Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Psychology and Personality Typology

  • David French on Hillary on ‘Implicit Bias.’ Hillary as Cultural Marxist. Psychology of the NeverTrumper

    Here (emphasis added): Indeed, in the debate Monday night, Clinton framed her discussion of “implicit bias” as a malady we all suffer from, telling Lester Holt: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other.”…

  • Predicting What One Wants to Happen

    Perhaps you have noticed this too.  People will often predict what they want to happen, even when what they want to happen is far from a foregone conclusion. At the moment I am reading an article by David P. Goldman who asserts that Hillary is "road kill": The presidential election was over the moment the…

  • Homo Loquax

    You know the type.  The one whose lack of understanding of a subject is no barrier to his talking about it.

  • Moral Narcissism

    As defined by Roger L. Simon1: Briefly stated, moral narcissism is this: What you say you believe or claim you believe — not how you actually behave — defines who you are and makes you “virtuous” in your own eyes and the eyes of others. Almost always, this is without regard to the consequences of…

  • Clinton Cash, The Movie

    Official trailer. Money, power, sex, and recognition form what I call the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. Hillary specializes in the inordinate love of the first two, Bill in the inordinate love of the second.

  • The Parable of the Lion and the Turtle

    The lion said to the turtle, "Come out of your shell, and join the party!"  The turtle said to the lion, "OK, Leo, after you have had yourself declawed and defanged." Defense mechanisms, both physical and psychological, serve a good purpose even as they limit relations with others.  But too much armor, psychic and otherwise,…

  • Christopher Hitchens, Religion, and Cognitive Dissonance

    Hitchens says somewhere that he didn't suffer from cognitive dissonance of the sort that arises when a deeply internalized religious upbringing collides with the contrary values of the world, since he never took religion or theism seriously in the first place.  But then I say religion was never a Jamesian live option for him.  But…

  • Is There Anything Good About Men?

    Via Bill Keezer, via Malcolm Pollack, I came to the above-captioned address by Roy F. Baumeister.  Packed with insights.  (In my book, 'insight' is a noun of success: there are no false insights.)

  • A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

    It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians.  What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification.  Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2.) Plato and Aristotle! These are not…

  • The Strange Tale of Chris Knight, the Central Maine Hermit-Thief

    A hell of a story.  This one goes into the Questers and Other Oddballs file. Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two…

  • The Several-Storied Thomas Merton: Contemplative, Writer, Bohemian, Activist

    An outstanding essay by Robert Royal on the many Mertons and their uneasy unity in one fleshly vehicle. There is of course Merton the Contemplative, the convert to Catholicism who, with the typical zeal of the convert, took it all the way to the austerities of Trappist monasticism, and that at a time (1941) when…

  • A Big Ego

    One associates loud, domineering, and aggressive behavior with a 'big ego.'  But a long memory for wrongs done one, a fine sensitivity to slights and slurs real and imagined are also signs of a 'big ego.'

  • Doubting Psychology

    Spencer Case reviews Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions.

  • President Snark

    "Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president."

  • Extrovert versus Introvert: The Introvert Speaks

    The extrovert is like a mirror: being nothing in himself, he is only what he reflects.  A caricature, no doubt, but useful in delineation of an ideal type.  This is why the extrovert needs others.  Without them, he lacks inner substance.  This is also why he is not drained by others, but drains them —…