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Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2021 16:45:42 GMT
Megan Wildhood: "One of the most prominent and yet most subtle ways our culture is abusive is the inconsistent expectation of reason and rationality. Nearly every message we get is that it is good to be reasonable; it is superior and evolved to be rational. Broadly, in our culture, reason and rationality are void of emotion, and feelings are always illogical and not to be trusted. "Psychologists may throw a client a bone and say that emotions may have, at one point, made sense, but in those cases, they are hang-ups from the past and should still be eliminated or cognitively processed into submission. Emotions are dangerous liars in this culture, and those who express them in a way that makes people in power uncomfortable are diagnosed as ill. "Similar to labeling challenges to power as symptoms of a mental illness, labeling emotions as evidence of illness is a way to ensure that those in power stay in power and the current structures stay firmly in place. It’s not even that we just expect people not to show emotion or even act on emotion—we expect people not to feel emotion if they want to be rational." Our Culture Is Abusivewww.madinamerica.com/2021/03/our-culture-is-abusive/
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Post by Chimera on Mar 7, 2021 17:02:44 GMT
No time to read that article now, but I have several books (all just dipped into, I think) that criticise this falsely emotionless conception of reason, which I think of as the "Mr. Spock" view, and which I have always felt to be a ridiculous caricature of what reason is.
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Post by Chimera on Mar 7, 2021 17:20:15 GMT
By the way, although I have little time for the original series of Star Trek (I like the later series a lot better, and I'm much more of a fan of Babylon 5 than of any ST series), I think Mr. Spock is a wonderful character, and Lionel Nimrod … er, Leonard Nimoy … portrays him brilliantly. But he's fictional.
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