The vast majority of people are supposed to experience some level of happiness with the way things are and not believe in the practical reality or even necessity of alternatives — Baden

There are approaches to psychology which hew to objectively-based conditioning models to explain human motivation, identity formation and cognition. According to these models, humans can be arbitrarily shaped by social reinforcements ( operating on biological mechanisms of libidinal energy , drive reduction, release of endorphins , etc) to accept distorted ideas about themselves or the world, or to believe themselves to be happy. Implicit in this think is that there is an ‘objective’ reality against which to measure such distortions of belief.

Then there are alternative psychological approaches that reject the idea of an objective reality. For instance , rather than agreeing with cognitive therapists like Beck or Ellis than mood disorders result from an inaccurate or irrational interpretation of reality, they argue that our interpretations of the world are not representations of an external object reality but a pragmatic guide to anticipating events that can be more or less adaptive and useful to us relative to our purposes. We don’t construct our understanding of the world in isolation but through intersubjective discourse and action. As a result , many aspects of our thinking, our political ethical and other attitudes , are partially shared within a wider culture. But we never simply co-opt whole -hog any aspect of culture, as if a culture consisted of objective values that could have the identical meaning for any participant in that culture.

how do we get around that to something more objective that might form the foundation of a more fruitful discussion? E.g. might present opportunities for falsifying the idea that the quality of human experience tends to be eroded by the advancement of consumerist thinking and the increased prevalence of social engineering technologies, particularly in relation to the commodification of identities. — Baden

Is there a way to apply a ‘social engineering technology’ to convince far-right Trump supporters to become CRT leftists? If one accepts the objective reinforcement model
of human behavior , then one might argue yes.
If one instead believes that one can only be shaped by those aspects of culture that are already consistent with one’s personal system of understanding , then social engineering technology is as much a myth as stimulus-response reinforcement. It fails to take into account the autonomous self-consistency of a meaning-making organism. There are absolutely profound differences in ways of understanding every major aspect of the world , from the religious to the ethic to the political to the scientific , between the far right and the left , regardless of the fact that we are all supposed exposed to the same social engineering technologies and consumerist thinking.
Why is this the case? If we believe in the objective reinforcement model we probably will claim that these differences are superficial and are themselves manipulations of social engineering technologies or the indoctrinations of media. If we instead recognize experience as perspectivally subjective, then we will insist that it is never the ‘same’ social engineering or consumerist thinking that you and I are experiencing.

I am curious to know if you think, regardless of your personal experience or theoretical convictions, that modern societies are progressing in a manner conducive to increased human flourishing and what objective metrics you consider relevant in determining that. — Baden

There in no such thing as increased human flourishing, as though there were one objective linear scale of meaurement. For one thing, the understanding of what flourishing entails ,how and why it is important, changes from era to era, culture to culture and person to person.
Not too long ago in many Western cultures duty to others was considered a more important value than individual happiness. If more people today report psychological dysfunction than in earlier times this may be due less to the fact that we are more objectively unhappy than that we are more invested in using medicalizing terminology

We are more depressed than 19th century individuals because they didn’t even use that concept to describe their moods. One was not depressed, one had melancholia , which meant something quite different.

If one wants to know how well a person is flourishing , one needs to find out from them what they want from
life in their own terms rather than pretending that some society-wide metric will have any meaning at all. The. one needs to find out if they feel they are achieving their goals relative to their own aims , and respect their answer rather than accusing them of being blindly indoctrinated by social engineering techniques or consumerist thinking.

w

If one wants to know how well a person is flourishing , one needs to find out from them what they want from life in their own terms rather than pretending that some society-wide metric will have any meaning at all. Then one needs to find out if they feel they are achieving their goals relative to their own aims , and respect their answer rather than accusing them of being blindly indoctrinated by social engineering techniques or consumerist thinking. — Joshs

:up:

Before we go further, I want to clear up a few points first as you seem to have gone off on an argument against your own projections or a generalised stereotype of a critical theorist rather than dealing with my central thesis in any kind of nuanced or charitable manner.

1) Human flourishing is not a myth but that does not mean it's easy to measure either. Call it societal health as determined through the well-being of its members if you want and "objective" metrics in determining societal health can include the results of qualitative studies that involve e.g. open-ended individual interviews. Trying to establish a basis for understanding whether our social circumstances are developing in a positive or negative direction through their effects on us doesn't have to equate to the exclusive use of top-down positivistic statistical methods or whatever you have in mind. Unless you can quote me where I've said anything incompatible with the above, you'll have to accept you're attacking a strawman there.

2) Social engineering is not a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(political_science). Again, you can call it something else if you want. The nomenclature is not the issue here. And the phrase "social engineering technologies" simply refers to technologies that can be used for social engineering or for mass social influence. Those are not a myth either. And it's rather ridiculous to suggest that a belief in the existence of e.g. Facebook as a social engineering technology equates to a belief that you can apply some magical technological trick to convince a Trump supporter to become a CRT leftist. My point would be more like social media presents us with the opportunity to try on and off a potentially conflicting array of identities rather than encouraging creativity and self-development thus potentially confusing us and weakening our ability for critical thought. Again, you seem to have a strange extremist strawman in your head that you are using my thread to bash. I'd rather you stick to my arguments, understand my thesis, and deal with that.

My thesis centres around concepts of the self and identity and the latter's apparent proliferation and commodification. There is certainly a Frankfurt School influence but that's not all there is. If you only want to attack critical theory or Marcuse or leftists in general or whoever, you are not fully engaging with my arguments but, as I said, largely bashing strawmen.

So now maybe you can actually answer the question, which I'll put as simply as possible:

Do you think societal health is increasing or not? Why or why not?

(Again, there is absolutely no sense in which answering a simple question like this implies a disrespectful belief that everyone is blindly indoctrinated by consumerist thinking/absolutely controlled by social engineering or whatever other extemist view you'd like to accuse your imaginary political opponent of. )

Do you think societal health is increasing or not? Why or why not? — Baden

If you asked whether my personal health was increasing or decreasing, I'd provide you my annual health reports and you could compare my blood test results, heart rates, urinalysis results, medications, diagnoses, etc.

That is, we would have objective criteria to compare.

If you want to do the same for society, you have to find objective measures and compare. Which criteria you choose and the respective weights you provide would be where some debate may lie.

But, if you create a societal health index, you will be able to measure year to year changes and could use it to promote certain policies, which I assume has been done.

What we might show is that all objective factors show improvement, but most think it's getting worse, just because we love to talk about the good old days.

For example: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/23/14062168/history-global-conditions-charts-life-span-poverty

It's definitely a difficult and potentially contentious question, but part of my point here is not that there were ever any good old days but that we should at least concern ourselves with the question of whether our quality of being (including material, mental, developmental factors etc.) is being promoted to a greater or lesser degree by our social conditions and what direction we're going in with regard to that. Social evolution under my conception is analagous to human evolution. There is no guarantee of progress even in the most advanced societies. We humans may get stupider over time and our societies may get stupider too. At least we can potentially do something about social stupidities. But only if we become aware of them. Refusing to countenance even the possibility of measuring social progress in any scientific manner is baffling to me.

Do you think societal health is increasing or not? Why or why not? — Baden

I think there’s no such thing as ‘societal health’ for the same reason that there no such thing as ‘societal belief system’. There’s too much diversity in lifestyles, backgrounds and personal perspectives for such a concept to be useful or coherent. It’s like those inane polls which supposedly tell us which countries are the happiest.

social media presents us with the opportunity to try on and off a potentially conflicting array of identities rather than encouraging creativity and self-development thus potentially confusing us and weakening our ability for critical thought — Baden

As I said before, these are not identities , they are roles. And to successfully play a role with respect to others is a very ‘healthy’ and creative achievement, since it requires that we enrich our understanding of others and thus also ourselves. Taking on new roles with new people is not inherently conflictual but strengthens the flexibility and viability of our overall sense of self, which is essential for critical thought. It is only when we are unable to connect with others via a role( due to our failure to make sense of their motives and actions) that we experience conflict.

As I said before, these are not identities , they are roles. — Joshs

This is part of the reason I think you are misunderstanding my position, I originally defined identities in terms of roles in the OP. You talk as if I have missed this aspect completely.

The limits of identity then are more like the limits of conceptual groups that fit under the broader concept of “role/character” or sets of roles/characters — Baden

What is your justification for making an absolute separation between the concepts of identity and role? i.e. How do you define each so that there is no overlap and what is your justification for such a definition? We better get that out of the way first. Then we can discuss the positives and negatives of taking on and discarding roles/identities, where there is definitely room for debate.

I think there’s no such thing as ‘societal health’ — Joshs

We will just have to let that one go then.

Refusing to countenance even the possibility of measuring social progress in any scientific manner is baffling to me. — Baden

But that was my twofold point: (1) the question cannot be meaningfully answered scientifically unless we identify what we're measuring, and (2) there is a propensity to believe today's miseries are worse than prior ones for a whole host of reasons I'm sure, but one reason is that we only actually experience today's.

I cited to the article that showed that many criteria show socieral improvement over time.

The better analysis for me would be to ask what could society be like if we maximized our resources because that measures how well we're running the show. Whether things are better now than in the dark ages isn't helpful because we had a whole lot less to work with.

It's akin to the tragedy on the personal level where someone lives well below their potential, even though they may be outperforming someone very limited.

My personal opinion is if we've started to go backwards, it's very recently. I don't hold any particularly romantic notions about the dark ages. At the same time technological advance isn't necessarily facilitative of social advance where social advance equates to the well-being (in a broad and inclusive sense) of the individuals in a society. I see it more as a tool of social reproduction with well-being being generally incidental, particularly where such advance involves the proliferation and penetration of media. Anyhow, more on this tomorrow.

My personal opinion is if we've started to go backwards, it's very recently. I — Baden

But you say here:

Refusing to countenance even the possibility of measuring social progress in any scientific manner is baffling to me. — Baden

Which means your desire is for an empiricaly based claim, not just for a general sentiment. I think many believe things have deteriorated, but unless you can offer a before and after comparison, you can't describe what that deterioration is.

And you've got to insert some judgment here on what is worse and what it better.

If the preacher counts empty pews as his criterion for our going backwards, at least he has offered an empirical basis for his claim, even if I think his religious attendance offers no proof of going backward, but I do get what he's saying.

So this now will be me prodding you and annoying you to list your criteria for how we're regressing and then I'll Google your criteria and see if they actually are getting worse.

My sentiment, which I'll express, is that the world is moving in a positive direction. I see areas in need of course, but I see those working to improve it, which gives reason for my sentiment, and is why there is a certain irony in your statement.

It's as if someone complains to me that no one cares for the poor anymore as he helps the poor. His statement contradicts what is revealed before me. So every time you complain about the lack of X in our world and make efforts for others to see that, you move the world in a positive direction, so you defeat your argument by making it.

There is no way out of my positivity trap.

I think many believe things have deteriorated, but unless you can offer a before and after comparison, you can't describe what that deterioration is. — Hanover

This describes the same thing as what you observed Baden is writing: you THINK many do this or that, but you can't count them or establish a proportion based on empirical studies.

So every time you complain about the lack of X in our world and make efforts for others to see that, you move the world in a positive direction, so you defeat your argument by making it. — Hanover

And yet you don't help to move the world towards more empiricism to support unsupported opinions.*


* Sez GMBA in his empirically unsupported opinion.

Briefly, any manner of scientific approach is better than pure assertion but I wouldn't expect that to yield an uncontentious result in a general sense. It may though, help us challenge certain assumptions. The conversation I had with @Josh centred around me trying to get him to at least countenance the idea that social progress isn't a given either in theoretical or practical terms, to help justify to him even the need for a thesis like mine.

He's closed off that road completely, but my thesis doesn't rely on an acceptance that society must be moving backwards, particularly because of subjective factors that come into play in that judgement. I understand that dependent on our values, material or technological progress might e.g. be more or less justificatory of other problems it may cause. And I don't want to get bogged down in a debate with you over particulars that focus on a broader thesis of social progress that overcoats the more specific problem I'm trying to identify here.

I might be willing to pursue that with you somewhat though if you actually have read the OP by now and have any interest at all in what I'm saying rather than a simple urge just to inject your own brand of positivity into the conversation. I have a brand of positivity too. My brand says that there is a wealth of unlocked potential in people, particularly creative potential, and many of our confusions and anxieties aren't due to personal deficits or inevitabilities of social conditions but contingent factors that remain in place due to our inability to believe we can challenge them, due to how they obscure themselves from us. Not necessarily in any conscious or conspiratorial way but largely due to the mechanics of how social reality works and reinforces itself.

This describes the same thing as what you observed Baden is writing: you THINK many do this or that, but you can't count them or establish a proportion based on empirical studies. — god must be atheist

Scroll up. I posted to a site supporting my claim.

Do you watch commercials? — frank

I watch them like a fucking hawk. Otherwise you end up believing in better, and thinking your worth it, and that your house is full of nasty germs and smells that you can't smell, but everyone else can, and that's why yo have no friends.

Thanks for correcting me.

Maybe I was mislead by your wording... you said you "thought" this or that. Whereas you KNEW this or that. You'd seen the charts.

No problem, I admit you're right.

He's closed off that road completely, but my thesis doesn't rely on an acceptance that society must be moving backwards, — Baden

I'll concede the point that engrained worldviews impede objective analysis, particularly as it relates to optimistic versus pessimistic outlooks. It's very obvious here how that impacts many posters.

It's the source of the confirmation bias I would expect to creep in if we attempted an empirical analysis of the issue, with our looking at examples of social change over time. To some all would be proof of positivity. Others the opposite. To others all data would conceal inconclusive nuance.

I'll concede too that refusal to consider the possibility we're headed in the wrong direction and insist we can't get things wrong is a foolish approach. As they say, the pessimists came to America, the optimists to the gas chamber.

I do though think we're on the path generally to getting it right, but that doesn't mean I refuse to believe we might have diverted on a terribly wrong path.

This point is why if we wish to turn from philosophical to empirical, long term change must be analyzed. I realize though that the thrust of your thesis isn't what is, but is about a certain type of what you see cas a pervasive personality,

But we need thise people too in our perfectly constructed universe. :wink:

might be willing to pursue that with you somewhat though if you actually have read the OP by now and have any interest at all in what I'm saying rather than a simple urge just to inject your own brand of positivity into the conversation — Baden

Having had a creative burst, you adopted some crazy writing style that couldn't hold my attention, so I waited until you started talking normal before I engaged, and now you chastise me for my well laid plan.

Lackaday..

That's my new resigned expression. Expect to see it often.

My brand says that there is a wealth of unlocked potential in people, particularly creative potential, and many of our confusions and anxieties aren't due to personal deficits or inevitabilities of social conditions but contingent factors that remain in place due to our inability to believe we can challenge them, due to how they obscure themselves from us. Not necessarily in any conscious or conspiratorial way but largely due to the mechanics of how social reality works and reinforces itself. — Baden

No question what you say here is true. I see my job as a lawyer as less me having great expertise (which I of course have in spades), but just as stepping forward and articulating their position and refusing to relent. What people accept as their fate due to reluctance to challenge their designated place in society is the source of such abuse. These limitations are engrained in their morality, where they truly believe a life of compliance and submission are righteous.

It's their obedient acceptance of the slave morality by their masters.

Lackaday.

What is your justification for making an absolute separation between the concepts of identity and role? i.e. How do you define each so that there is no overlap and what is your justification for such a definition? We better get that out of the way first — Baden

I missed your inclusion of the word role in the context of identity. Let me share psychologist George Kelly’s understanding of role , which is where I’m
getting mine.


”We have insisted that the term role be reserved for a course of activity which is played out in the light of one’s construction of one or more other persons’ construct systems. When one plays a role, one behaves according to what one believes another person thinks, not merely according to what the other person appears to approve or disapprove. One plays a role when one views another person as a construer. This, of course, is a restricted definition of the term. It is the definition specifically used in the psychology of personal constructs. The term is used much more broadly elsewhere. The concept of individual suggestibility need not be considered, as it once was, the sole basis for a social psychology.”

For Kelly , the difference between identity and role is that persona identity , the ‘self’ , is the more or less stable sense of one’s own values, how one understands oneself in relation to and apart from all those who play a part in one’s life. Personality is hierarchically organized. At the subordinate end are peripheral constructs involved in interpreting everyday events. At the superordinate level of the self are core constructs concerning our central beliefs and values.
“Core constructs are those which govern a person’s maintenance processes—that is, those by which he maintains his identity and existence. In general, a healthy person’s mental processes follow core structures which are comprehensive but not too permeable. Since they are comprehensive, a person can use them to see a wide variety of known events as consistent with his own personality.”

Emotional turmoil consists of those events ( guilt, anxiety, threat) which throw our core sense of identity into crisis. Not knowing who we are anymore, not knowing what we stand for, is a situation of profound psychologicalcrisis and dysfunction. We can play an indefinite number of roles with other people without destabilizing our core identity. On the contrary, that stable identity ( which is not a static thing or even a narrative but the ability to assimilate a wide range of events in a way that maintains our self-integrity) is what allows us to play so many roles.

Occasionally we have to undergo a major revision of our core identity, which is potentially profoundly traumatic.

there is a wealth of unlocked potential in people, particularly creative potential, and many of our confusions and anxieties aren't due to personal deficits or inevitabilities of social conditions but contingent factors that remain in place due to our inability to believe we can challenge them, due to how they obscure themselves from us. Not necessarily in any conscious or conspiratorial way but largely due to the mechanics of how social reality works and reinforces itself — Baden

This is a common theme in contemporary philosophy. Some articulate it in terms of social power hegemonies which entrap us in their mechanics of thought( Foucault , Critical theory) , and some focus on ingrained personal habits (James). Either way, finding a way to step outside of the frame we are enmeshed in , or. at least to see the frame as a frame, is a necessary pre-condition for envisioning truly new possibilities for oneself.

“The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”

Arthur Miller: Death of Salesman

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”

Shakespeare: Hamlet

Having had a creative burst, you adopted some crazy writing style that couldn't hold my attention, so I waited until you started talking normal before I engaged, and now you chastise me for my well laid plan. — Hanover

I appreciate your honesty :smile: . So, let me steer this back to what I was saying in the OP and maybe expand on it and (I hope) put it in a more easily digestible form. It might take more words and be less precise and risk labouring the point, but anyhow.

Let’s zoom in a little on the mechanisms of what I’ve referred to as social engineering technologies whose proliferation and development forms a large part of recent social change (and again the nomenclature is not what’s important, just that these are technologies that clearly have important social consequences in terms of how we relate to ourselves and others). I’d like to draw a line of reasoning from the economic logic of such platforms through their behavioural and psychological effects and tie this to the conception of identity and self I’m putting forward to demonstrate that the overall dynamic may be undesirable in important ways.

So, social media companies, for example, make money in proportion to the effectiveness by which they direct our attention and behaviours. This is not a conspiracy theory but simple economic logic applied to the nature of their business.

The economic model of such technologies centres around “engagement”. Engagement can be determined through social penetration (number of accounts as a proportion of potential accounts), individual breadth of attention (amount of time spent using the service as a proportion of potential time using the service), and individual depth of attention (amount of time spent engaging with specific economically focused aspects of the service (clicking on ads etc) as a proportion of time spent using the service). The model flows more or less linearly through these categories of engagement seeking to transform awareness of the service into penetration of the service into usage of the service and, ultimately, into engagement with the economically focused aspects of the service in order to achieve profit from such.

As the nature of the service is one whereby its users promote and engage with the identities of themselves and others, engagement is largely engagement with identity. That’s at least to say there is a process of identity creation and experimentation that accompanies engagement with such platforms. (I’m aware of Josh’s objections here in terms of his conception of roles, which I’ll try to deal with in more detail in a separate post).

One consequence of this is that there’s a tendency for everyone to become their own propagandist: social validation becomes a game of online identity formation that encourages a view of our identities as a means to attract positive social responses. But there’s an inherent problem here: Identities becomes tools to achieve “likes” or replies, but due to their sticky nature, our commodified identity masks, so flexible and convenient in our online world, run up against obstacles in real-life worlds they weren’t designed for or due to deeper sets of dispositions and orientations in the self they are not necessarily compatible with.

I don’t see this as simple role-playing because the impetus for taking on the role is a real psychological and physiological reward, and this reward, the hit we receive from being socially validated imprints on us the means whereby we achieved such social validation, i.e the actions in the form of engagement activities that caused it, in a self-reinforcing manner. Where behaviours are self-reinforcing, they form patterns, which are interpreted consciously through the lens of identity. We become what we are conditioned to do.

From such self-reinforcing commodification of identity, it’s a short step to postulating that this process also facilitates a generalised consumer sentiment that further benefits the social engineering system in terms of its potential for profit and therefore further empowers its technological refinement and effectiveness.

This is to present a critique of the notion of free-floating transferable disposable identities (commodified identities) that can become sticky identities formed purely on the basis of social validation that is mediated through technologies for which our personal selves, or makeups, attributes, and dispositions are seen exclusively through the lens of opportunities for processing as profit. And, insofar as they are not so processable, seen as obstacles to be overcome by ever more effective (invasive) refinements of the technology instead of, more appropriately, as resources that are recognized as positive ends in themselves. In other words, the instrumental force of a consumer orientation channelled through technological “progress” can (maybe) result in mass individual regression if the worth of the individual is measured from the perspective of their depth of self-development rather than simply their degree of participation or even material success in the social system they find themselves in.

But even from the point of view of material resources, can we not sense a problem here? A continuous reward for the proliferation or focus on socially-validated identities divorced from the self-provision of the material necessities of life is hardly conducive to settling the self into producing wealth for itself when such a process is based on short term validation in a free-floating environment divorced in the abstract from notions of real material need and so likely distractive from them.

So, the idea is that social validation in its physiological form conditions behavioural response such that that behavioural response leads towards action that further develops impersonal identities (in terms of their relationship to our unique abilities and dispositions) that may move us further from developing a sustainable level of stability, happiness, self-satisfaction, and even material wealth.

We may or may not agree on that but maybe we can agree at least on the possibility that certain social technological forms simply by their nature and not necessarily through any greater conspiratorial design result, in their most pervasive forms, in a flattening out of our relationships with identity such that identity becomes a means for quick physiological validations rather than something that should have a deeper relationship to the self mediated by the presence of our physical bodies, their particular forms, libidinal organisations, and histories?

As an aside, psychologically, it’s a fairly well established theory that the gap between an idealised image of the self and the actual reality of the self as experienced day to day is a cause of stress and anxiety proportional to the size of that gap. This may be translatable in terms of its propensity to cause anxiety into the gap between an everyday self and identities that form through social validation in a technological context such that those identities are set apart from the self, but at the same time are stickier than idealised identities of the past which had less potential for immediate social validation due to the absence of the technologically mediated means to do so.

Another issue to touch on is the development of socially validated political positioning that becomes entrenched to the point that any identified political opponent’s reasoning is rejected on the basis of their politics rather than on a critical analysis of the reasoning itself. It’s clear that, in general, politics has become more polarised in many advanced nations and we’re obliged to examine why this may be the case if we wish to slow or reverse this process. As one of the major changes in the recent past that correlates with such polarisation has been the rapid development of social technologies, there is room to theorise their involvement in such polarisation.

So, my concerns, you’ve stated you share in at least some sense, centre around making the most of our social/individual resources regardless of whether the arbitrary social organisation finds itself in alignment or in opposition to such a goal. And we can look at the situation both from the point of view of a generalised material progress and also from the point of view of an internal personal progress that are not necessarily in conflict with each other, but that social forces, particularly in the form of ever more pervasive and invasive media technologies, may put in conflict with each other. It’s that I would like to oppose, and the further political polarisation that results in the lack of mutual understanding and cooperation on issues of interest to anyone that believes selves can and should be developed in ways that are not always immediately recognizable and valued from a social perspective.

As a caveat, we can make a distinction between different types of social platforms and their methods of validation/identity reinforcement. Validation that requires effortful thought forces an engagement with the self in a more sustainable way than validation that results from merely propagandising ourselves, attaching ourselves to whatever ideas are popular among our social connections, or entertaining others through shitposting etc. I think TPF is an example of such a platform as people generally gain respect through their intellectual efforts. Of course, then there’s the Shoutbox. :scream:

Anyhow, effortful cognitive engagement with one’s circumstances as they apply towards the experience of the self is also a means by which valuable cultural artefacts are not only appreciated but produced. The recognition of a separation of the self and its social environment, of some inevitable social alienation, is productive in fostering the creation of culturally valuable relations defined in terms of their ability to encourage positive social change through transcending and challenging cultural norms. Insofar as this is facilitated and encouraged, not all implementations of social technology are bad and we needn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Go, TPF!

So, I hope this is enough that I not be misunderstood as a Luddite or Cassandra or whatever. Rather, I want to say that the intersection of technology, economics, and consumerism may be creating a mode of interaction with the self that is in its most pervasive form diseased and culturally destructive, not because of any one individual, firm, or type of technology but because we have certain vulnerabilities in our process of identity formation that allow us to be put in circular processes of reward that inhibit our ability to create sustainable stable selves, and as our values are socially defined, our particular potentialities may become further divorced from our awareness over time because it may be that is how society has come to function, i.e. as a means to inhibit authentic self-development in favour of instrumental self-relationships focused on the same type of reward mechanisms that make us want to buy Nike trainers or the latest iphone.

In short, relations that are inimical to the development of character, which is not the same thing as identity because it suggests a particular mode of instantiation of identity that is strong and stable. Character is what happens when identities work together in a coherent and sustainable way within selves. Character, if anything, allows for the resistance to identity structures that offer temporary physiological validation. It doesn’t have to be good or bad in itself but it is at least a way for us to immunise ourselves against social processes that themselves seek to immunise themselves from the types of social change only characters are strong enough to bring about.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

Well, I wrote most of that while jogging and talking into my phone, so I hope it came out alright. I did edit it afterwards.

: social validation becomes a game of online identity formation that encourages a view of our identities as a means to attract positive social responses — Baden

the impetus for taking on the role is a real psychological and physiological reward, and this reward, the hit we receive from being socially validated imprints on us the means whereby we achieved such social validation, i.e the actions in the form of engagement activities that caused it, in a self-reinforcing manner. Where behaviours are self-reinforcing, they form patterns, which are interpreted consciously through the lens of identity. We become what we are conditioned to do — Baden

Character, if anything, allows for the resistance of identity structures that offer temporary physiological validation. — Baden

I want to distinguish my view of validation from a reinforcement approach in which validation takes place via a physiological reward mechanism.
George Kelly writes “ “In some respects validation in personal construct theory takes the place of reinforcement, although it is a construct of quite a different order, Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, whereas in conventional theory reinforcement is a value property attributed to an event.”

In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.

“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).

“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

Social validation for Kelly is not a physiological hit, an imprinting , a conditioning, but the result of a match between our expectations and events. It is only important to fit into a group that we already identify with in some manner , on some basis. What is validated or invalidated for us takes place on the basis of its relevance for our own purposes and goals. Our identity has a functional unity to it based on meaningful relevance, rather than being glued together by jolts of externalized reinforcements

Thanks for the Kelly reference. I'll look into this more and try to come up with a response, probably tomorrow.

Our identity has a functional unity to it based on meaningful relevance, rather than being glued together by jolts of externalized reinforcements — Joshs

This is largely true when everything is as it should be. However I think the OP has a point about how this functional unity can breakdown, and has been breaking down for many recently. Even within Kelly's framework, identity is dependent on external reinforcement so far as that the external social segments provide a person with validation material, rather than alienation.

One example is when social groups are polarized to the point where you are told "pick a side - if you are not with us, you are against us." A person may soon find that groups that shared their identity alienate them, and the opposite polarized group are even worse. Thus leading to a confusion about identity influenced by external sources.

Or to make the same point using Kelly's terminology - it is a problem when the validation material available from the the polarized segments of culture offer more alienation than validation for some people.

Even within Kelly's framework, identity is dependent on external reinforcement so far as that the external social segments provide a person with validation material, rather than alienation. — PhilosophyRunner

Yes, but keep in mind that for Kelly it’s not the events themselves that are validating or invalidating. They only provide the raw substrate of our experience.We are always in motion. That is, our experience is always changing , so there is always validation material for us to make something of. Our challenge is to make sense of the new in ways that are intelligible to us , that are consistent on some level with our identity. It’s what we are able to make of events , how we construe them that determines whether they are validating or alienating, not what they supposedly are ‘in themselves’, and that varies from person to person within the ‘same’ consumerist society.

One example is when social groups are polarized to the point where you are told "pick a side - if you are not with us, you are against us." A person may soon find that groups that shared their identity alienate them, and the opposite polarized group are even worse. Thus leading to a confusion about identity influenced by external sources. — PhilosophyRunner

Let’s say we find that members of our family support a political orientation that puts them in an opposite camp from us. They may feel alienated from us based on this political difference, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we feel alienated from them. It’s not the political difference in itself that causes feelings of alienation but the inability to understand why the other person believes what they believe . In other words, our discovery of their outlook disturbs us because the person we thought we knew is now someone we no longer recognize. Our former scheme of understand has been invalidated We feel that we know longer understand them and no longer trust them. But it is possible for us to empathize with their viewpoint from their perspective, without coming over to their side. In this case we can maintain our political difference without feeling alienated from them. Our construal of them has not been invalidated. We get why, given their framework of understanding, they had no choice but to embrace the political position they did.

@Baden, you said:

I agree in that it is only from an analysis of the social that a coherent concept of self can arise. I don’t see how we get at any kind of purely metaphysical self. To me the self (socially named as a "person") is a social atom, the most discrete functioning social unit. As long as you are a functioning social unit (e.g. physically discrete and linguistically located) and you can make a stable and clear judgement on who you are in contradistinction to others, you qualify as a self under my conception. So, a self is a set of identities that may work well together or may not, but that can at least coherently locate itself in its social structure (i.e. among other selves). — Baden

Yet in your OP, you also said:

The thesis presented here then is that this phenomenon of multiple and fractured identity formation, the creation of self-conflictual selves (subjectively experienced in the long term as unhappy, meaningless and anxious selves, characterized by indecision, irresoluteness, and inaction) is not a bug but a feature of advanced society and the more “advanced” the society the more a feature it tends to become. — Baden

It seems we fail to connect in this train of thought what George Allan was saying. He is pointing out the flaw in our thoughts in our search for one identity conflicting with other identities. The error in thinking is this, which was included in the passage I gave you earlier:

Understanding, meaning, and purpose cannot function for us in the absence of some reality that transcends the pervasive experience of temporal passage...

.
(And btw, you write like him)

Putting it all together, it doesn't matter whether you say that the self you're talking about is within the social context, not metaphysical. But the point is, you are talking about the self-conflictual selves -- a self defeating its self, or something. It means you are positing a self that is unique and apart from the other social selves. This is a foundational view of self, social or metaphysical. You are looking for a transcendental self. You want some stable self that transcends all other social changes and complexities.

Is this a correct reading of your thesis?

It’s what we are able to make of events , how we construe them that determines whether they are validating or alienating, not what they supposedly are ‘in themselves’, and that varies from person to person within the ‘same’ consumerist society. — Joshs

Absolutely. However there are circumstance where these external circumstances are challenging or contradictory enough that that it becomes difficult for a person to validate their identity with any group. My assertion is that this is happening to a greater extent in today's society than say a couple of decades ago.

Let’s say we find that members of our family support a political orientation that puts them in an opposite camp from us. They may feel alienated from us based on this political difference, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we feel alienated from them. — Joshs

True for a family member. But in that case the dominant identity would be of them being family, rather than their political identity. So the alienation is not happening in the dominant identity in that group - for that to happen a person would have to find their goals do not align with their family member being family. This certainly would cause an identity crisis - but it is not the crisis I intended to highlight with my example.

I might have been overly vague in my example as I wanted to generalize and not fixate on any single political or social issue. Here is another, perhaps clearer example:

There are two political parties X and Y. Jack's goals match reasonably well with X and he identifies as an Xer. Happy times.

Now the parties become more polarised. Jack's purpose no longer matches well with either party. Even worse, a lot of Xer now deplore him and his goals. Yet Y still does not align with his goals any better than previously. Jack is now a politically alienated person, who has an identity crisis in a portion of his social groups.

Note that does not mean he has no identity any longer - he may have a number of identities around family, work, etc. But a part of him is no longer fulfilled and he no longer has an identity in that area.

While I used a political party identity in the example above, I don't intend to limit my point to that - I just thought it would be the easiest example. I have seen it happen with work, gender, etc

Putting it all together, it doesn't matter whether you say that the self you're talking about is within the social context, not metaphysical. But the point is, you are talking about the self-conflictual selves -- a self defeating its self, or something. It means you are positing a self that is unique and apart from the other social selves. This is a foundational view of self, social or metaphysical. You are looking for a transcendental self. You want some stable self that transcends all other social changes and complexities.

Is this a correct reading of your thesis? — Caldwell

I think we’re on the same page. As you pointed out, I stick to the discourse of the social sciences; part of my self-identification places my thought in the realm of sociology and linguistics, so that when I talk about a self that has the ability to resolve and resist conflicts: that has integrated layers of past experiences into a stable structure of character; that is to a large degree immunized against social influences; whose dominant orientation (along the lines of Josh’s Kelly reference) is to mould the social interpretively in accordance with its own dispositions rather than be moulded by it in self-conflicting ways, I frame that perspective in terms of an idealized self that must by its nature be in some opposition to the social, but is nevertheless, being a self, still interpretable as a social unit and must be to function socially (to be sane).

I’m reminded here of Paul Newman’s quote “A man with no enemies is a man with no character”. We might say “A person for whom the social is not (in some sense) an enemy is a person without character”. This is a person swallowed up in the social, subject to its whims, whose ego confabulates narratives to obscure its situation, a person, who, though they may consider themselves a multiple role-player, even a skilful one, has no capacity for truly independent action to resist the social, and is not fooling the social through their masks but is being fooled into thinking they are in control of the masks they wear and their effects, i.e. a person who may perceive themselves as lying to the social but are helplessly transparent in the face of it. This dynamic may be interpreted in some philosophical discourses as a failure to acknowledge the existence of a metaphysical or transcendental self and thus close off avenues to its realisation, or in religious discourse as lack of belief in and/or separation from God.

So, while under my conception, we don't reach all the way through the context of the social to a truly metaphysical level of self, the general contextualisation of the self in the face of the social as a self facing both threats and opportunities re its healthy realization, and much of the practical consequences of this situation, remain the same. What would form a true contrast here could be e.g. postmodern notions of identity play whereby the self is flattened out into some kind of dopamine machine around which the pinball of discourse races and the game is to get as many little lights of experience to flash up before the ball drops back into its hole of underlying meaningless. And then do it all again and accept that as all there is.