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We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed but not in despair. |
✖ Via Bible, 2 Corinthians 4:8: As quoted in the third installment of Errol Morris’ essay on anosognosia (published in The New York Times). Part 3 is all about the debilitating stroke President Woodrow Wilson suffered on October 1919 and his subsequent refusal to acknowledge that there was something wrong with him. Morris tells the story: For Levin, Wilson’s inability to perceive his own incapacity had truly devastating consequences for the nation and world he helped to lead. Perhaps even more troublingly, the reaction to Wilson’s anosognosia on the part of his close associates raises the possibility of an even more problematic impairment — a social anosognosia. Can a group of people, perhaps even society at large, devolve into a state of destructive cluelessness?
Wilson expressed it best of all. On hearing the news of the Senate vote — essentially, the end of the League fight — Wilson asked Grayson to read a verse from the Bible, 2 Corinthians 4:8:We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed but not in despair. Wilson then said, “If I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad, but my faith in God holds me to the belief that He is in some way working out his plan through human perversity and mistakes.”[52]
Amen. (more) |
• Jun 28, 2010 link notes tagged:
communication
cognitive bias
cognition
anosognosia
knowledge
consciousness
society
critic
despair
anxiety
history
self
pathology
incapacity
representation
collective
social
community
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To take a dose of LSD is all right, and you will have the experience of being more or less crazy, but this will make quite good sense because you know you took the dose of LSD. If, on the other hand, you took the LSD by accident, and then find yourself going crazy, not knowing how you got there, this is a terrifying and horrible experience. This is a much more serious and terrible experience, very different from the trip which you can enjoy if you know you took the LSD.
Now consider the difference between my generation and you who are under twenty-five. We all live in the same crazy universe whose hate, distrust, and hypocrisy relates back (especially at the international level)’ to the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles.
We older ones know how we got here. I can remember my father reading the Fourteen Points at the breakfast table and saying, “By golly, they’re going to give them a decent armistice, a decent peace,” or something of the kind. And I can remember, but I will not attempt to verbalize, the sort of thing he said when the Treaty of Versailles came out. It wasn’t printable. So I know more or less how we got here.
But from your point of view, we are absolutely crazy, and you don’t know what sort of historic event led to this craziness. “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It’s all very well for the fathers, they know what they ate. The children don’t know what was eaten. |
✖ Via Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson, University of Chicago Press, [1972]2000, p. 481 [Google books preview] Think midle eastern wars, energy crisis, Europe financial crisis, unexplainable killing sprees and so forth. Previously on Skandalon |
• May 25, 2010 link notes tagged:
communication
technology
media
ecology
cybernetic
deception
despair
lost
confusion
generation
history
context
politic
economy
energy
war
destruction
murder
killing spree
