Clipmarks | Existential dread Clips

Health Fetishism Bad for Health

Fri, 02 May 2008 14:19:44 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Health means wholeness.

In a society of lowered horizons and diminished expectations, security and safety have become the highest values and the goal of preserving health has become the zenith of human aspirations.

Postponing death, through austere regimes of diet and exercise, moderation and restraint, and through regular submission to the medical surveillance of check-ups and screening tests, now takes precedence over enjoying life

fetishism of the body in contemporary culture, expressed in cults of body enhancement as well as the narcissism of the complete check-up, is linked to a pervasive fear of disease and an ultimate terror of death. These preoccupations reflect a fantasy of mastering the unmasterable, and a disavowal of death.

Though subjecting the body to a relentless regime of prevention and surveillance is unlikely to make much difference to the duration of our animal existence, it is certain to reduce the scope of our humanity – as well as imposing an unsustainable burden on our health services.

Tags: neurosis, narcissism, existential dread

The Dread of Dying as Source of Woe: Irvin Yalom

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:07:33 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Nice interview

Clip Source: www.salon.com

it is not just love that we look for in all the wrong places. If Irvin Yalom is right, it is life itself. By denying death, the psychoanalyst suggests, we misdirect our search for happiness. The true meaning of life, his work suggests, lies in engaging what we most fear.

"The primitive dread of death resides in the unconscious -- a dread that is part of the fabric of being, that is formed early in life before the development of precise, conceptual formulation, a dread that is chilling, uncanny, and inchoate, a dread that exists prior to and outside of language and image." -- "Existential Psychotherapy"

"A real confrontation with death usually causes one to question with real seriousness the goals and conduct of one's life up to then. So also with those who confront death through a fatal illness. How many people have lamented: 'What a pity I had to wait till now, when my body is riddled with cancer, to know how to live!'" -- "Love's Executioner"

Tags: yalom, fear of death, repression, denial

National security - the dominant American myth

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 01:34:10 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: We make ourselves less safe in order to create the illusion that we are more safe

Clip Source: warincontext.org

“national security.”

The phrase is potent because it promises something that is impossible, since the human condition is by definition insecure. When candidates vie with one another over who is most qualified to be “commander in chief,” and when they unanimously promise to strengthen military readiness, they together reinforce the dominant American myth - that an extravagant social investment of treasure and talent in armed power of the group offers members of the group escape from the existential dread that comes with life on a dangerous planet. That such investment only makes the planet more dangerous matters little, since the feeling of security, rather than actual security, is the goal of the entire project.

Tags: war on terror

The State Religion: The myth of national security stands between us and the future

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:48:29 GMT

clipped by: papananook
clipper's remarks: I repeat: "Toughness" and strength through militarism speak to the myth of nationalism but will get us only deeper into the quagmire that President Bad Example has bequeathed us as his legacy. We won't stop terrorism with shock-and-awe bombing, torture and pre-emptive global bullying. Almost everybody knows this by now, but our presidential candidates still genuflect before the almighty defense budget, varying only in the fervor they are able to project.

This is scary, is it not -- that we might wind up with More of the Same as our next commander-in-chief, simply because we lack the capacity to step outside the stagnant mythology of macho nationalism.

"Preachers warn of hellfire to offer rescue from it, which is available to those who submit," writes Carroll. "This feedback loop of damnation-salvation-submission serves the people by offering meaning, and it serves the elite by protecting the structure of power. In religion, all of this is overt. In presidential politics, it is im

Clip Source: www.smirkingchimp.com

Grab your flak jackets because there's "trench warfare" on the campaign trail, as would-be commanders-in-chief prove their mettle not merely by persuading people to vote for them but by "demolishing" their opponents -- because the leader of a country as powerful as the United States of America must, above all, be someone who's tough and ruthless, right? Like George W. Bush.

"Military power . . . functions in America the way state religion has functioned in other societies," James Carroll writes, in an excellent piece this week in the Boston Globe on the myth of national security. The central dogma of this religion, which no candidate dare question lest he or she be damned for heresy, is "that an extravagant social investment of treasure and talent in armed power of the group offers members of the group escape from the existential dread that comes with life on a dangerous planet."

Wouldn't it be nice if we could at least talk about such matters at the level of a presidential debate

Hate Bombing: the Sleep of Reason

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 08:50:07 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: The rise of Fascism - not in this or that form, or this or that leader, but among the ordinary people - was marked by a descent into hatred of modernism, enlightenment values, irrationalism, superstition, an existential dread that sort security in myth. It is this current today, not the easy targets of Bad Wolf Bush or X or Y, which is the more alarming of background indicators of what has the potential to erupt.

Clip Source: www.city-journal.org

A pitiless new day is dawning. The powers of the inhuman and the efficacy of hatreds mutate dangerously. A generation that worked diligently to tame the threat of nuclear war finds itself driven toward a horizon more frightening to contemplate than the one it dreamed of avoiding. Now it must try again to think the unthinkable, to leave the era of the H-bomb and enter the time of the human bomb.

Imre Kertész was twice a survivor, once from the death camps and then again from Communism; saved by literature, he was Hungary’s first Nobel Prize winner. He writes: “Some day we should analyze the mass of resentments that bring the contemporary mind to scorn reason; we should undertake an intellectual history of the hatred of the intellect.” The various forms of racism, chauvinism, fanaticism, and the apparent rebirth of an aggression that was thought to be a thing of the past surprise us. Should we not be surprised at our surprise?

Tags: hatred, terrorism, modernism, irrationalism

Be Guided by Gaia and other wacky ideas

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:34:33 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: A review of philosopher Mary Midgley's book.

Clip Source: www.spiked-online.com

As a scientific hypothesis, James Lovelock’s Gaia theory is worth serious consideration. He suggests that it is possible to view the Earth as a self-regulating system: that organisms do not merely ‘adapt’ to the environment, selected by the blind hand of evolution, but rather play a role in creating that environment.

Yet this scientific hypothesis has been blighted by the peculiar moral climate that has prevailed since the 1960s, when it was first proposed

Gaia has become an intermediary in human beings’ spiritual crises; and, unfortunately, this has meant that an interesting theory has been taken in increasingly wacky directions.

“Gaia is now cast as a wise figure which somehow knows what is best for the planet”

Gaia stops being a theory, and becomes merely the projection of human hopes and anxieties.

Gaia is cast as a wise figure, an Earth guardian,

This guardian Gaia is an answer for the human search for moral guidance.

Books discussed:

Earthy Realism: The Meaning of Gaia, by Mary Midgley

Tags: gaia, new age, projection, existential dread