I just read Denial of Death. It was my first exposure to the strange fascination psychoanalysts had with shit. On the one hand, it is interesting to wonder how much we are fascinated by this but do not know it. On the other, it sounds like their analysis went off the rails and simply condemns them as being disconnected from reality.
I prefer your summary here in using the truth of bodily functions to level the playing field and remind both sides of the aisles we all shit, and we're all going to die. Why not play nice?
Exactly. I think their obsession appears so due to the majority of society intently, and intentionally ignoring it. That's why the conversations on our animal sexual impulses get people so tied up in knots where the most sex positive sound like puritans.
Absolutely. The knowledge of good and evil and the elevation from our naked state seems to indicate the angelic knowledge the animal attained which creates the dichotomy in which sin a core concept.
Is it better thought of as the Anal Angel? 😎 Now that you've described it, I see this tension everywehere in how people behave. Especially amongst women who seem offended by the animal. Guys are so much more comfortable with their baser instincts and, often, with ours. I think their initial reaction is more in worry about how I'll react.
Haha. Yeah, I can see that. When a woman farts or burps around the guys the first time it’s awkward. When she embraces it she just becomes part of the gang.
I'd suggest that issues like #MeToo, cancel culture, politics, and social media are more a function of perceived centrality than of duality. These conflicts, I think, are an extension of our specie's ingrained tendency to place itself at the center of everything, including the natural and moral universe.
This self-centered aspect of humans is evident, for example, in the Judeo-Christian tradition: God created man in his image and interacts with his creation solely through us. That's not striving to find your place, that's placing yourself squarely in the center of things.
This perceived centrality isn't a mere religious or cultural artifact; it's part of our cognitive wiring. As the psychotherapist Aaron Beck describes it in his book Prisoners Of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence:
"We all have the tendency to perceive ourselves as the lead actor of a play and to judge other people’s behavior exclusively in reference to ourselves. We take the role of the protagonist and the other players are our supporters or antagonists. The motivations and actions of the other players revolve around us in some way...This self-centered orientation forces us to focus our attention on controlling the behavior and supposed intentions of the other players. We have implicit rules, such as, “You should not do anything that distresses me.” Since we may apply the rules too extensively and rigidly, we are constantly vulnerable to the behavior of others."
My experience is that most cultural conflict is less about the duality of "animal" and "angel" and more about the centrality of "me."
I hadn't thought of it that way specifically. I'm also not certain it conflicts. Can you have the duality if we aren't the centerpiece? In the Judeo-Christian, I agree we are centered, but then we realize we're animals like Isaiah struggled with:
And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
That's a good point and I agree. Duality probably does arise from the centrality. But I don't think the duality is animal vs. angel.
Humans' denial of our animalness is, by now, ingrained and unconscious. We're like an elite college sophomore from a small rural town who tells his new-found intellectual equals "yea I'm from there, but I'm not one of them".
We now think of ourselves in terms of "humanity". We don't blame the terrible things we do to each other on an abundance of animalness, we blame it on a lack of humanity.
The duality we struggle with, I think, is a self-centered struggle with humanity: "the human I am" vs. "the human I should be" according to [fill in the blank]. Our conflicts with others often arise from the comparison of "the human I am" vs. "the human they should be".
Isaiah 6:5 is a good example of this. Isaiah is standing in the temple before a vision of God and comparing his imperfect humanness and sinfulness to the perfection of God before him - "the human I am" vs. "the human I should be" according to [GOD]. Then he extends that comparison to those "I dwell in the midst of".
As I read it, Isaiah realized he was on the low end of a scale ranging from "imperfect man/human" to "perfect God", and his grief came from realizing he's too human and not enough like God.
People place themselves and others on similar human-centric scales all the time. And it creates a lot of grief.
Nailed another quandary. #metoo bugged me for exaclty the same reasons and it drives me nuts that most people, especially women, can't see that or refuse to even consider it.
Becker's "worm-infested body" is a total misconception of human nature and raises severe doubts about his general knowledge about the biosphere on the "Pale Blue Dot" ...
He's a shill and part of a specific agenda ... No need to mention his extraction here ...
Yes, worms CAN be present when the person is diseased, a purely pathological condition ...
but
The human microbiome in the gastro-intestinal tract is just one of the many miracles we barely start to understand (and value).
Without the trillions of microbes, hundreds of kinds, residing in our guts, by munching the food we eat and extracting the nutrients we so badly need on a daily basis, humans, as well as other mammals, would not have been able to develop, not be able to survive.
These anaerobic microbes developed billions of years ago, THEY are the TRUE masters of survival:
Its them, that "use" our bodies as a vehicle in order to survive in a toxic environment that was created in the Great Oxigenation Event a couple of billion years ago ...
Information-flow between the GI-tract and brain is about triple the intensity than from the brain to the "rest" of the body.
This flips the narrative entirely and we should highly appreciate our decay into the soil in order to feed some other kinds of microbes waiting for our fluids and tissues ... 🤣🤣🤣
Humans may be the current apex predator and destroyer, but we're faaar from being survivalists.
I'm not sure that what you described contradicts Becker's insights at all. Haven't read Denial of Death a few times, I think he'd fully agree wtih you.
The term "worm-infested body" is the description of a pathological situation and entirely contradicts the facts that without the highly complex, mostly benefcial microbiome "residing" in the human digestive tract (their hopefully comfy condo so-to-say) we, and other mammals would simply NOT be ...
Imho, Becker is a shill with a special agenda. Just search for his origins and many things become crystal-clear ...
The most part of the West is indeed infested by them !!!
I refer to their political, atheist arm, NOT the genuine religious one !!!
I just read Denial of Death. It was my first exposure to the strange fascination psychoanalysts had with shit. On the one hand, it is interesting to wonder how much we are fascinated by this but do not know it. On the other, it sounds like their analysis went off the rails and simply condemns them as being disconnected from reality.
I prefer your summary here in using the truth of bodily functions to level the playing field and remind both sides of the aisles we all shit, and we're all going to die. Why not play nice?
Exactly. I think their obsession appears so due to the majority of society intently, and intentionally ignoring it. That's why the conversations on our animal sexual impulses get people so tied up in knots where the most sex positive sound like puritans.
Perhaps the concept of “original sin” is the Judeo-Christian perspective on humanity’s animalistic nature.
Absolutely. The knowledge of good and evil and the elevation from our naked state seems to indicate the angelic knowledge the animal attained which creates the dichotomy in which sin a core concept.
Is it better thought of as the Anal Angel? 😎 Now that you've described it, I see this tension everywehere in how people behave. Especially amongst women who seem offended by the animal. Guys are so much more comfortable with their baser instincts and, often, with ours. I think their initial reaction is more in worry about how I'll react.
Haha. Yeah, I can see that. When a woman farts or burps around the guys the first time it’s awkward. When she embraces it she just becomes part of the gang.
I'd suggest that issues like #MeToo, cancel culture, politics, and social media are more a function of perceived centrality than of duality. These conflicts, I think, are an extension of our specie's ingrained tendency to place itself at the center of everything, including the natural and moral universe.
This self-centered aspect of humans is evident, for example, in the Judeo-Christian tradition: God created man in his image and interacts with his creation solely through us. That's not striving to find your place, that's placing yourself squarely in the center of things.
This perceived centrality isn't a mere religious or cultural artifact; it's part of our cognitive wiring. As the psychotherapist Aaron Beck describes it in his book Prisoners Of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence:
"We all have the tendency to perceive ourselves as the lead actor of a play and to judge other people’s behavior exclusively in reference to ourselves. We take the role of the protagonist and the other players are our supporters or antagonists. The motivations and actions of the other players revolve around us in some way...This self-centered orientation forces us to focus our attention on controlling the behavior and supposed intentions of the other players. We have implicit rules, such as, “You should not do anything that distresses me.” Since we may apply the rules too extensively and rigidly, we are constantly vulnerable to the behavior of others."
My experience is that most cultural conflict is less about the duality of "animal" and "angel" and more about the centrality of "me."
I hadn't thought of it that way specifically. I'm also not certain it conflicts. Can you have the duality if we aren't the centerpiece? In the Judeo-Christian, I agree we are centered, but then we realize we're animals like Isaiah struggled with:
And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
That's a good point and I agree. Duality probably does arise from the centrality. But I don't think the duality is animal vs. angel.
Humans' denial of our animalness is, by now, ingrained and unconscious. We're like an elite college sophomore from a small rural town who tells his new-found intellectual equals "yea I'm from there, but I'm not one of them".
We now think of ourselves in terms of "humanity". We don't blame the terrible things we do to each other on an abundance of animalness, we blame it on a lack of humanity.
The duality we struggle with, I think, is a self-centered struggle with humanity: "the human I am" vs. "the human I should be" according to [fill in the blank]. Our conflicts with others often arise from the comparison of "the human I am" vs. "the human they should be".
Isaiah 6:5 is a good example of this. Isaiah is standing in the temple before a vision of God and comparing his imperfect humanness and sinfulness to the perfection of God before him - "the human I am" vs. "the human I should be" according to [GOD]. Then he extends that comparison to those "I dwell in the midst of".
As I read it, Isaiah realized he was on the low end of a scale ranging from "imperfect man/human" to "perfect God", and his grief came from realizing he's too human and not enough like God.
People place themselves and others on similar human-centric scales all the time. And it creates a lot of grief.
Nailed another quandary. #metoo bugged me for exaclty the same reasons and it drives me nuts that most people, especially women, can't see that or refuse to even consider it.
Makes my head hurt just thinking about it now!
Becker's "worm-infested body" is a total misconception of human nature and raises severe doubts about his general knowledge about the biosphere on the "Pale Blue Dot" ...
He's a shill and part of a specific agenda ... No need to mention his extraction here ...
Yes, worms CAN be present when the person is diseased, a purely pathological condition ...
but
The human microbiome in the gastro-intestinal tract is just one of the many miracles we barely start to understand (and value).
Without the trillions of microbes, hundreds of kinds, residing in our guts, by munching the food we eat and extracting the nutrients we so badly need on a daily basis, humans, as well as other mammals, would not have been able to develop, not be able to survive.
These anaerobic microbes developed billions of years ago, THEY are the TRUE masters of survival:
Its them, that "use" our bodies as a vehicle in order to survive in a toxic environment that was created in the Great Oxigenation Event a couple of billion years ago ...
Information-flow between the GI-tract and brain is about triple the intensity than from the brain to the "rest" of the body.
This flips the narrative entirely and we should highly appreciate our decay into the soil in order to feed some other kinds of microbes waiting for our fluids and tissues ... 🤣🤣🤣
Humans may be the current apex predator and destroyer, but we're faaar from being survivalists.
I'm not sure that what you described contradicts Becker's insights at all. Haven't read Denial of Death a few times, I think he'd fully agree wtih you.
The term "worm-infested body" is the description of a pathological situation and entirely contradicts the facts that without the highly complex, mostly benefcial microbiome "residing" in the human digestive tract (their hopefully comfy condo so-to-say) we, and other mammals would simply NOT be ...
Imho, Becker is a shill with a special agenda. Just search for his origins and many things become crystal-clear ...
The most part of the West is indeed infested by them !!!
I refer to their political, atheist arm, NOT the genuine religious one !!!
Interesting piece