SillyBilly said:

I was just watching that problem with atheism video from the thread in here and remember something I though was funny about what you're saying. The problem is, is that people think evolution is something that we can control. For example they talked about sterilizing retarded people as it is justified (under false reasoning) to force evolution. Well evolution is not a conscious thing, it happens naturally without conscious involvement of the beings progressing through it. For example if you try to force evolution by taking it into your own hands that way it becomes redundant because you are acting as if you understand that evolution is attempting to progress to perfection.

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I guess you've never heard of dog breeding.

Kickle said:

Why are we always trying to escape the work load?

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Kickle said:

Do you think that antidepressants will prolong or shorten the lifespan of our society? Meaning that from what I know of strong, conquering empires, they fall when there is internal conflicts that occur simultaneously with the external conflicts. It seems pretty obvious to me that most people are displeased with the direction of our country, our government, and the rife between capitalism and other systems. There is a huge amount of dissent that is becoming more and more polarized. Along with this, there is a growing amount of depression and feelings of helplessness.

Rather than allowing the natural course of events to occur, for depressed individuals to either A) cease production and start offing themselves or B) start revolting against what makes them feel like giving up, we have created something to suppress these feelings even further. Do you think that this is a true way to overcome the storm that is visibly brewing? Or do you think that it will just make the storm that much stronger in the long run?

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The more I think about this the weirder it gets. First some groundwork. I think we can all agree that ascribing intervals to history is a somewhat arbitrary practice, isn't it.

1. Giving an age an "ism", (or an ism its age) is attributing culture with its pathos, as we will refer to it in a kind of narrative.

Compare this to an understanding of logos, or logic.

From pathos, which is ordinarily a literary term, it seems apparent we' ve made our way toward patho-logy. Freud famously made the step from Sophocles' fictionally constructed Oedipus to The Oedipus Complex, and instantiated a Pathos - of - logos.

How were they brought together, with such standing tradition that left pathos and logos to be so different? (How about the epic entitlement of psychology into the philosophy forum?)

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2. Based on the arbitrary practice of entitling a specific narrative for an "age" I would say that in the first place attributing an "age" to history is the symptomatic diagnosis of culture. This is already what was happening, now it is becoming explicit, compounding in on itself... Where does psychology arise out of pathology?

This historical diagnosis of diagnosis - the age of anti-depressents...  Is "psychology" possibly its realization?

Maybe it would be safer to just call this the age of psychology. That's what I was thinking at first, as it seems appropriate. It also seems reasonable to say that antidepressents, or pathology in general, is technique used in an age of pyschology. But part of me thinks that this is an overly convenient label. Where again did the supposed distinction arise between psychology and pathology?

Traditionally, I'd say the arbitration of age is remarkable only as the realization of polarities of treatment and diagnosis (in culture). Internal is always going to be symptomatic of external; that is, unless the majority assumes the dogma that our science is "substantive" in more than a conventional sense.

Perhaps the question is, "to what extent does our culture actually realizee the fictional, or socially constructed basis of pathology?" The theory and its  construction is evident, but what specifically could be realized?

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IT is too little to call man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world; than the world doth, nay, than the world is. And if those pieces were extended, and stretched out in man as they are in the world, man would be the giant, and the world the dwarf; the world but the map, and the man the world. If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another, to hills, and all the bones to quarries of stones, and all the other pieces to the proportion of those which correspond to them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of man to move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star; for, as the whole world hath nothing, to which something in man doth not answer, so hath man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation. Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, man, so far as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces; our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants; that reach from east to west, from earth to heaven; that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once; my thoughts reach all, comprehend all.

Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, any where, and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the sun, and beyond the sun, overtakes the sun, and overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere. And then, as the other world produces serpents and vipers, malignant and venomous creatures, and worms and caterpillars, that endeavour to devour that world which produces them, and monsters compiled and complicated of divers parents and kinds; so this world, ourselves, produces all these in us, in producing diseases, and sicknesses of all those sorts: venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases, and manifold and entangled diseases made up of many several ones. And can the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures, as we can diseases of all these kinds? O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches! how much do we lack of having remedies for every disease, when as yet we have not names for them?

But we have a Hercules against these giants, these monsters; that is, the physician; he musters up all the forces of the other world to succour this, all nature to relieve man. We have the physician, but we are not the physician. Here we shrink in our proportion, sink in our dignity, in respect of very mean creatures, who are physicians to themselves. The hart that is pursued and wounded, they say, knows an herb, which being eaten throws off the arrow: a strange kind of vomit. The dog that pursues it, though he be subject to sickness, even proverbially, knows his grass that recovers him. And it may be true, that the drugger is as near to man as to other creatures; it may be that obvious and present simples, easy to be had, would cure him; but the apothecary is not so near him, nor the physician so near him, as they two are to other creatures; man hath not that innate instinct, to apply those natural medicines to his present danger, as those inferior creatures have; he is not his own apothecary, his own physician, as they are. Call back therefore thy meditation again, and bring it down: what's become of man's great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust; what's become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness, of the grave? His diseases are his own, but the physician is not; he hath them at home, but he must send for the physician.

-John Donne, 1624

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Poid said:

Quote:

Kickle said:

Why are we always trying to escape the work load?

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Because working sucks?

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Poid said:

SillyBilly said:

I was just watching that problem with atheism video from the thread in here and remember something I though was funny about what you're saying. The problem is, is that people think evolution is something that we can control. For example they talked about sterilizing retarded people as it is justified (under false reasoning) to force evolution. Well evolution is not a conscious thing, it happens naturally without conscious involvement of the beings progressing through it. For example if you try to force evolution by taking it into your own hands that way it becomes redundant because you are acting as if you understand that evolution is attempting to progress to perfection.

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I guess you've never heard of dog breeding.

Kickle said:

Why are we always trying to escape the work load?

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Because working sucks?

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The problem is, is that people think evolution is something that we can control.

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bradley said:

Surveys show that people are happier than ever. At least, on average. Maybe the recession is getting people down at the moment.

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Kickle said:

Because the amount of Americans seeking psychological/psychiatric help for depression is, and has been, on the rise. To the point of utter absurdity IMO. While it is possible that the increase is due to a decrease in the stigma attached to going to a shrink, it's also possible that there is an increase in the amount of depressed individuals.

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Kickle said:

That's why I'd like to hear what these surveys were measuring. Some theories of depression would suggest that on the surface people should look happier than ever. But as soon as that illusory facade gives way to the brute force of reality, they'll end up depressed. In other words, while the illusion is helpful in the short term, it doesn't work long term. Questions like "are you happy" don't really get at these concepts. It just scratches the surface of social desirability.

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SillyBilly said:

Those breeds are redundant, obviously.

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You don't know what redundant means, obviously.

SillyBilly said:

If they tried to survive in the wild without humans they would die out depending on their distance from the main original line of evolution we see still progressing in wolves.

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I wasn't aware that the concept of evolution only applies to wild animals from Earth.

SillyBilly said:

Obviously mating is supposed to be competitive if nature goes through such trouble to make it difficult but actually make it completely possible for a new better creature to evolve through natural selection. As soon as humans put there touch in things generally go wrong.

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Quote:

Is it possible to realize this an age of psychology?

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Quote:

We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit.  We have a great revolution against the culture.  The great depression is our lives.  We have a spiritual depression. (fight club)

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SillyBilly said:

Those breeds are redundant, obviously. If they tried to survive in the wild without humans they would die...

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