Category: Psychology and Personality Typology
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List and Precision Obsession
You are list-obsessive if you write down an already completed task just so you can cross it off your list. You are precision-obsessive if you point out that a task, completed or not, is not the sort of thing that can be crossed off a list. An admirable concern for precision can veer off into…
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How Much Bad Behavior Ought We Tolerate from Our ‘Friends’?
The following arrived on Christmas Eve: Apatheia, Ataraxia, and Holiday Spirit I was wondering if you had any advice for those struggling to maintain their Stoic calm as Christmas approaches. Alas, I am one of those souls this year. I will not burden you with the details, but it seems the holidays also bring out…
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The Mighty Tetrad
Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex,…
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Kamala and Moria/Witzelsucht
Joe Biden, suffering from dementia, was finally and 'democratically' kicked to the curb only to be replaced with Kamala Harris who may be suffering from her own neuropsychiatric malady, moria. How else explain her giddiness, uncontrolled childish euphoria, inappropriate laughter, inability to be serious about matters of grave importance, hyper-joyous inanity, and the like? This…
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The Lucky Pollyanna
The pollyanna runs a risk of early death. One thinks of October 7th and the Israelis willfully oblivious of the Gazans sworn to their extermination. But the lucky pollyanna who happens to live long and well lives a life enhanced by the bliss of ignorance. A lucky outlier. Related: The Psychology of the Pollyanna and…
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Consolations of Late Adulthood
Despite the fact that the Grim Reaper, the ultimate 'Repo man,' is hot on my trail, I wouldn't go back to being a child, an adolescent, or even a young adult for anything. What is that makes childhood and adolescence so rotten for some of us? In a word, powerlessness, and in a three-fold sense.…
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The Psychology of the Pollyanna and the Political Ponerology of Leftism
We all know pollyannas. They are more often women than men and the charm of these lovable ladies is in no small measure due to their openness to the positive in people and things and their seeming incapacity to discern the negative and evil. A most extreme example has come to my attention, one .…
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Liz Cheney: Profile in Political Projection
Projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one attributes one's own unacknowledged feelings, desires, intentions, attitudes, etc. to others. Extending the notion into the political sphere, the political projector accuses the other side of doing what he and his ilk are doing but will not own up to doing. I happened across a very clear…
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Noetic Distance
You kept your distance from him when he was alive, and you did well in so doing. Now that he is dead, when his only proximity is noetic, it is noetic distance that you must maintain.
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Why are People so Easy to Swindle?
My answer at Substack.
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Psychiatry as Ideology in the USSR
Sidney Bloch, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, OxfordJournal of medical ethics, 1978, 4, 126-131 I got the reference from an article on the defenestration of Jordan Peterson. Commentary on Bloch's paper from the same article: The Oxford psychiatrist Sidney Bloch’s classic 1977 academic paper “Psychiatry as Ideology in the USSR” demonstrated how psychiatry in…
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The Introvert Advantage
Currently atop the Substack pile. With a little help from Kafka, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and Einstein. ……………. Thomas writes (12/29), A very nice note for the (nearly) new year. It took me decades to realise I am one of those who was nearly socially self-sufficient all his life – no school yard bullying ever touched me,…
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Beware of Projecting . . .
. . . your values and attitudes into others. We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally. It is dangerous…
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More Malcolm on Mass Formation
Here at Motus Mentis, the weblog of Malcolm Pollack. Pollack is an uncommonly good writer as you will see from the quotation below. More importantly, he speaks truth against the current madness. In my earlier post on his American Greatness essay, after acknowledging his even-handedness, I suggested that . . . he may be giving…