HELMUT RAULIEN: Maybe the ability of having a self concept is proportional with the intelligence or the well functioning of the mind, because the mind is a reflecting system, and also self-reflecting, if it is highly developed. But intelligence does not guarantee social competence: Asperger people and are often very intelligent, but lack social competence. I like the term "social agreement", though many agreements have been established long before a human was born, and are eg. present in the epigenes and genes. Social agreements, I think, are the structure of a social system (Luhmann said, expectations and expectations of expectations are the structure). And the more one shares these agreements or expectations, the more social competence he or she has. Intelligence, of course, helps too, but not alone. And a trauma, like having been neglected as a child, or experience of violence, like in a war, can destroy or block social agreements and with it social competence. -x- GCM: This all presupposes that 1] “self concept” is ‘something’ even if just a concept; 2] that you objectively know “well functioning” of the mind according to a scientifically experimented conclusion physically demonstrable; 3] that any reflecting system has a self since there is a “reflection of”; 4] that “social competence” is a scientifically experimented conclusion demonstrable in repeated physical experiments with exactly the same results; 5] that “the more one shares these agreements or expectations, the more social competence he or she has” always and in every possible case throughout history or any place in present-time world arrives at exactly the same “social competence”; 6] what physical trauma changes is not “social agreements and with it social competence” but physical control. -x- I myself would agree with Pierce that there is no ego except in the all-encompassing Hegelian sense of one’s understanding of all ‘one’ knows since ‘two’ cannot share the immediate physical experience of ‘knowing’, that “we have no power of introspection”, that “all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts”, that “we have no power of intuition, but every cognition is determined logically by PREVIOUS cognitions”, and that we have no power of thinking without previously cognized signs. “Social agreements” are physically present only between specific people determined not by a “the intelligence of the well functioning of the mind” but by the physical circumstances of the specific place of agreement, for instance western Iraq at the moment which in no possible way is in accord with the “social agreements” of West Texas. Trauma changes the control of how and what one speaks without one’s consent that is “always already” a problem for non-traumatized speakers trying to avoid either a Freudian mistake or an ambiguous phrase interpretable in a way one has not approved. All people speak “after the fact” out of, hopefully, a well-trained (habitual) ability to enunciate to one’s purpose, but there is never any absolute control over what one says. But I suppose a “way of speaking properly” is sort of a social convention that, however, changes according to whether one is speaking to Republicans or Democrats or Islamists.
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