Braininvat » October 7th, 2018, 4:38 pm wrote:Interesting analysis, though I am generally reluctant to draw too many conclusions about someone's psychological makeup on the basis of their behavior in front of a Senate committee and TV cameras.
I'm a big reader into the neurosciences and philosophical takes on the semiotics of biology, so I feel there is a fairly good ground to speak about what's going on in his head on the basis of how the brain is organized. There is a profound increase in knowledge here, which is leading to a profound paradigm shift in how we think about the human mind.
Since we have bodies, and our feeling states are 'wired' into our consciousness through the insular cortex, the developmental process of cognition (since the brain is always hardwired developmentally) is the development of the cingulate cortex, then the orbital frontal cortex, and as the child ages, more external cortical regions 'grow' as the cognitive developmental system becomes increasingly 'refined' around the same sort of semiotic problems, adding new semiotic structure as 'older' structure falls into the implicit - unconscious - zone.
Any person competent in the requisite sciences knows it is fully legitimate to assume that during this proceeding, Kavanaugh was attempting to 'manage' the information he was being bombarded with in the sketchy sort of way that people like him tend to do things. The 'pauses' he always made before speaking were obvious "think of something plausible" moments. He pauses as he does, also, because being in front of a group of strangers, and having cameras focused on you, is moderately stressful. Under such conditions, the body is too 'tense' for the cortex to receive the blood-flow required for a more effective and sellable lie.
The confirmation yesterday underscores the reality that the legislative branch of the government has epically failed in its Constitutional mandate to be independent of the executive branch.
This is where I derive my whole prior argument from. What makes you think that the executive branch is truly separate from the legislative, or judicial branch? I understand that this is the purpose, and when society is working right, this desired result can occur. But we also have to be clear headed about how humans work: the enlightenment was the cultural background for the intellectuals who built America. What is the cultural background today? Postmodernism? An exaggerated contempt-worthy scientism? Evangelicalism? The enlightenment value of reason is quieted amidst this uproar of popular mainstream hedonism. Sports, music, etc, has created a stupid culture, and there are plenty of stupid people available to help scaffold a stupid government.
On another note, since the emergence of an asymmetrical society 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, it makes sense to posit that two narratives would emerge that would 'fit the needs' of the two classes that existed: those who controlled material resources and those who didn't. There is plenty of meaning in the archeological record which demonstrates the different forms that these narratives took; its only the "elitist" narratives left for archeologists to work with, for obvious reasons.
More or less, an "intramundane" Gnosticism is the logical spirituality to be adopted by guilt-ridden brainminds (we are not in control of ourselves, as is typically imagined). Since feeling states are fundamentally reducible to actions in a self-other intersubjective context, actions that are asymmetrical, which produce an asymmetrical effect in an other (shame, humiliation) always leave a 'residue' in the formative structure in the mind which acted that way. The logic of the mind is dyadic: it grows through 'dyadic expansions of consciousness' - interactions between two people in which a feeling of 'being known' expands consciousness by stimulating emotion.
Mainstream religions have typically been protests against the excesses of the elite. Zoroaster and the Avesta criticizes the Vedic Indo-Aryan culture which despoiled Iran-Western India between 3000 and 1500 BCE. The Hebrew Bible emerged out of Egyptian slavery; then it was reformed again after Babylonian captivity, etc.
We need to get real about this difference between these two classes, and how these two classes preserve fundamental differences between how emotions are processes in the brainmind, and so, since you have a greedy class that wants to keep what it has, you get a moral-system that is diametrically opposite to the moral system created by natural processes. You could say the elite 'skim' the matter, or the "surplus" (in marx's language) of the work of others to live the way they do without hitting existential rock-bottom.
Substance Dualism has its origins here. It is the belief of elites and vagabonds. Both suffer from unresolved relational traumas that keep them dissociated from their bodies, but equipped with a narrative that allows them to manage their anxieties with "power". The narrative is everything, psychologically, to human beings. Challenging another's narrative is an invitation to belligerence.
So naturally I assume that Kavanaugh has been raised in a myth-laden WASP culture which in his time period included pagan rituals with all sorts of pretentious beliefs about the nature of reality. Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, etc, are examples of unsubstantiated metaphysical speculation.
I assume that people who behave the way he behaves need a metaphysical 'story' to ground their feeling of security. I therefore consider it quite likely that he is, as they would probably describe themselves, an "illuminati", because people like him subscribe to sadomasochistic ideas about reality - and who knows what other occult theories fit their needs? People like this are obsessed with the occult, probably because they think their movements through power are happening
because of secret occult powers.
