OK so you repeat what you said earlier, ignoring my reasoned objections and providing more instruction of your dogma.
I say you can't define universal terms like fear and safety or any of the other so-called six reactions, like disgust. These are words and they mean what we construct for them mean in some particular contexts. This is why I say your approach relies on identifying essential behaviors by means of indefinite words that claim what can't be falsified, or therefore, proven. Instead show me the behaviors and then list the words that encompass them. You'll need the whole dictionary and more. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, February 26, 2010 4:19:58 PM Subject: Re: michael's fear, run for safety. On Feb 26, 2010, at 4:48 PM, William Conger wrote: > Our efforts to continually short-circuit the safety vs. fear model to see one as the other, suggests that something else, more fundamental, is affecting our behaviors. Because man is the only creature that functions by means of making metaphors -- to pretend one thing is another -- it may be that the constant fluidity and capacity of human metaphorical consciousness and action may be truly fundamental, somehow. I do mean to say that there are only two basic, radical emotions--fear and safety. The rest of what we experience every day are complex elaborations of them, animated by our appetites. Some psychologists or anthropologists give a list of five or seven basic feelings, such as disgust (I can't recall such a list right now). But when I saw them, I saw that they could be reduced to the two, security and insecurity. (Sounds like Worringer, btw.) Some things please us. Clearly these things do not pose a threat to us, and thus appeal to our feelings of safety and security. Happiness, joy, enthusiasm, and similar emotions can be connected to our sense of well-being, and thus to safety. Some things repel us because they raise a fear of some kind of injury or threat. For example, certain things are disgusting to us: rotten organic material, feces, whatever. But among the seemingly disgusting or repellent foods, there are some that people eat. I can't stand oysters. I am completely disgusted by it, but when I analyze my disgust, I realize it is based on my instantaneously intuiting that the oyster is not good to eat, it's uncooked, it's unhealthy, and thus it's harmful--thus the disgust is a danger reaction. Even though my intellect tells me that oysters are edible, I cannot override that disgust based on my (wrongly grounded) fear. Why do some people react with passion to breaches in some kind of canon or norm, while others accept the breaches? Whether it's using colloquial or dialectical or substandard expressions, or non-traditional kinds of paintings and modes of portrayal, or unusual genres of music--to some people, certain forms are unattractive and even repellent. They might even see them as declassi or subversive. While in all likelihood, no one thinks that saying "They is" will produce social catastrophes (parodied in the expression, "the end of Western civilization as we know it") it is precisely that very slim but still potential calamity that people react to. It's a fear. This isn't the place to elaborate fully how I see the relationships between the substratum of two radical feelings and our innate appetites and the superstructure of culture and societal behaviors that have been built up on them over all the years of human existence. Nor am I incognizant of the extremely complicated and elaborate ways the human mind has of understanding, symbolizing, manipulating, mapping, parsing, and otherwise constructing and combining internal representations of existence. Part of that, I submit, includes configuring or allocating how our root feelings (fear and safety) and our appetitive motivations are intertwined in our social behaviors and ways of conducting our daily lives. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
