Dreams change under authoritarianism (2019)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
With that aside, they were socialist revolutionaries. Terms are only imprecise because of people trying to redefine it when it's inconvenient for their views. Whether it's in the original interpretation in europe, they literally killed their russian royals... or in the modern interpretation of the word they were socialists who believed in the power of the state and central planning as being tenants of a good society.
Sorry, no. You're cherry picking the aspects of left-right that make for a favorable argument. In a different context, one could point out how leftists favor decentralization while rightists are fans of centralized control. Rather than getting bogged down in painting with a broad brush, just so the two contemporary "left" and "right" teams can duke it out over who gets to take blame/credit for the past, it's better to stay focused on specific beliefs and dynamics.
I agree that in this case, the revolutionaries are appropriately described as leftist. However once they've taken power and become entrenched, it's appropriate to describe those attempting to preserve the status quo of that power structure as reactionaries - just as it would be appropriate to describe any group (rightist or different leftist) attempting to overthrow that leftist-branded power structure as revolutionaries.
Under this definition, the Drug War is left-wing, as are restrictions on access to abortion or contraception, restrictions on children's attendance or participation in beauty pageants or drag shows, and restrictions on either public nudity or traditional religious garb. Now if you really believe all of those policies are left-wing, fine, but I think it's not as simple as you want to make it seem.
That would make Marxists the right winger then?
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished. Left-wing politics are also associated with popular or state control of major political and economic institutions.
Right-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, authority, property or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies.
Confidence and insulting the integrity of people who would dare disagree does not make this true.
edit: also this makes theocracies left-wing?
What we actually have is a supermajority who believe in typical US values like publicly funded education, providing modest social safety nets and one person one vote. A small minority on the far-right leaning towards secession. And a small minority on the left so disenfranchised that their well-meaning causes like unionization and protecting the environment are portrayed as little more than punchlines on the evening news.
Which brings up the importance of media in political discourse. In journalism, one always punches up, doing investigative reporting on politicians, religious leaders, titans of industry, etc. Propaganda punches down at immigrants, the poor, the less fortunate.
Which means that we also don't have news in the US, just infotainment that endlessly distracts and denies. A handful of outlets like FSTV and Public Television try to get at the truth, but have such small viewerships that they're tolerated so the big players have something to point to as alternative. Which is by design, to suppress any left-leaning sentiment among voters.
Edit: video by Matthew Cooke supporting my claim: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JiEdui05BeY
In a sense you can see it applied to the entire EU. Social conservatives are described as fascist, homophobes etc while the other side is portrayed as horribly corrupt, inefficient, nepotic. And both sides of course say the other is the one that breaks the rule of law(which they both do). The economic policies disappear in all of this.
Which is a weird take the first time you hear it, but I've yet to find even one example of a policy position that doesn't fit this filter. And of course, it leaves plenty of room for those of us who don't think the state should be a parent without invalidating the polarity itself.
In Soviet Russia, being against the government is reactionary!
Let me up the ante. Put real unedited war / oppression / prison / etc. etc. footage including most gory stuff on youtube and TV and feed it to people every day "specially in countries that did this stuff to their citizens and others."
Bet this will destroy quite a few governments.
[1] Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War.
[2] Noelle-Neumann, The spiral of silence: Public opinion, our social skin, University of Chicago Press (1973)
What is real art vs imitative art? I've never heard of these terms
[0] the adjective is very important here; supposedly Carter has complained in public about the hijacking of US evangelical churches by godbotherers, but while plausible I haven't confirmed the quote.
[1] Bob Altemeyer had academic studies of correlation between fear levels and willingness to follow authoritarian leaders; to me it sounded awfully like the phenomenon of fear-biting in dogs (a vice to be avoided if one is looking for a good hunting prospect).
[2] evidently never having heard « Il faut de tout pour faire un monde » ?
If you explain which wordings you find propaganda terminology, I might attempt to restate them.
====
Edit: following Linebarger's injunction from Psychological Warfare[0]:
> The point will invariably arise: "This tells me how to listen to a foreign radio. Okay, I'll get the news, the lectures, the plays—all the rest of it. But so what? How am I going to know what's the truth and what's propaganda? How can I tell 'em apart? Tell me that!"
> The answer is simple: "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
let's do an analysis of my post:
Source: 082349872349872 (ostensible, first-use, and, I claim, also the true source), transmitted on HN
Time: Monday morning, no retransmission, non-peculiar time.
Audience: HN
Subject: query on the relation between fear, dreams, and authoritarian evangelicals
Mission: white propaganda soliciting information about content of dreams outside the author's social circles, and informing about the existence of academic studies relating fear and following authoritarian leaders. potential ostensible second-use wrt James "Jimmy" Carter.
Exercise: perform your own analysis, according to the STASM model or your own.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...
In real life, approximately zero evangelicals want some kind of Gilead. If you talk to them, the most ideological want some sort of idealized, non-racist high-tech version of the 1950-80s. No doubt there are some cranks out there, but they’re about as common as Westboro Baptist Church members (one family) or the series of weird niche western US cults. The generalization is totally wrong and informed by propaganda.
I’ve thought a lot about how strange it is fiction can have such a powerful effect on people’s perceptions, and people often seem unaware of the propagandistic nature of it. Another example is Atlas Shrugged.
At any rate, being fascinated by the subject of dreams, I have talked to a lot of evangelicals about their dreams and have not noticed any deviation from the norm.
Of the approximately 55m conservative evangelicals who don't want some kind of Gilead [edit: is there a proper evangelical term for lone cranks who do wish to immanentise the eschaton, so I can use less loaded vocabulary?], how many would you say:
* believe the US is a secular nation
* believe in maintenance of the separation of Church and State (yes, just like the Haskell weenies?)
If there are substantial numbers who don't (after all, someone is electing the representatives espousing the opposite — but maybe someone else?), what is the difference between their position and my head-canon for Gilead (to be clear: a theocratic state, eg Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, Saudi, the Vatican etc.)?
PS. Being partial to disco, and neither Argentinian nor El Salvadoran nor Pakistani, of that range I'd be happiest with an idealised non-racist high-tech late 1970s. As it appears that even Baptists dance in the twenty-first century, who are the evangelicals with whom I could find common ground on this project?
PPS. Upon reflection, if I were to roll back time, how about the 1990s but part of the idealisation is we actually get a Peace Dividend?
PPPS. ...and neither Canter&Siegel nor Eternal September nor the Yugoslav wars ever happened. maybe idealisation is not as easy as it appears...
P4S. was it at least clear that "authoritarian" was meant to constrain, ie pick out a subset, not generically describe, "evangelicals"?
> my head-canon for Gilead (to be clear: a theocratic state, eg Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, Saudi, the Vatican etc.)
I talk to a lot of american evangelicals and this isn't true either. A fair portion of them do want the racism back in the form of segregation, they just know not to use either term to describe their ideal.
They also do want moderate-to-heavy restrictions on or punishment for abortion, birth control, homosexuality, miscegenation, divorce, women owning property. It's not quite gilead but it's a lot closer to that than to "the 80s without racism."
You'll probably rarely run into people who are actively and openly pursuing a government that would implement all of those policies. But framed individually and neutrally for example "should no-fault divorce be removed" these are mainstream positions.
I didn't get my opinion here from fiction or the internet. I've lived a lot of my life among american evangelicals and am a practicing christian even now. I have a lot of ties to this world still for complex reasons. Walking back and cracking down on a lot of the social freedoms gained in the last few generations are unfortunately popular ideas that you can't dismiss as "just some cranks."
A domain that is becoming more narrow in its understanding of scripture and extreme about applying it. Look at someone like Beth Moore, a highly prominent figure in this world and by no means a liberal or progressive, viciously chased out for openly holding a view on marriage¹ that would have been easily accepted by evangelicals even a generation ago, and that many probably do privately hold still.
So yes it's entirely possible our evangelical acquaintances have little overlap. But still, these are mainstream views right now and growing more so. You can find dominionist books by prominent christian authors in the window displays of christian bookstores. It may not be the majority of evangelicals, but it is a significant portion and making it the majority is explicitly one of their goals. Dismissing this movement as fringe is irresponsible imo.
¹: The view is "egalitarianism" the idea that both genders have equal privileges and responsibilities within marriage. This is not "wokeism" my southern baptist grandparents believed this.
Now that you mention it, I recall the Dixie Chicks getting cancelled for openly suggesting that maybe the Iraq adventure wasn't such a good idea.
Most people of faith are just people who are trying to make sense of the world. But sometimes Pastor Bob is a controlling Nazi, and uses faith and religion as a way to spew his worldview and poison those around them.
Political operators and others exploit that faith too. The Giliad stuff gets pitched as faith adjacent, so parents or faith leaders who don’t know better get it in the hands of kids etc. It’s one of the reasons why keeping politics away from religion is important.
Indeed. I grew up in a church that called itself "Evangelical Lutheran". Most of the stories I read about "evangelicals" online are completely alien to me. Like evangelicals supposedly taking the Book of Revelations seriously.. my pastor described it as ancient science fiction, allegorical at best but mostly incoherent nonsense. Any "mark of the beast" talk was considered raving lunacy in my evangelical church. That position on Revelations doesn't square with what the internet says evangelicals believe.
I've also never heard the word 'Gilead' before this thread. I'm not sure what it means.
An example I thought of this evening: compare and contrast Joel Osteen with Jimmy Carter. (or even just the house of the former with the houses of the latter)
Both evangelical, but living very different theologies.
Consider the term "evangelical authoritarian" and the conclusion you cane up with about fear and paranoia in their dreams.
The propaganda interpretation is a reductive "basically white americans who support trump" but in reality if you took time to understand what that phrase means perhaps you will see how your conclusion or the phrase itself make no sense at all.
My intention was to nudge to the direction of critically examining your assumptions not to say you had bad intentions or that I was free from incorrect assumptions myself.
[e for e in evangelicals where authoritarian(e)]
(Also feel free to directly point out my errors next time; I married into a culture which is far more direct than the anglophone and may have gone native in areas)
Cheers!
The "evangelical authoritarian" does describe them well.
And I am saying that as someone who grew in evangelical church. Mine was significantly less authoritarian then it gets to be, but I still read enough texts produced by authoritarian ones and had enough contact to know it is not made up construct.
Anyone can accuse anyone of speaking in propaganda terminology, it doesn't mean anything in itself, as there's no clear distinction between "propaganda terminology" and "non-propaganda terminology" - propaganda often uses terminology that is also used in non-propaganda conversations.
And our assumptions are always influencing our views, that's kind of a given - you can't have views without assumptions. Are you implying that you, yourself, don't have any assumptions, but instead rely on some kind of divine truth?
No. But I would appreciate it when others point it out when my conclusions are incorrect because of my assumptions. It helps me self-reflect, that was my intent when commenting.
In some fields, like mathematics, pointing out "this result is incorrect" can be useful in itself, but that's because of the deeply technical nature of mathematics itself - mechanical verification of correctness is feasible.
In ordinary conversation, things aren't that black-and-white, and pointing out that something is wrong doesn't in itself provide valuable input for self-reflection. Providing some more information why is always more helpful than just saying "you're wrong, figure it out".
If your statement hinges on understanding the working of someone's mind, it should be rephrased to rely on the ideas expressed in their comment; your opinion on whether someone's thinking is "clouded by assumptions" isn't worth discussing because it's not something you could possibly know. If you're right about it, you're right like a stopped clock.
If you nebulously posit someone is wrong without highlighting specific views and indicating why you believe they're wrong, you haven't made a criticism, you've made a swipe. This is a more wordy was to say, "you're dumb."
Anyway, you're not entirely correct, but they're pretty clearly bordering on trolling.
(see also the note in sibling thread about the importance of the adjective "authoritarian": the godbotherer reference was not meant to be respectful, but neither was it meant to refer to real evangelical Christians.)
This read mostly as a "those damn Evangelicals, am I right?" which is a common enough sentiment, especially in tech circles.
Cheers!
Terrific example of how dreams are an idiolect (a dialect of one person).
(Edit) In case it's not clear:
The point I am trying to make is that you wouldn't know why a chimney sweep would be an upsetting image without the part in parentheses clarifying what that meant to her. Dream imagery is a symbolic language drawn from our life experiences and much of it will not be obviously meaningful to an outsider who doesn't know the backstory.
One of my recent dreams was about me in a room full of indifferent people and one with a knife looking at me. I took a knife away from him, pushed him onto a window sill and carved crosses on his knees.
I have no idea what this means.
This is just what kinda popped into my mind. Nightcap guru (from the other top post) suggested this:
> This dream likely symbolizes a feeling of helplessness and vulnerability in your current life.
> The indifferent people in the dream could represent a lack of support or understanding from those around you. The figure with the knife symbolizes someone or something that is causing you fear and anxiety. By taking the knife away from them and carving crosses onto their knees, you are asserting your power over the source of your fear and taking control of the situation. This dream could be interpreted as a sign that you have the strength and courage to overcome whatever is causing you fear and anxiety.
But there is a recent knowledge I could add to this. From my therapy sessions I learned that direct interpretations, even when they come from your own mind, may be very far from your issues or thoughts that may have produced a dream (in case it really is a subconscious experience at least partially). I have found very unusual multi-tier connections between events and my panic attacks, that I could never interpret myself into in a straightforward way. If you're familiar with chess, it feels like your mind looks several moves forward and wide, but a conscious interpretation is just a take on direct attacks.
https://inthewilderless.substack.com/p/against-dream-interpr...
https://inthewilderless.substack.com/p/towards-dream-intuiti...
(Note: I was quite familiar with "imaginal meditation" when I first found this post, so to me this made a lot of sense and was immediately applicable. But I hope and think that it is even if one is not familiar with those practices)
Crosses are a Christian symbol. Are you Christian or not?
Crosses were used by the Roman Empire to punish people and were so painful they had to invent a new word for it: Excruciating.
Crosses get used in popular fiction as protective symbols against monsters, like vampires and werewolves.
But what does a cross mean to you?
Knees can be a symbol of humbleness, a la "get down on your knees." They can also be a symbol of a point of vulnerability.
But what do knees mean to you?
A window might be a "window of opportunity" -- ie a time frame in which something could occur. Pushing a person onto a window sill could be putting something in place for a particular time frame.
But what does a window sill mean to you?
Dreaming of individuals you actually know rarely is about that person. Instead, that person symbolizes something to you or sometimes your description of them in the dream is a play on words. When I had a corporate job, dreams of my ex husband were really dreams about my job. I was "working for The Man" and "married to my job," so my job was "The Man in my life."
"In the early 20th-century Age of Empire, when European colonies stretched across the world, psychoanalysis was the novel technique of the moment. In an attempt to better understand their colonial subjects in those years, officials in the British empire undertook a curious and little-known research project: to collect dreams from the people of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific."
That this was a novel conclusion shocks me, less than a century later!
Linebarger makes similar points to what the British discovered here in his Psychological Warfare book I've cited in another thread; reading between the lines he makes a strong, if implicit case, for desegregating the US Army in the 1940s edition (something they would eventually do ~Korea — but still in advance of much of civilian society) and for taking decolonisation seriously in a later, domino-theory-era, edition.
How do you even distinguish dreams (plans or visions of future) from dreams (experiences your have while sleeping) in English language? In my mother tongue there are different words for these things
- "I dreamt about you last night" - clearly a sleeping dream
- "I dream of being a doctor" - clearly a future desire
- "It's a dream come true" - ambiguous but the difference isn't important
In my experience there's also a cultural implication/expectation that the different meanings are often intertwined, i.e. desiring something so strongly you have dreams about it.
It was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
Every person I know that went to college has had a dream about being lost or stuck on campus.
Dreams about being in the backseat of a car unable to reach the pedals are so common it makes me wonder.
I know that Vipassana meditation increases dreaming. And weed decreases dreaming. And maybe intense mental labor or media-consumption has an affect on it too.
What else affects how much you dream?
God bless Libgen
Also true, as everyone can confirm who did this: Dreams significantly change when you start paying attention to your dreams, i.e. by collecting them.
So, is authoritarianism really the _cause_ of the dreams changing, in the case of Charlotte Beradt? I bet, not.
Yesterday my partner and I walked past a restaurant and the sign had changed from whatever it was to “Rosie’s” and I said, “Oh look, that’s different” and she said, “it’s been like that for years”.
Your example with the restaurant sign doesn’t work because your consciousness didn’t alter the signs. But looking at your dreams will.
Such a book would make people think in wrong directions, i.e. directions that dont serve the ruling class.
But propaganda never changes.
And the response, of this: https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/Fisher_Price:_A_Retrospective