"The philosophy that the human is of two parts: a material body and an immaterial soul."
Looper is another one of those films about time travel. It deals with the if-you-had-a-chance-to-kill-baby-Hitler question, but instead Hitler is some big time crime boss from the future who just so happens to have telekinetic powers. Bruce Willis travels back in time to make sure that this crime boss doesn't see his 21st birth day. Jason Gordon Levitt is the only person standing in his way.
The question this situation poses is obvious. Are we mere slaves to environment and genetics? Has our fate been decided since birth?
Though vastly unscientific and soundly rejected in scholarly circles, dualism still maintains a strong foothold in mainstream society. It is the belief that we are more than mere machines, but a marriage of the spiritual and physical. Where the equation of human action has been confounded by one variable: the human will.
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Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away one could tell that Christmas was around the corner because of cold weather and happy faces. Now with global warming and the bastardization of what once was a saintly holiday, the hallmark of Christmas is profanity-laced tirades brought on by all-day rush hour traffic and crazy-eyed shoppers ready to put an ax in the back of the first heffa to try to take her tickle-me-elmo. Christmas has become a petrie dish of psychological oddities. Today, I examine differing aspects of the holiday from various psychology levels of analysis.
THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE STAMPEDE
When you are the first to perform an act that everyone else wants to perform, a funny thing happens: they do it too. There is comfort in the mob.
In the Stanley Milgram experiment, where subjects were asked by an authority figure (an actor in a lab coat) to give an electric shock to a patient (another actor, unbeknownst to them) researchers found that the few times that the subjects resisted the men in lab coats was when they observed another participant resisting "the doctor's" orders as quoted below:
"Later experiments conducted by Milgram indicated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically reduced obedience levels. When other people refused to go along with the experimenters orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks."
In other words, the only authority strong enough to overcome the knowing glance of the anonymous dictator known as social decorum is the infamous mob mentality. Public spaces usually don the lab coat of societal norms. When in these places, you act a certain way because everyone else acts a certain way. However, when one person acts outside the character of what is deemed acceptable, it serves as a domino effect, giving each subsequent person tacit permission to jump outside the box of decorum. Thus, we get what once were civilized people stampeding into Toys-R-Us like nutzos: breaking bones and killing the clumsy among them in a human stampede brought to you by Barbie Dolls and hotwheels.
Working against the crowd works against our physiology, but resisting the crowd may save your life or the embarrassment of having to explain at the pearly gates why Daisy Mae entered twenty years earlier wearing your shoe print.
HALO OR PENCILS: HOW CULTURE HELPS US CHOOSE
"My wife and I have five children and the reason why we have five children is because we do not want six. " Bill Cosby: Himself (1983)
In China, they only have one child. The reason they only have one child is because the Chinese government doesn't want overpopulation. This plays an important role in how children are brought up, abolishing the three-child dilemma. No longer do they have the youngest wallowing in the glow of the bright lights of novelty and the oldest growing too fast into a pair of sensible shoes while the middle struggles to try to remain relevant like yesterday's child TV star. Therefore, this single child is smothered with affection of the youngest and taught responsibility like the oldest. Middle-child foibles need not apply.
Now let's examine this in contrast to America: children fighting like dogs over a dry bone, scrambling to catch every subtle drop of attention they can garner from their parents. And when there isn't enough spotlight to go around at home, they turn to their peers, cajoling oohs and ahs from the crowd via the newest basketball sneaker or that "cute" new blouse. So they beg their parents for the latest this or that. Meanwhile, back in China, they ask for pencils.
PASS ME THE GENDER STEREOTYPE PLEASE How We Learn to How to Think
Gender is not defined the brand of organ between our legs. Rather it is defined by the whims of society. Outside of what type of reproductive organs one possesses, what constitutes being a "woman" is determined either purposely or haphazardly by way of what society "says." If society says that women are weak-minded homemakers ill-equipped for important leadership roles in society so shall they be.
This has already been stressed in my article on gender stereotypes and how society reinforces them via our choices in what we buy for our children. They are barely out of the womb and already we are buying them dolls and cars. All we need is one crucial factor to pull the trigger on our choice of toy: that pivotal announcement: "It's a girl!" From then on, it's pink clothes, little dollies, and easy-bake ovens. If it's a boy, it's blue, toy cars, and building blocks.
Sociological studies have even revealed that before birth we are preparing our children for their choice of toy. As Margaret L. Anderson notes in Thinking About Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and Gender one study done by Rubin et. al examined how parents described newborn babies in the first 24 hours. The study found that "[a]lthough physical examination revealed no objective differences between male and female infants, the parents of girls reported their babies to be softer, smaller, and less attentive than did the parents of boys." Therefore, as you can imagine, these "less attentive" vessels may be given less authoritarian games than their "more attentive" counterparts.
Toys R Us is said to be complicit in this game of defining gender by dividing boys toys from girls toys. These definitions may seem harmless, but when injected in the sociological bloodstream they manifest themselves into real life struggles for women that ferment into widespread issues. Beneath the glass ceiling to progress emerges a second barrier: one's very on psyche.
SHOPOHOLISM: IT'S IN THE GENES.
an evolutionary and genetic look at shopping
In one of David Chapelle's earlier roles, he plays a rank-style comedian who likes to pick on unassuming men and women in the audience. His opening line is always, "Women be shopping! Women be shopping!" It's not really funny in and of itself, but the sarcastic point is that he was merely expressing a stereotype about a group of people in order to garner laughter.
Women, it turns out, do be shopping. In human being's formative years, the women would be given the task of foraging for nuts, berries, and plants. Thus, they learned a keen eye for color. The pleasure of sifting through a thicket of leaves has been supplanted by the thrill of searching the racks for a bargain.
Shopping has even been demonstrated to release those brain-manufactured drugs known as endorphins into women's bodies. So, maybe when women call shopping "therapy" there is something to their claim.
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Many years ago when men were men and pilots landed planes with the use of their instincts and bubblegum, there was resistance to implementing more technical methods of landing and steering planes. "I don't need no confounding doohickey to find my way! I've got this!" the rambunctious pilot would say, banging his chest mightily. Then he'd go out and run a plane into a mountain. Thus, author and professional pilot William Langewiesche surmised maybe we do need those confounding doohickeys after all. Much like the stupid pilot in our example, we steer through our lives with "Folk Psychology": that inner gut feeling that tells us when something is right or wrong. When someone's a "good person" or a "bad person". Whether we should turn left or right. Whether we should fight or just walk away. The answers we receive from our minds are in noway determined scientifically and most often determined intuitively. If you're Obama, you don't ask MSNBC if you're doing a good job. Why would you turn to your own mind in order to come up with answers to general questions about the world. A mind clouded by rationalizations, misattributions, confirmation biases and various other mechanism specifically designed to make you look better: your very own personal spin-doctors. You ask an impartial contributor. Someone with no dog in the fight. That unhampered observer goes by the name science. The human mind is a wonderful, phenomenal computer able to perform impossible tasks like recognizing faces in a matter of less than a second. Unfortunately, the human mind is not rational. The grey matter floating in our head is specifically wired to get by in life and not make rational decisions. Irrational people who flip their lids if the wallpaper isn't the right color may not make many friends, but they are more likely to survive in this world because no one wants to mess with them. By natural selection, they pass to the next generation. Therefore, using our own minds as a measure of what "seems" to be the norm or what a situation "seems" to be is not the best methodology and should be traded for more sound methods.
"Please eat my nasty pasta! If you don't, it will hurt my feelings; I will fall into a deep depression; it will make me susceptible to dating the first woman that comes along; she will only be using me for my money; she will bankrupt me; I will become homeless and have to spend the rest of my days picking up cans and coming up with outlandish stories in order to elicit sympathies from gullible passersby... and it would be all your fault."
Will he slip and fall down the slippery slope?
The slippery slope fallacy seems to assume that logic works like people walking up or down a hill, and if we even slightly lose our footing, we will go tumbling to the bottom, breaking our leg and clavicle. It makes it easy to debate people using this Butterfly Effect of logic. "You have to let me do this," your roommate says, "or it will ultimately lead to a series of events that would result in the apocalypse." And so you agree let him have sex with your girlfriend. Unfortunately, this reasoning is not sound if no good reason is given why one outcome would follow from next.
The most recent advent of the fallacy is found in the anti-gun-control movement. "If we outlaw guns then next it will be knifes, fertilizer, and even curtains!" one advocate once told me. But obviously, that would not be the case and we have no logical reason to believe that outlawing anything else would follow from the outlawing of guns. Furthermore, no reason is even given.
The more popular use of this fallacy is in matters of socialism. More government control is equated to more socialism; therefore, people foolishly assume that at the rate we're going we will all be socialists just in time for supper. Unfortunately, this does not necessarily follow. Could we not ALSO say that less government control will inevitably lead to anarchy, and more reality shows will ultimately lead to a nation with zero IQs. None of these hypotheses are at all logical. So, how about we decide what policies to employ and not employ based on what is effective and useful and not whether it will make us more socialist or anarchist?
DAD
Did you clean your room today, Tommy?
TOMMY
Of course not, dad. I'm waiting on the government to do it for me
DAD
Darn that Obamacare!
But conservatives don't get to have all the fun. Liberals can be heard, too, saying things like, "Why should we outlaw having abortions at conception? What's next? Outlawing sex? Outlawing sperm? Outlawing if you ignore that twinkle in your girlfriend's eye?" Obviously, conservatives have set a stopping point at conception and we have little reason to believe that this regression would go on forever.
Certainly, advocates in all these examples may have reasons to believe that one event my result in another, but none are ever presented; and the connections they make are so outlandish it would take compelling evidence to demonstrate their case.
Logical solutions to problems are not like Goldberg. They do not Jackhammer one problem into oblivion and then look around and holler "Who's Next?" Sometimes there are no problems left in the arena. Sometimes the problems do not want to fight. Sometimes the regress is not so infinite.
Recently, I visited a conservative Facebook page in wake of the tragedy in Connecticut. Obviously, the owner of the page is staunchly against gun control while I am firm for it. Watch as he/she commits the infamous Slippery Slope Fallacy, highlighted for your enjoyment.
GUN ADVOCATE: You can ban all the guns in the world, and the destruction and mayhem will just get much worse. The solution is not stricter laws, the solution is to place armed guards in the areas of concern, and train the average citizen how to use a gun, and train them in crisis situations. Why not, most American citizens would help if they could, the show of force from people who are armed would be enough to stave off an attack. Make it known that people here are armed and these tragedies will stop. That boy forced his way into the school, if an armed guard had been present, this whole tragedy could have been avoided. Here's something to keep in mind about banning guns. If you ban guns, what's next? Kitchen knives? They can be weapons. Baseball bats? They can be used as weapons. How about hair spray? Light it up and that's a very destructive weapon. How about Curtains? You can throw them over people and bring them down, or you can tear them into shreds and use them to choke people with. Oh wait, lets ban screw drivers, they can become weapons, or how about a nail gun, now that's a gun so we need to ban that too. Letter openers, nail files, fire pokers, brooms, bleach, keys, etc. How about things to make a bomb, are we going to ban them as well? Acetone, Hydrogen Peroxide, Muriatic Acid (If you don't have this around go to a pool store). A molotov cocktail would need a rag, glass bottle such as a wine or beer bottle, gasoline, motor oil and the optional styrofoam cup, are we going to ban all of these things too? My point here is no matter what, there are always going to be weapons of mass destruction at the tips of anyone's fingers. Banning guns does not solve the problems, it will just create more and you won't like the results any better. The answer is to increase security in areas that are prone to attacks such as this. I heard a guy on Hannity yesterday say that his idea would be to place trained police officers that are on disability and unable to perform their duties as a cop, but could handle a role as a security cop at the schools. They are trained in bolistics, they have firearms, and they would be an excellent choice to put in schools because they know how to spot the criminals before something happens. Pay these guys a little more than what their disability check is paying them, and they would make excellent security guards for schools, malls, wherever they are needed to ward off would be slayers. Arm the areas that need arming, and these problems won't be problems anymore. Start banning guns, and it won't stop there. We won't have anything pretty soon, and Agenda 21 will be a reality.
MY RESPONSE: I'm sorry, but if you make the argument that getting rid of all the guns in the world will lead to more mayhem, you have to at least come with facts.
tHe StAtIsTicS
Now I realize that there may be studies that intimate that having more guns leads to less crimes, but I'm talking about deaths. And since the ban on assault weapons expired in 2004, mass shootings have doubled in the U.S. Japan has very strict gun laws and while we have thousands of gun deaths each year, the most they have ever had was less than a hundred. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center concluded that where there are more guns, there are more homicides.
States with stricter gun laws tend to have less homicides. High income countries with less guns have less homicides. Now there's several cultural and sociopolitical factors that may have a confounding effect on these differences (lower recidivism rates, higher conviction rates, a more authoritarian government) but when you see this trend from nation after nation, doesn't that at least give you pause?
The Absurdity of Macgyverisms
Let me just point out the fatal flaw of your second argument. You say that if we ban guns then that will lead to people banning other things -- such as curtains -- that can kill. Therefore, we shouldn't ban guns.
OK, imagine it's many many years ago when nuclear warheads were coming in vogue. The government all of sudden says, "Listen citizens, I know this second Amendment thing says you can have any type of arms you want, but the nuclear variety is off the table." Then a gentleman comes and says, "But, sir, if you don't let us have nuclear warheads what's next? Guns? Staplers? Curtains? Bubble gum? YOU watched McGuyver didn't you? People can kill with ANYTHING! No matter what you do we'll have these weapons of mass destruction at the tips of our fingers. Banning nuclear warheads doesn't solve the problem."
This argument would be ridiculous. This level of ridiculousness even has a special name in logic known as the slippery slope fallacy.
"1. Event X has occurred (or will or might occur). 2. Therefore event Y will inevitably happen. This sort of 'reasoning' is fallacious because there is no reason to believe that one event must inevitably follow from another without an argument for such a claim." LaBossiere, Michael (2010-11-04). 42 Fallacies (Kindle Locations 2070-2075). . Kindle Edition.
Simply because anything can be used as a weapon does not mean we should not ban guns or nuclear warheads. There is no reason to believe that we would ban all of these random things if we banned handguns in the first place...
It's Curtains! Curtains! You understand?
Furthermore, if all these things are just the same as a gun, why do you not instead carry a concealed curtain? Or a beer bottle? Or stick bubble gum? -- well some people do that last one already but you get my point: it seems that, of the things I mentioned, one of these things is not like the other. SOMETHING is easier to kill people with.
Secondly, let me let you in on a little secret: they don't have guns in Japan. Despite all that, they have no people killing with letter openers, nail guns, and curtains -- of all things. Interesting thing, an almost exact situation happened in Japan just after the shooting in Connecticut. There was a mass assault, but instead of a gun, they used a knife. I believe 22 were stabbed. What was the difference? THOSE PEOPLE LIVED. Even if they do get their hands on something else, less people die.
Now, I'm not like other liberals. I don't mind a trained cop or veteran being in all of these places. But look, most times I go into a mall I might be walking with a backback. There are various entrances at that mall. You're going to have a cop or soldier at each entrance checking everyone's bag as they come in? But fine, you'll probably say he can just "tell" because he's been trained. Fair enough. However, what's to stop our gunman from shooting up people in a park? What's to stop him from shooting up people in a church? What's to stop him? Don't let him have the gun! Let him go get his curtain and try to smother a crowd to death. I welcome it!
You say guns are only more destructive because criminals choose them first??? No, criminals choose them first because they are more destructive. Not only that, but they're more efficient. Again WHY do you have a gun and not a broken bottle? Why don't you just make a bomb every morning and carry it with you to work? One is more efficient and convenient.
Oh, Let's Just Give Guns to EVERYBODY!
Finally, it would be nice if every Tom, Dick, and costumed kid's show character was properly trained with a gun, always packing, and ready to pop a perps head clean off his shoulders from 40 feet away. Unfortunately, I don't want to have to depend on all of these highly unlikely scenarios in order for these killings to be thwarted. Also, what if someone simply doesn't want a gun? What if they are raised in a culture where guns are taboo and barely anyone in their city has a gun? Certainly they shouldn't be forced to carry one. This portion of your solution is flawed. It depends on voluntary participation. That's like replacing the tax code with voluntary donations: you just might not get enough participation for it to be effective.
Therefore, we need an alternate plan. How about we just cut the gunman off at the pass? How about we just don't let him get guns? Or at least not semiautomatic or assault weapons. There's more I have to say, but I've rambled on too long. Always nice to discuss the issues. We both want the same thing: safety for our kids. We just have very different solutions. Peace.
"Any superiority or inferiority complex you may have is a figment of your imagination created by Barbie Dolls and Pepsi Commercials."
One of the prevailing notions in feminist thought is that what makes a woman seem strong or weak are socially constructed concepts. In other words, there is nothing intrinsically inferior about a woman being excessively muscular, but, in American society in particular, such body types are frowned upon and even looked upon in much the way you would something morally repugnant. Reflexively, men are made to feel inferior for expressing emotions. Women are made to feel like "bitches" if they express strong opinions. This is the strange dichotomy of gender stereotypes. Men are made to feel inferior for possessing traditionally feminine traits while women are made to feel inferior for possessing masculine traits. Society both creates and reinforces these gender stereotypes through various mechanisms from the types of toys children play with to the inundation of images they're exposed to in the media. If Barbie were a real life woman, she would be a gargantuan seven-foot monster whose body would be so out of proportion, she'd be forced to walk on all fours -- that's if she doesn't die of malnutrition first. This and pretty much any commercial with a woman in it teaches nearly 99% of women that their bodies and faces are not good enough -- even though the women in these commercials have been airbrushed to no end and have layers of makeup applied by a team of experts. In truth,. the women they see on the TV do not even live up to their own synthesized expectations. Even things like building blocks and dolls are preparing men for a life of engineering and computers while preparing women for the a life of homemaking.
"It's always cooler to create false memories because -- let's be honest -- the real ones aren't that special."
Christopher Nolan will have you believe
that in order to implant a false belief you have to assemble a crack team of inception specialists, invade the victim's mind all the while confusing him with an ever-descending tapestry of dreams within dreams within dreams. And don't forget your totum!
Truth is implanting a false memory is not all that complicated. It can be something as simple as a changing a word in a sentence. "Did you see a blue car?" as opposed to "Did you see the blue car?" All you need is a mouth and an impressionable kid and the rest will fall into place. Take the Sam Stone Experiment. In this experiment, various children observe a man who the experimenters refer to as "Sam Stone" go in and out of the room. In the control group, they just observed him and were asked questions about him afterwards. However, in the experimental groups (there were three in all) they were prompted in a variety of ways so as to create bias. Sam Stone was said the be a nice guy, but clumsly. Accordingly, when asked whether Sam Stone had ripped a book when he entered the room, children were more apt to say "yes" even though Sam had done no such thing.
This type of thing even works with adults. For instance, do you remember where you were when 9/11 happened? You probably think you do, but one study demonstrated that when asked the infamous where-you-were question, respondants had a tendency to change their answers over time. Turns out our memories are very maleable demons. They change over time, get embellished, and even become an amalgamation of other people's memories from discussions we have about the memories.
This same problem is prevalent when we get into supposedly repressed memories. In an effort to draw them out, some psychologists hypnotize their patients and have them regress to when they were a child. Unfortunately, these regressions never seem very authentic for even in their hypnotic state, the adult acts like an adult acting like a child and not how a real child acts. Certainly, they sincerely believe they are in their childhood state, unfortunately, they are lying to themselves and their memories are thus no more reliable than a politician in November.
Think about how this plays a role in all of our society. People are sent to prison because of eye witness testimony or even a confession that was possbily the result of planting false memories. People are led to believe things about minority groups in particular that are not even so -- like out friend Sam Stone -- because of bias and prejudice. Children accuse old men of sexual abuse because of suggestive or leading questions from authorities. So, next time you start to spin some old yarn about how you single-handedly beat down the entire Chicago Bears' defensive line pause, sit, and think real hard because it may be full of crap.
