Tribalism Buck, seems to be a kind of biological imperative. We are hard wired for certain things. We tend to put a loved one above lesser family, and lesser family above other families. We put our cultural group (if we have one) above country, and country above other countries. Sweet speech is nice, used appropriately under some specific circumstances, but is often a disguise for a blatant lie, and a means for self deception too.
'Transcendence', as being, is the immanent fact of everyone's life, but as transcendent it is not, for in that guise it is what we are searching for, but not yet found to the extent that we look no longer. As long as you are a transcendentalist, you have failed to accomplish (a funny word that: 'accomplish', in this context) what transcendentalism is about. You cannot stay on the path forever; there is an arrival whereupon you are in a trackless land and you finally have to terms with what you have discovered, and to live it rather than spout it (though if you have the inclination to teach, spouting may be OK when you are ready to be your own person about it). You may just choose to live it and to hell with those who do not know, or do not care, or who do care. But to be effective you must first be independent of all that that brought you to this 'final' state. You have to be self-sufficient, not spouting retreads mindlessly. Even then, you may not have the personality or intellect to teach, or be insufficiently attractive to people to garner much attention. However if all this fails, you could become a TM teacher (or re-certify) and parrot a teaching of enlightenment, for there are those who would rather be slave than free, and who knows, maybe it will help get some on the way to a better life experience. ________________________________ From: "dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 11:37 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Maharishi: When one starts TM, cruder values are replaced by finer values, speech is less sharp So tribalism is necessarily a cruder value? No possibility for collective altruism for individuals to join? And getting back to the original quote, the role of the sweet truth in protecting a finer value? "France will never cede to terrorism because it is our duty, and, more than that, because it is our honour.'' -President Francois Hollande, who condemned the killing as "cruel and cowardly". "As transcendentalists will never cede to the terrorism of ignorance because it is our duty, and, more than that, because it is our honour.'' -Buck in the Dome From: "Xenophaneros Anartaxius anartaxius... [FairfieldLife]" FairfieldLife yahoogroups.com EMPATHY: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. If you have empathy, then you ought to be able to understand and share the feelings by MJ and Turq, and see their point of view as a valid expression of life. According to some posters here I have no feelings, so you can skip me. If you look at the universe at large, observing how it operates, it really does not seem to have feelings either, it just rolls on and on, steam-rolling everything in its path. As if it did not know what it was doing. 'Empathy is the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective. You place yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling. Empathy is known to increase prosocial (helping) behaviors. While American culture might be socializing people into becoming more individualistic rather than empathic, research has uncovered the existence of "mirror neurons," which react to emotions expressed by others and then reproduce them.' >> >>Groups are notorious for lack of empathy when a member of the group begins to >>behave and believe differently from the collective norm. > turquoiseb@...> wrote : > Groups are notorious for lack of empathy when a member of the group begins to behave and believe differently from the collective norm. > A section from the article/interview about narcissism I posted the other day that I found fascinating -- the idea of "narcissism of the group." Article URL below, excerpt below that. > Anyway, I think this is the mechanism that gets triggered when someone who strongly identifies with a group hears or reads criticism of that group that causes them cognitive dissonance. They hear the trigger words, that pushes their buttons and *increases* their levels of identification with the group, and they start acting out essentially narcissistic behaviors. And these behaviors are the complete opposite of empathy. > This is your brain on narcissism: The truth about a disorder that nobody really understands > > This is your brain on narcissism: The truth about... >The term "narcissist" gets thrown around more and more often these days. But >almost everyone's getting it wrong >View on www.salon.com Preview by Yahoo Is there a chapter that was really surprising? The one on tribal narcissism. I find that topic terrible and dark and fascinating and all kinds of combinations. I’ve written a bunch for Time on morality and racism and how tribalism drives those kinds of behaviors. And tribalism in this case really is just narcissism, the grandiosity of the group. So it wasn’t too hard to find the overlap in the Venn diagram there. So I find that topic both compelling and awful. Do you want to delve more into the chapter for the reader who hasn’t gone more into it? There’s narcissism of the individual and there’s narcissism of the group, and in both cases it’s essentially the same thing. We are better, we are more entitled, we are different or at least less interested in the people around us, or the tribes or nations around us, because we’re worthier than they are. Our people are the prettiest, our language is the most musical, our clothes are the most stylish. And these people are barbarians or at the very best civilized but crude. We are deserving of resources just as I, as the individual, am deserving of the raise, or deserving of the job or deserving of the hottest girl at the party because I’m better than the other guys around me. Now this has its benign expression in sport, except when people are killed, in soccer brawls or when a fan of the San Francisco Giants is beaten up in a parking lot by a Dodgers fan. Obviously it can get ugly sometimes. But for the most part you go to a game — and I would go to an Orioles game, I would paint my face orange and black — and we are literally different colors. We are parts of different tribes. And for that kabuki-ish three hours, I don’t like you and you don’t like me. But then we go home, we wash the paint off and go back to what we’re doing. It’s a good way of bleeding off some of the steam and pressure of those feelings and it’s a culturally controlled way of doing that. And there’s even a bit of prettiness and pageantry around it. So that’s how we contain those feelings and express those feelings in harmless ways and have a really good time doing it. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel lousy when your team loses the World Series. Why do we personalize this and feel such a real sense of loss when a game was lost that you do? Well, it’s because the tribe has been hurt and you’re part of the tribe and therefore the loss is yours too.
