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- Bert Cooper’s Mad Men koan
In Mad Men, Bert Cooper says “A man is whatever room he is in” and calls it a Japanese proverb, though it is not.
- ludic hermeneutics of cultural transformation
Joyce, Huizinga, Erasmus, Eco and Agamben share one subject: how play and interpretation drive cultural change and meaning-making.
- Perspective on Psychological Work
The past is a fiction of the mind; psychotherapy accepts it and heals wounds, while coaching builds a different future than the default one.
- monoculture and cultural diversity
David C. Korten recalls a youth with no concept of cultural diversity, expecting a whole life in a monocultural white town.
- shared culture and getting our story wrong
We humans live by stories, and a society’s ability to live together securely depends on the authenticity of its shared story.
- mass consumerism and excessive overconsumption
Consumerism defined as an obsession with buying material goods becomes, for Brown and Vergragt, an engine of unsustainability.
- new communalists and new left
The New Communalists sought refuge from government power in personal computing and psychedelics; the New Left took to campus direct action.
- being a grown-up in a contemporary culture
We play parental, fiduciary and societal roles yet know in our heart of hearts that we still have to grow up.
- freedom to choose recoils in anxiety of change
The moral measure of a culture is how well it tolerates ambiguity and change and how open it is to the otherness of others.
- patterns of cultural influences and personal biographies
Where we find patterns, we will likely find core, emotion-laden ideas, internalized messages that tell us what to do.
- six stages of ancestral passage to adulthood
Ancestral rites of passage moved the young into adulthood through departure, ceremonial death and rebirth, teachings, ordeal and return.
- doubt protects mystery from stagnation
Certainty is the enemy of truth: dogmas and beliefs are husks that once held energy and can also become a prison.
- gender and other cultural fantiasies
Gender is socially construed, and its constricting definitions of men and women are one more frangible fiction.
- confused dictatorships of prosperous liberal democracies
Those who have never known tyranny can mistake their own elected governments for evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights.
- the end of history
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama suggested we may be witnessing the end of history, with Western liberal democracy the final form of government.
- white supremacist capitalist patriarchy
White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, a term coined by Bell Hooks, names a system that privileges wealthy white men through exploitation.
- psychotherapy assumption processing traumas
To James Hillman, processing heartbreak makes a processed psyche, like processed food; wounds and scars are the stuff of character.
- accumulated sensory and cultural experiences
Some experiences we accumulate just by living in a physical and social world; others result from conditions that designers create.
- tech engineers desire
Luke Burgis sees Silicon Valley and authoritarian governments engineering desire, so people want what others want them to want.
- conformity and artistic novelty
Most people go through life in a coarse comfort, like petted animals, never realizing they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts.
- public beauty and novelty
The one thing the public dislike is novelty, because it frightens them as an assertion of the artist’s individualism.
- social classes partial realisation
No class is ever really conscious of its own suffering; it has to be told by others, and often disbelieves them.
- the slavery of the machine
To sweep the streets with joy would be appalling: all monotonous, dull, unintellectual labor must be done by machinery.
- true artist and amusing craftsman
The moment an artist takes notice of what other people want, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman.
- all hipsters look alike
The effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone into the same ditch.
- distinctions between good and poor taste
Taste, a pattern of preferences for some qualities of form over others, shifts with education, advertising and popular culture.
- Can't Get You Out of My Head
Adam Curtis’s emotional history of the modern world traces how inner feelings got mixed up with power in the age of individualism.
- personal names in tribal societies
Tribal societies, thought to have the least individuality, give the most individual names, drawn from dreams or deeds and rarely handed down.
- picaresque mode parody of the individuation
The picaresque is a psychopathic parody of the individuation epic, but individuation might be a paranoid organization of the picaresque.
- sophisticated therapeutic class
The “therapeutic class” arrives with stories already formed into the therapeutic genre, self-reflective and focused on the main character’s problems.
- Technological Society
- Gurdjieff and Kundabuffer
For Gurdjieff, the organ Kundabuffer, implanted in a cosmic catastrophe, left humanity anesthetized and permanently insane.
- three levels system in society
India’s caste system keeps the large majority in simple consciousness and has overall avoided the mass neurosis of Western societies.