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PhilippeSchiffFirstEssay 10 - 01 Jul 2018 - Main.PhilippeSchiff
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Destroying the Fantasy
-- By PhilippeSchiff - 23 Feb 2018
The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.
-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Society’s Belief
White supremacy continues to exist because, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, people are in a “fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.” Dr. King’s words are as true today as they were in the 1960s. Our self-deception fuses with an all-too comfortable vanity to perpetuate an injustice whose continued existence we fail, or rather refuse, to recognize. This fantasy can be broken with visceral education.
Self-Deception
White America’s self-deception is a dissociation from reality that results from a repression of the self-evident truth that racism still burns inside our society. We can at least credit white Americans with finding this fact – a fact painfully obvious to its victims – unpleasant. But this distaste has merely buried the problem, instead of solving it.
Repression caused by cognitive dissonance is a well-known phenomenon. Undeniable knowledge gets displaced to our subconscious if it conflicts with a belief whose importance trumps. We value the latter belief more and accordingly give it precedence. This condition is familiar to us all. Who hasn’t, at least temporarily, ignored an important-looking piece of mail? Collectively this can perpetuate injustice. Although, as Thurman Arnold tells us, social organizations don’t have a consciousness, Dr. King reminds us that it is capable of self-deception.
Comfortable Vanity
This self-deception is perpetuated by a comfortable vanity. By believing themselves actually committed to the cause of equality, progress, and justice, white Americans remain oblivious to the fact that they are reinforcing inequality, halting progress, and spreading injustice. The same is true about other similarly pernicious forms of bigotry. Ask a man if he is truly committed to full equality for women and he will be insulted that you even implied otherwise. Yet, in his daily life he will continue to mansplain and overlook and patronize. He will be so self-deceived and vain to be able to ask a female lawyer “have you been aware of the fact that you’re a women?”
Fantasy Destroyed
Grasping the Problem
In order to begin an attempt at solving this problem, we need to develop an understanding of how such self-deception works. Although people think their mind is a single block, indivisible and unitary, such a model fails because it cannot satisfyingly explain how contradictory beliefs coexist. A better model can be found in Frank Putnam’s research in The Way We Are. Putnam tells us that people’s consciousness is made up of states of mind. From time to time, in response to certain stimuli, we switch from one state to another. One closes up and is shoved into our subconscious while another one appears and reveals its contents. This is most pronounced in people suffering from mental diseases such as bipolar disorder, but it exists in us all. Such states are formed by the experiences we undergo throughout our lives. Unpleasant experiences create states which become buried in the subconscious. But, even non-active states have an effect on our being. Although only a single state is active at a particular time, a personality is, in Putnam’s words, “the collective dynamics of a person’s set of identity, emotional, and behavioral states.” In other words, a personality is, to borrow from quantum physics, a superposition of self-states.
Social structures have states as well. Thurman Arnold explains that national morale is more important than logic. One who realizes that a society has switched from one morale, or self-state, to another, can tap into this new self-state and propel himself to leadership. This works because as Putnam’s research shows, just as a mother’s state interacts with her baby’s state or a knowledgeable psychiatrist's with her patient's, the locking of one person’s state with a complementary state of the counterparty allows for both fluent communication and an outsized influence.
We also see the switching of states of social organizations. White supremacy was an active state for many years, but was then closed off and pushed into the collective subconscious. But this state did not go away and continues to play a role in the “collective dynamic” of our society. It must be addressed. Especially since we are seeing leaders bringing this self-state to the forefront and exploiting it.
Visceral Education
Crucially, however, we also know that switching states can make the invisible suddenly visible. As Putnam tells us, “switching into or out of” states can cause us to switch between seeing the skull or the young woman in the painting tellingly called “vanity”.
We can cause this switch by visceral education which will get society as a whole to switch states and finally see what is already there. We can learn by looking at the great movements against social injustice from the past. From Gandhi’s non-violent civil disobedience to Dr. King’s civil rights movement, we see that by showing the willingness to suffer and the dignity of nonviolent resistance, the particular self-state of Europeans that couldn’t help but value such counteraction was brought to the front. The vanity disappeared for a moment and became too uncomfortable. The self-deception was paused because the dominant self-state repressing the knowledge of white supremacy was shoved aside.
Visceral education is crucial to solving today’s social problems. We read about police shootings of unarmed black men. We see the de facto racial segregation of housing. Many of the civil rights movement’s achievements have been reversed. But these billboards addressed to us just get repressed into our subconscious and are kept there by our comfortable vanity. If people started disobeying, if we all started shouting out, if more and more joined movements such as Black Lives Matter, if an inspiring leader like Dr. King were to rise and be heard – then we could finally achieve some progress.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
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PhilippeSchiffFirstEssay 9 - 23 Apr 2018 - Main.PhilippeSchiff
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Destroying the Fantasy
-- By PhilippeSchiff - 23 Feb 2018
The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.
-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Society’s Belief
White supremacy continues to exist because, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, people are in a “fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.” Dr. King’s words are as true today as they were in the 1960s. Our self-deception fuses with an all-too comfortable vanity to perpetuate an injustice whose continued existence we fail, or rather refuse, to recognize. This fantasy can be broken with visceral education.
Self-Deception
White America’s self-deception is a dissociation from reality that results from a repression of the self-evident truth that racism still burns inside our society. We can at least credit white Americans with finding this fact – a fact painfully obvious to its victims – unpleasant. But this distaste has merely buried the problem, instead of solving it.
Repression caused by cognitive dissonance is a well-known phenomenon. Undeniable knowledge gets displaced to our subconscious if it conflicts with a belief whose importance trumps. We value the latter belief more and accordingly give it precedence. This condition is familiar to us all. Who hasn’t, at least temporarily, ignored an important-looking piece of mail? Collectively this can perpetuate injustice. Although, as Thurman Arnold tells us, social organizations don’t have a consciousness, Dr. King reminds us that it is capable of self-deception.
Comfortable Vanity
This self-deception is perpetuated by a comfortable vanity. By believing themselves actually committed to the cause of equality, progress, and justice, white Americans remain oblivious to the fact that they are reinforcing inequality, halting progress, and spreading injustice. The same is true about other similarly pernicious forms of bigotry. Ask a man if he is truly committed to full equality for women and he will be insulted that you even implied otherwise. Yet, in his daily life he will continue to mansplain and overlook and patronize. He will be so self-deceived and vain to be able to ask a female lawyer “have you been aware of the fact that you’re a women?”
Fantasy Destroyed
Grasping the Problem
In order to begin an attempt at solving this problem, we need to develop an understanding of how such self-deception works. Although people think their mind is a single block, indivisible and unitary, such a model fails because it cannot satisfyingly explain how contradictory beliefs coexist. A better model can be found in Frank Putnam’s research in The Way We Are. Putnam tells us that people’s consciousness is made up of states of mind. From time to time, in response to certain stimuli, we switch from one state to another. One closes up and is shoved into our subconscious while another one appears and reveals its contents. This is most pronounced in people suffering from mental diseases such as bipolar disorder, but it exists in us all. Such states are formed by the experiences we undergo throughout our lives. Unpleasant experiences create states which become buried in the subconscious. But, even non-active states have an effect on our being. Although only a single state is active at a particular time, a personality is, in Putnam’s words, “the collective dynamics of a person’s set of identity, emotional, and behavioral states.” In other words, a personality is, to borrow from quantum physics, a superposition of self-states.
Social structures have states as well. Thurman Arnold explains that national morale is more important than logic. One who realizes that a society has switched from one morale, or self-state, to another, can tap into this new self-state and propel himself to leadership. This works because as Putnam’s research shows, just as a mother’s state interacts with her baby’s state or a knowledgeable psychiatrist's with her patient's, the locking of one person’s state with a complementary state of the counterparty allows for both fluent communication and an outsized influence.
We also see the switching of states of social organizations. White supremacy was an active state for many years, but was then closed off and pushed into the collective subconscious. But this state did not go away and continues to play a role in the “collective dynamic” of our society. It must be addressed. Especially since we are seeing leaders bringing this self-state to the forefront and exploiting it.
Visceral Education
Crucially, however, we also know that switching states can make the invisible suddenly visible. As Putnam tells us, “switching into or out of” states can cause us to switch between seeing the skull or the young woman in the painting tellingly called “vanity”.
We can cause this switch by visceral education which will get society as a whole to switch states and finally see what is already there. We can learn by looking at the great movements against social injustice from the past. From Gandhi’s non-violent civil disobedience to Dr. King’s civil rights movement, we see that by showing the willingness to suffer and the dignity of nonviolent resistance, the particular self-state of Europeans that couldn’t help but value such counteraction was brought to the front. The vanity disappeared for a moment and became too uncomfortable. The self-deception was paused because the dominant self-state repressing the knowledge of white supremacy was shoved aside.
Visceral education is crucial to solving today’s social problems. We read about police shootings of unarmed black men. We see the de facto racial segregation of housing. Many of the civil rights movement’s achievements have been reversed. But these billboards addressed to us just get repressed into our subconscious and are kept there by our comfortable vanity. If people started disobeying, if we all started shouting out, if more and more joined movements such as Black Lives Matter, if an inspiring leader like Dr. King were to rise and be heard – then we could finally achieve some progress.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
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PhilippeSchiffFirstEssay 3 - 28 Feb 2018 - Main.PhilippeSchiff
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Paper Title
-- By PhilippeSchiff - 23 Feb 2018
Section I
Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
Subsub 1
Subsub 2
Section II
Subsection A
Subsection B
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
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PhilippeSchiffFirstEssay 1 - 23 Feb 2018 - Main.PhilippeSchiff
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Paper Title
-- By PhilippeSchiff - 23 Feb 2018
Section I
Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
Subsub 1
Subsub 2
Section II
Subsection A
Subsection B
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
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