Greetings Economists, Melvin P replies to my thoughts, Melvin, Welcome to the heat tank.
Doyle, Sounds like the hot pot for fresh email posters. ;-) Melvin, His use of the words "sectarianism" and "cult" are in my estimate justifiable historically. And also Melvin writes, Suffice it to state that addiction involves ingesting a substance that has a biological impact on the human organism - molecular alteration, while obsession is not necessarily driven on the basis of the biological impact of injection. There is more than meets the eye to this proposition because human beings must ingest to live. What we ingest to live, emerged as a separate and distinct field of scientific inquiry in the early 20th century. Obsession appears in its mode of expression as "addictive behavior," but they are not identical. My point is that sectarianism and cultism versus addiction may converge but are very distinct social processes. Adulation of the individual or the cult movement in society - from movie and rock stars to social leaders (Kings, Queens, Pope, Presidents, Militants and even Marilyn Monroe) is a somewhat different matter. As interesting as these subjects are, I have chosen to write about the economic structure of society in which this social intercourse plays itself out. (I of course have undying loyalty to Marilyn Monroe and am aware that everyone does not universally share this archetype. So much for that.) Doyle I think that an economic view of what makes sects work is called for. When I talk about managing emotions I am thinking about how using the internet one could reveal the structure of social groups in new ways. When for example I work in another place and work with you on some document on-line that concerns the working class movement it is important to know how you feel when we collaborate. Here on Pen-L we usually work individually, and reply to each other as individuals, but I could see working with people on the same document on-line (via content management software systems) for various reasons. Knowing how you feel might be as simple as a phone call, or it might be elaborated through some sort of emotion sensing device (lie detectors are the common example of some way to measure emotions). If we measure how I feel about something we have something to economically analyze in relation to the documents we produce together collaboratively. I have an on-line paper from MIT which discusses the concept of the economy of emotions in Information Technology. Analytical Models of Emotions, Learning and Relationships: Towards an Affect-sensitive Cognitive Machine, Barry Kort, Rob Reilly, MIT Media Laboratory, That paper proposes to analyze an Emotion-Learning-Spiritual Economy. In that sense (where we are discussing sectarianism from the 1970's and 1980's) and have a written text we also could produce some sort of record of the feelings that went with the text. I think it then possible to rationalize the structure of feelings that social networks create online, and from there reveal what sectarianism really is. A sect or group when it produces a dogma (literally) has such and such feeling structure to it, and when another group which is not dogmatic produces a text it has such and such feeling structure to it. Therapies promise psychological help for social problems. We still don't know what exactly to do about groups with sectarian tendencies. I.e. we can't definitively say an organizational structure is not going to be sectarian. There are many people I think who would defend sects and what they do, or who might contrarily organize non-sectarian groups. So we don't know if there is a social value to sects rather than a need for a blanket banning. We could ask how to manage the emotional structures that under lie how these human groups are formed if we could see the actual structure of emotions linked to communications (written text). We usually instead take a lot of time getting to know people and that personal experience is how we usually guess at the emotional structure in a social group. This guessing game works, but I think has very definite limits which having records of emotions and the ability to shape and direct the emotional system of a group would offer powerful new tools for building socialist groups. thanks, Doyle
