms enlisted to help "ward off" the anxiety only exacerbate the situation, causing more distress. It has even been defined in terms of this coping strategy, as a "symbolic behavior in defense against excessive psychobiologic pain [which] is self-perpetuating because symbolic satisfactions cannot fulfill real needs." [2] According to psychoanalytic theory, neuroses may be rooted in ego defense mechanisms, but the two concepts are not synonymous. Defense mechanisms are a normal way of developing and maintaining a consistent sense of self (i.e., an ego), while only those thought and behavior patterns that produce difficulties in living should be termed neuroses.

I want to talk about learning My experience leads me to conclude that there is a world of difference in picking up a fragment of knowledge here and there versus seeking knowledge for an answer to a question of significance. There is a world of difference between taking a stroll in the woods on occasion versus climbing a mountain because you wish to understand what climbing a mountain is about or perhaps you want to understand what it means to accomplish a feat of significance only because you want it and not because there is ‘money in it’. I think that every adult needs to experience the act of intellectual understanding; an act that Carl Sagan describes as “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.” This quotation of Carl Rogers might illuminate my meaning: I want to talk about learning. But not the lifeless, sterile, futile, quickly forgotten stuff that is crammed in to the mind of the poor helpless individual tied into his seat by ironclad bonds of conformity! I am talking about LEARNING - the insatiable curiosity that drives the adolescent boy to absorb everything he can see or hear or read about gasoline engines in order to improve the efficiency and speed of his 'cruiser'. I am talking about the student who says, "I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of me." I am talking about any learning in which the experience of the learner progresses along this line: "No, no, that's not what I want"; "Wait! This is closer to what I am interested in, what I need"; "Ah, here it is! Now I'm grasping and comprehending what I need and what I want to know!" When we undertake such a journey of discovery we need reliable sources of information. We need information that we can build a strong foundation for understanding. Where do we find such reliable information? We find it in the library or through Google on the Internet or combinations thereof. I have a ‘Friends of the Library’ card from a college near me. This card allows me, for a yearly fee of $25, to borrow any book in that gigantic library. Experts in every domain of knowledge have written books just especially for laypersons like you and I. Lincoln was an autodidact. Perhaps self-actualizing self-learning is for you. When your school daze is complete it is a good time to begin the learning process.

Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.” Humans are animals plus something else. “Soul” is a word created by many to express that something else. That something else, that soul, represents our problem because wo/man has lost, to a large extent, its animal instincts as a guide to behavior. Our ego has controlled behavior for humans, by controlling anxiety, by taking in anxiety and letting it out a bit at a time. The ego makes it possible for the creature to stop and weigh the situation before acting. Wo/man creates meaning to give life a value. With consciousness and recognition of mortality wo/man has attempted to give meaning to the things we do in order to avoid the recognition that life is not much. In other words we recognize our self as more than animal, but without the presence of meaning in our life we are faced with recognition that we are just matter that is here for only a little while. We are creators of meaning so that we are more valuable than just mortal beings. Examine the great efforts we put into religion. Is this not an prime example of the creation of meaning and is this not associated with the concept of soul.

Meaning: The Great Truth about Human Nature The great truth of human nature is that wo/man strives for meaning. S/he imposes on raw experience symbolic categories of thought, and does so with conceptual structures of thought. “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.”—Otto Rank In the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of opposition paradigms, science faced the dilemma: if we make wo/man to be totally an object of science, to be as this object merely a conglomeration of atoms and wheels then where is there a place for freedom? How can such a collection of mere atoms be happy, and fashion the Good Life? The best thinkers of the Enlightenment followed by the best of the nineteenth century were caught in the dilemma of a materialistic psychology. Does not the inner wo/man disappear when humans are made into an object of science? On the other hand if we succumb to the mode of the middle Ages, when the Church kept man firmly under the wraps of medieval superstitions, do we not give up all hope for self-determined man? “Yet, we want man to be the embodiment of free, undetermined subjectivity, because this is the only thing that keeps him interesting in all of nature…It sums up the whole tragedy of the Enlightenment vision of science.” There are still those who would willingly surrender wo/man to Science because of their fear of an ever encroaching superstitious enemy. Kant broke open this frustrating dilemma. By showing that sapiens could not know nature in its stark reality, that sapiens had no intellectual access to the thing-in-itself, that humans could never know a nature that transcended their epistemology, Kant “defeated materialistic psychology, even while keeping its gains. He centered nature on man, and so made psychology subjective; but he also showed the limitations of human perceptions in nature, and so he could be objective about them, and about man himself. In a word man was at once, limited creature, and bottomless mystery, object and subject…Thus it kept the best of materialism, and guaranteed more than materialism ever could: the protection of man’s freedom, and the preservation of his inner mystery.” After Kant, Schilling illuminated the uniqueness of man’s ideas, and the limitations from any ideal within nature. Schilling gave us modern man. Materialism and idealism was conjoined. Wo/man functioned under the aegis of whole ideas, just as the idealists wanted, and thus man became an object of science while maintaining freedom of self-determination. The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts. Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.” Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”?? Quotes and ideas from “Beyond Alienation” Becker