Heart surgery 102

The German REnaissance

Sebastian Brant

Why write a NEGATIVE history of lonliness AND laziness?

If the thick symbol of the high REnaissance was the cabinet of curiosities, this idea was still in Carl von Linneus mind 200 yrs later. But a very different idea appears in the 1600s as the TRAGIC SHIFT takes hold starting in France. This new idea was the COMPLICATION COMEDY this was a result of the further development of the tragicomedy (cf. Shakespeare). The sad truth of the matter is the switcheroo as social collective action resulted in a swap, as in the complication comedy. Not that every play in this genre always does, but let’s say it’s at least part, and in rather large measure, of its repetoire. If the reason was national pride, we can’t say, but to top Monte Verdi seems to lie in the cards, besides it was Richelieu who launches this idea of allowing theatre (again). If this is any true at all the witches tried and convicted in the 1500s differ from those of the 1600s.

[embed]

[embed]

[embed]

Anyone slightly familiar with narcissism knows these ppl blame others but the human group aka the family, may give us clues to all of this.

This would be to claim a VERY profound observation. Cars for instance are dependent much like trains, both are dependent on roads or tracks. How do we imagine thinking? That intelligence is dependent on tracks leads us 1) to find a new description of narcissism as externalisers (but in a profoundly new significance of that well established concept) 2) it redefines how the brain works. Wow.

The tracks are the social relations and societal networks.

Saying that is not saying narcissisms are sane, but they perform thinking all the same, in science the exception leads the way to new discovery.

That is, if narcissism is this externalising (cf. Lindsey Gibson) it is in a sense no different from thinking, the only difference being that narcs are wholly dependent upon system, in this strange sense (SIC) Sam Vaknin’s stance reflects this in his view of NARCISSISM as complete victims with little volition (cf. Vaknin). The new thing here is that I point to the network as the source of that victim/perpetrator function. More clearly seen if we speak merely of behaviour, and the sources of said behaviour.

But we must return to modern life. Modernity emphasises unifomity and still allows for increasing mixing of urban populations (as e.g in North America, which is included in Western modernity). The dregs of history points to attitudes, or put in the proper way; the dregs of history often hide under ideas about history, and still structuralism would in the end cease if enough mixing took place to eradicate DIFFERENCE. In the case of modernity we must generalise to be able to study details. The history of medicine is such a train hurtling along a fast-track into the future. The body was ripped apart into different parts (and it is only slowly with a return to Chinese medicine and acupuncture that we are putting Humpty-Dupty together again, more on this in the main feature OH THAT IT SHOULD COME TO THIS, here at Medium.com). By studying these branches several things are accomplished all at once. What branches? Notably chains of development in the big tree of technical advance.

quoting from our last episode of OH THAT IT SHOULD COME TO THIS

Using in wrongful ways Goffman’s TOTAL INSTITUTIONs we may liken it to society as idea or bigger whole (a typical frivolity for the stated reason as well as the simple observation that the sky, or dogs, or society are within limits knoweable still underpin ideas of complexity overload, since the overload has to happen in a society, or as in Tainter’s case a world civilisation equivocates ‘a society’). Social science (e.g Réne Girard and Émile Durkheim) often resides on suppositions about ‘modern society’ as well, another hidden fact or preconception we tend wrongfully to neglect. (end of quote from part 40)

Times affect ppl, Pascal may have been affected by the times. A wave of fire for real science was peaking with Pascal, yet as time went on and in part through Pascal’s increased interest into ambiguity and religion he stepped out of the pure world of mathematics into life. The burnings at the stake of several dissidents also reaches a kind of peak. But this is NOT true of the witch-trials more broadly which will be on the increase throughout the 17th century. More and increasingly more of them leading to conviction and burning will happened, more of them in a Protestant context, and very few of them in Spain. Often at friction points between faiths, for such an example we can look to Belgium.

Witches as cybernetics

The witches coven is much like very many tales in folklore mere metaphor. Oups! Just hold it right there, say what? But how about literal truth instead?

The witches covens were there, the brooms, the cat. But did you get it my good telly-watcher(s)? We aught be very happy for Freud despite his critique and his relation to Adler/ Jung as more insightful thinkers perhap. My own line of inquiry is culture and culture as code, the symbolic contents of history. The reason I say so is my strivings to follow Claude Lévi-Strauss. So going back to the folk-tale witch in league with the Devil, why would we believe the silly stories? The complex dynamics of the family come to the fore in pathology, and hence it is often understood that sick families have a dynamic. One that sometimes is the main focus, sometimes the individuals that end up with substance abuse etc. A focus on the group is a wholistic stance, but as we can glean it leads to big complexity very quickly, and it is comforting to reduce complexity. We focus therefore much more on individuals but his approach is too simplistic for certain. My guess is the Middle Ages were much more fluent in this language of family, and the ideas about witches are indeed real clinical observations, minus the humbug and the oozing sulpur that is. The Devil, sure if it’s any help, sure… We live in isolated households, this was not the case previous as we may well ponder and hence we are living in a different world.

In truth I devised my notions of the complex cause in my thoughts over the witch-craze. I was thinking as such; we have millions of causes, but which ones are significant and at the same time UNRELATED? This latter criteria is an odd one. But as a heat map it actually shines a light on factors in ANY complex cause. Mine were; The first was books describing Bronze Age women in magical ceremony, we still know these sources, and have the texts — they would be rarely read but be part of, if merely very marginally, a learned world of monks and older texts. The second would be women in the position as village soothsayer/ healer (often enough itinerant), and the third and for our purposes the more significant, is the phenomenon of narcissism, more specifically female narcissism. As we can see these factoids are wholly unrelated and merely circumstantial as the defendant said in court as he pleaded not guilty.

This is my parsing, my general answer; the question now is which of these strands are worth pursuing?

Point one, not so much but yes we could and such studies abound over literature’s image of the witch. We don’t have to invent that wheel.

Point two is the women healer(s), an interesting subject but one Mary Douglas has covered, fRAMED as authorities feeling threatened by the olden ways and trying to oust the competition. This may come in handy later, but is in some part at least half-ways investigated at this point.

Point three is the narcissist dynamic, but as any readers and/ OR telly-watchers may have noticed a veritable PANDORA’s box. A veritable crash course in intricacy and intrigue.

My conclusions are in line with my general parsing, the complicated cause is the real answer, but the details here are forthcoming in our next episode. For a primer in the group dynamisms of sick families, see below.

As readers will know any number of factors can be added to this mix, I have however chosen these, due to their UNRELATEDNESS… the reason is complexity requires a very special approach one I pretend to establish.

extras

[embed]

[embed]

[embed]

A reflexion — what happens when psychopathy is grown out of a group dynamic? as Rebecca Mandeville points to, we can have that (SIC), meaning as a result despite no apparent cause i.e no narcissist proper is present it is the group dynamic that results in this strange behaviour. This by the way is a COMPLEX CAUSE. An emergent and bad outcome of a system, seemingly without a cause, but that cause my good telly-watcher is the complex one.

Rawls’ veil of ignorance

The narcissist has at some point found out about the reality on/off which is either imported by abuse or reinvented by dysfunction (one nice parent and one harsh parent f’s up the brain), this is the core malfunction. Said in another way, to the narc there is such a switch, it is that switch which is the sticking point or core phenomenology of narcissism. In switching it reality is controlled. But how, and my readers being intelligent already are scrambling for answers, the group of course, but how?

As the on/off switch is core to the functioning of the FSA dynamic, we may have to conclude the reason for all of this — the narc is controlled by adulation and not by any other idea, ideation, drive, advocacy, planning in the future, etc but is a victim of the flimsy nature of group think, with the on/off switch serving merely as a small rudder in a stormy sea. The narc is a victim of the fantasy. But unless the sick family falls in line it stops. I’d say the witches coven is right there for any man to behold, elegantly described in Rosemary’s baby — minus the superstition we have clinical social groups in maladaptive dress.

This rewrites what narcissism is using MORPHOLOGY/humourology. We can see that in this case it is a kind of functional schizophrenia. The words we use matter less. Functional in this context since the on/off button actually the symbolic representative of Murphy’s law (the Kantian imperative but upside-down namely as veil or self-induced imagining) so that ANY event or interpretation is in some senses negotiable. The idea that one is in control is after all the fancy this all revolves around, and somehow the mechanics reach a STABLE EQUILIBIUM point, and is maintained. Using the magical button the sick family or its proverbial coven take decisions that result in scapegoating but it results in other stuff as well. ONLY (and only if) in as far as the scapegoated family member (R.Girard instead indicts society at large, possibly after reading Giordano Brunos last work on bindings, Daniel Bell utilises a similar idea but in so far as society is in a double-bind, a concept he takes off Bateson) can be made part of the lie or distortion, proving or proofing this delusional ideation as true. In a family the audience is after all captive in some sense. This in so many words is the process of data-handeling/distortion, and this all hinges on semiotics, proving that semiotics is a stupid academic strawman. Or said differently it loses its magic inside the more complex notion of (complex) systems. We may want to keep the word but it obscures more than it clarifies.

The killings by teenagers in Sweden can ONLY be explained completely though not entirely, as a result of girardian mobbing.

The view of the clinician is to trust statistics, Sam Vaknin is referencing this frequency data i.e the numbers that we collect to assertain e.g that circa 2 per cent are real narcs. But recognises that either you accept the stats or you refute them. You can refute them since most disorders are resistant to diagnosis. Another expert, and best-seller author Doctor Ramani aligns in a sense with unscientific hearsay and claims that one third of the populous is narcissist (Dr. Ramani Durvasula, DON’T YOU K NOW WHO I AM? 2019 and other titles). Who’s right?

Sam Vaknin is of the highest order of competence.

And yet if we open up the resistance to therapy and the resultant can lead to another conclusion, which is the disbelief in stats. We can disregard stats entirely, as Vaknin says yes but we must disregard all of it or none of it.

We may be faced with a middle ground though— we see in Lindsay C Gibson the EIP which is a broader kind of category, but in part a diagnosable state highly impervious to change hence stable. But we are not only inside a complex issue both psychology-wise as well as philosophy-wise, that is to say we may have to look at this a little bit like the foreigner or the anthropologist or the natural philosopher who merely is looking for broad-strokes order or logic, aka surface patterns. We may choose to refute EIP as a dignosis however since it loosens it too much (as it includes the Narc, or said differently as it includes narsisistic style personality, which isn’t full-blown narcissism, it yanks at the clean categories).

How do we proceed then?

On the one hand we will find the idea of diagnosis, a concept then which is slightly toned down in Lindsey C Gibson’s approach, not just in her but in any attempts to bend or break the idea of a strict or clean diagnostic. To the other (and Sam Vaknin often explains anamnesis by diffuse group dynamics) we will find systems of any kinds, such as corporations, firms, ideologies, cults, religions, smaller groups and even sick families, the brain as system is equipped with social wiring. We must add the caveat that no family is either sick or firm/ infirm nor healthy, it must however be manitained as a fiction, and we are biologically programmed to produce healthy environments in the family, still the family is just another system, and some systems are families with conflicts. Not to overstate it, we are just looking at this from the view to find PATHOLOGY albeit a slanted view it’s true. It sadly happens in the home just as much as in the street, but the view is totalising and universialising, a trick we use in science to make things smooth. Systems are by definition the result of many factors that make up a whole. In explaining the witch-craze I have great affinity for these systems which I find can be made even more radical (perhaps reminiscent of Feuerabend) since the family may be said to be in contact with yet other systems and these in turn with others ad infinitum. This second view in short is that middle ground in the statistics, the either/ AND category. It is a philosophical choice, should we accept it. I believe the witch craze might lead the way towards improvements in current scientific practices, but as a first step throw light on the 1600s that hitherto has been lacking.

A likely reason for the naming of witches are certainly involved here, but our stats are only speaking of convictions, wasn’t a stigma put on the few who were called witch but who succumb later not to trial but to public scorn? We forgot those, didn’t we? This is a recurring theme in medicinal history, e.g whereas public hospitals kept records private clinics did not. We forget this too.

Confronted with the tried and convicted cases we are faced with a similar dilemma as the Vaknin and Ramani debate.

A middle ground that stands on both feet, this (or such a middle ground) is complexity — or what I have dubbed the complex cause.

We must entertain and resist fuzzy categories at the same time we may ask; can and should we abandon safe category? We must entertain BOTH.

Vaknin confirms it in the family as does Gibson and others, absent mothers are a kind of system effect; at the same time apart clean categories such as the diagnose of an ailment we must entertain as well i.e fuzzy systems that produce results but are diffuse on the other clear-cut diagnosis.

As such organisations prove (or disprove) this as they blow-up the scale so to speak for the scientist adding new distortions obviously and yet revealing somethings one would at least hope. In short we have 1) diagnosis labels in mental disorder or even others such as the B-cluster, yet the EIP broadens or stretches this label, 2) we ALSO have results that have results yet not the diagnosis, unless we disregard these we have to be dealing in systems-effects coming out of a more complex dynamic. In these cases we have results but no apparent causes.

The notion of FSA falls in this category, it is only true in part in the case of EIP syndrome (N.B. the author never uses the word syndrome, cf. Gibson).

Toward this end I have fiddled with the concept of PSEUDONARCISSISM.