Charlotte Iserbyt: Societies Secrets

[Ed Jewett]

I tried to respond to this post this morning but couldn't connect & then had to leave for the "state of usury", South Dakota. What I had said this morning went something like this.

Marx wasn't as irreligious as we think. Yes, he said "religion is the opiate of the people" and "the sigh of the oppressed". The fact that the Communist Party of the US (CPUSA-Marxist-Leninist) has a religion commission with clergymen from various faiths is some indication as to how complex Marxism is when it comes to religion. There is a line of thought from Epicurus through Spinoza to Marx. I see one of your biblio. books is by Antonio Dimasio. Much of Dimasio is related to Spinoza's ideas about the mind body split. The term pantheism was coined in 1805 to describe Spinoza's religious views. When Einstein was asked if he believed in God he said "yes, my god is the God of Spinoza". Einstein was a socialist.

Well, the great thing about Internet discussion is that it is asynchronous, so it doesn't really matter when you respond. Everyone has other things to do during the day and night.

Pulling the Damasio book off the shelf, I note that Spinoza is noted in the index of the 335-page book once, on page 25, with footnote to his book first published in 1677. The text on page 25 is about consciousness, and the paragraph reads as follows:

"Consciousness opens the possibility of constructing in the mind some counterpart to the regulatory specifications hidden in the brain core, a new way for the life urged to press its claims for the organism to act on them. Consciousness is the right of passage which allows an organism armed with the ability to regulate its metabolism, with inmate reflexes, and with a form of learning known as conditioning, to become a minded organism, the kind of organism in which responses are shaped by mental concern over the organism's own life. Spinoza said that the effort to preserve oneself is the first and unique foundation of virtue. Consciousness enables that effort."

I checked the index of "The Feeling of What Happens" for mentions of "socialism", "the state", the relationship of the self to the state, anything having to do with politics, anthropology, sociology, etc., as well as the table of contents, as well as the conclusion (especially the part "Where does consciousness fit in the grand scheme of things?" on page 309 ff and the graphic on page 310 of the upwardly-curving pathway from wakefulness through autobiographical self to creativity) and I found ... hold your breath, now... nothing.

Perhaps I can scan all the books and all the excerpts and feed them to the NSA computers for a linguistic, historical and etymological analysis and ask them to post the results here. Surely, being a good socialist state, the USofA would accede to the request in off hours; it ought to take their ganged Cray computers about 42 milliseconds and could be fit into the gaps of their ongoing surveillance of everything on the planet.

How is excellence (and the coaching and development of it) related to socialism? Why is it, apparently in your mind, necessary that it be applied to the state or the collective? It does not exclude ethics, or empathy.

The idea that Einstein was a socialist is about as relevant to the question of whether my synthesis of material is socialist as the notation that Candace Pert donated almost $2,000 to Hilary Clinton.

As it says in the "Intro" to my collection, borrowing from The Consultant's Guide to Excellence, by Wayne Halliwell, Ph.D., Terry Orlick, Ph.D., Kenneth Ravizza, Ph.D., and Bob Rotella, Ph.D., published by Orlick Excel, Chelsea, Quebec 1999:

People can be helped to become exceptional, to be the best that they can be, when they seize opportunities and find ways to enhance their own performance and their own lives by strengthening positive perspectives,
by learning skills that allow them to embrace the challenges of higher-level achievement, by developing effective strategies for pursuing their dreams, by harnessing their passion, and by becoming their own best coach.

"The reason that doubt is such an enemy is that it attacks the will itself. Anxiety and fear are emotional and psychological disturbances that make functioning more difficult, but doubt weakens the will, which is at the center of our being. Doubt can cripple a person's desired act, think or even to live.

To perpetrate dought in the educational system, or in parent-child or manager- employee relationships, is one of the most debilitating -though often unconscious -crimes against human potential.

The cost of not recognizing [and counteracting] this is high, not only for the individual but for the group or organization. When doubt becomes internalized norms, the spirit suffers, a sense of purpose decays, dignity declines, excellence and greatness going to hiding, and the seeds for decadence and failure are germinated." [W. Timothy Gallwey]

We are in a world, whether socialist, capitalist or other, in which fear and anxiety are routinely generated. Our collective sense of purpose has decayed, excellence is in hiding where US educational systems cannot create an individual who can make change accurately at a retail cash register with the help of a calculator.

Why do you persist in trying to label my work, my intent, and my application of that synthesis as socialist?

Well, somewhere else, my avatar is a piece of calligraphy by my first aikido sensei which connotes the idea that the solution is at the heart of the matter...



if we keep moving in dialogue and the spirit of the way of harmony in movement, we may arrive at it.

Is this it?

And is all this an antidote for the manure and the produce that comes out of secret societies?

If secret societies have really found an avenue to improved or enhanced society, why is it secret?