The whole point of philosophy is prevention, not cure.
2 + 2 = 4
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows." — George Orwell
ABOUT
TAGS
LIKES
ARCHIVE
SUBSCRIBE
TWITTER
RECOMMENDED
Voluntaryism
Freedomain Radio
The Daily Bell
TheAntiTerrorist
The Voluntary Life
-
20120110
-
20120109
Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.
-
→
-
→
If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent.
-
20120103
“Attachment is impossible under such circumstances.”
Freedomain Radio: Working Moms, Daycare, and the War Against the Family
-
→
Our capacity for self-regulation depends upon our interactions with other people
…our capacity for self-regulation depends so much upon our interactions with other people that it might well be called “other-regulated self-regulation.” We’re not born knowing how to regulate ourselves – in fact, we’re alarmingly, chaotically, un-self-regulated creatures at birth, more so than most other newborn animals on earth. Loving parents, if we’re lucky, begin the long process of teaching us how to organize and regulate our inner selves – encoding their care and attention in the pliable neural fibers that integrate various regions throughout our brains. No matter how good we had it in the beginning, however, we’ll need reinforcement of these early lessons throughout life, and much remedial work if we were shortchanged early on. For Siegel, therapists are the remedial attachment experts and rescuers of the chronically un-self-regulated, and it is their job to, in effect, help rewire the frayed neural connections, reintegrate (or sometimes integrate for the first time) different areas and functions of the brain – implicit and explicit memory, right and left hemisphere, neocortex with limbic system and brain stem.
Mindsight: Dan Siegel Offers Therapists a New Vision of the Brain
-
20120101
For over ten years Gabor Mate has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Hepatitis C or HIV, and in many cases all four. But if Dr. Mate’s patients are at the end of the spectrum, there are many others among us who are also struggling with addictions. drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, compulsive work habits, sexual seeking or spending: what is amiss with our lives that we seek such destructive ways to comfort ourselves? And why is it so difficult to stop these habits, even as they threaten our health, jeopardize our relationships and corrode our spirits?
-
20111229
It’s hard to get enough of something that almost works
It became evident that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence were far more common in an obese population than was comfortably recognized. We slowly discovered that major weight loss is often sexually or physically threatening and that obesity, whatever its health risks, is protective emotionally. Ultimately, we saw that certain of our more intractable public health problems such as obesity are often also unconsciously attempted solutions to problems dating back to the earliest years but hidden by time, by shame, by secrecy, and by social taboos against exploring certain areas of life experience.
Putting it plainly in regard to obesity, we have seen that obesity is not the core problem. Obesity is the marker for the problem and sometimes is a solution. This is a profoundly important realization because none of us expects to cure a problem by treating its symptom.
The general principles underlying the unconscious, compulsive use of food as a psychoactive agent are common to any of the addictions. Whether we are talking about the next mouthful, the next drink, the next cigarette, the next sexual partner, or the next dose of whatever psychoactive chemical we might buy on the street, the concept is equally applicable: It’s hard to get enough of something that almost works.
The Permanente Journal: Obesity: Problem, Solution, or Both? by Vincent J Felitti, MD, et al.
More:
- YouTube: The Freedomain Radio Interview with Dr Felitti
- Quality of mother-toddler relationship linked to teen obesity -
→
How to be happy: a psychotherapist's view
Early relationships alter our brains before we learn to speak. As you learn together with your earliest caregivers how to regulate your emotions, your brain will be making lots of new pathways that are necessary for you to learn to become comfortable with your emotions and manage them for yourself. Your earliest bonds also serve as a model for all subsequent relationships, teaching you to form nourishing, enriching, and mutually beneficial relationships throughout your life. The bulk of these neural connections happen before you are two years old. In other words, much of the wiring up that determines how you respond emotionally and conduct relationships, happened pre-verbally. The logic, reason and language part of your brain develops so slowly that most of the patterns for how you feel are formed before you can reason with yourself and others.
-
20111227
Placebo: Heal Thyself
Mere belief that recovery is coming can by itself bring the recovery about.People rely on a variety of sources of information for foretelling the future. It is clear that the placebo’s message – to the effect that ‘this treatment will soon make you better’ – can be conveyed by any or all of them: learned associations, explicit instruction, rational argument, magical reasoning, trust in authority, and, of particular importance, subtle social cues of the kind called ‘bedside manner’ (so that, for example, the same placebo pill may work consistently better when administered by one doctor than another). But, by whatever route the message comes, the patient must have the right mind-set to receive it.
People have learned – their culture has taught them – that nothing is a better predictor of how things will turn out when they are sick (whether the pain will ease, whether the infection will abate, whether they will be nursed back to health) than the presence of doctors, medicines, and so on. …the very prospect of medical attention – the patient’s belief in it – works its magic for the simple reason, stemming from the general rule above, that for most of human history, once a sick person has had cause to think that he will soon be safe and well, he has had just the excuse he needs to bring on his own recovery as fast as possible.
The Placebo Effect by Nicholas Humphrey (PDF)
[Placebo] works for a reason, because it gives people a safety signal. It gives them the belief that they are in a secure environment in which they can now release their healing resources, they can afford to let down their guard. Placebos work because they suggest to people that the picture is rosier than it really is. Just like the artificial summer light cycle for the hamster, placebos give people fake information that it’s safe to cure them. Whereupon they do just that.
The Evolved Self-Management System by Nicholas Humphrey
More:
Health Management System
YouTube: Placebo: Cracking the Code
Placebos Work Even Without DeceptionImage: Placebo Pilules
-
20111212
"Differentiated parts become linked together."
“The brain is the social organ of the body.” “The brain is not limited to what is in skull but is the extended nervous system that is the mechanism by which energy and information flows.” “The nervous system is about connecting the inside with the outside.”
“The mind is not just the activity of the brain.” “The mind is in your body and in your relationships.” “Our minds are created by our relationships.” “Relationships are what the brain requires for its healthy growth.”
“Relationships are the sharing of energy and information flows. The mind is the emergent, self-organizing process arising from both our bodies and our relationships.” “The mind is an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”
“The self is not singular, it is distributed.”
“Mindsight is the way we can focus attention on the nature of the internal world. It’s how we focus awareness on ourselves – our own thoughts and feelings – and how we focus on the internal world of someone else.” “The way we develop mindsight is through our relationships with our parents, initially. Parents reflect to us what they see in our inner world – not just noticing our behaviours – but reflecting back to us our feelings.” “When parents don’t provide clear feedback then the lens of mindsight becomes distorted. We may not be able to see within ourselves or within other people.”
“When we make sense of our own lives we can strengthen our mindsight lens.” “Thoughts have a quality of absolute certainty. When you give people the power to do what the mind really does – which is shift degrees of probability of energy flow – and bring them down to this open space which we call awareness, you actually strengthen the capacity of the mind to not only see things clearly, but to integrate experience. This is the way you stay fully present to another person and also to yourself.”
“Integrative communication in relationships stimulates the growth of integrative fibres in the brain.” “When integration is present harmony unfolds. When integration is impaired you get either chaos or rigidity or both.”
“You can define what a healthy mind is.”
“Health is defined as integration.” “Integration is defined as the linkage of differentiated parts: You allow separate things to become specialized in what they do in a system and then you connect them to each other.” “Differentiated parts become linked together.”
Quotations taken from various video presentations by Dan Siegel.
-
→
-
20111211
Attachment in Psychotherapy
This eloquent book translates attachment theory and research into an innovative framework that grounds adult psychotherapy in the facts of childhood development. Advancing a model of treatment as transformation through relationship, the author integrates attachment theory with neuroscience, trauma studies, relational psychotherapy, and the psychology of mindfulness. Vivid case material illustrates how therapists can tailor interventions to fit the attachment needs of their patients, thus helping them to generate the internalized secure base for which their early relationships provided no foundation. Demonstrating the clinical uses of a focus on nonverbal interaction, the book describes powerful techniques for working with the emotional responses and bodily experiences of patient and therapist alike.
Book: Attachment in Psychotherapy (HIGHLY Recommended)
Video: Attachment in Psychotherapy -
20111210
Who are the Geolibertarians?
We Geolibertarians distinguish ourselves from right-wing, “royal” libertarians by our profound respect for the principle that one has private property in the fruits of one’s labor. This includes the fruits of mental labor and the results of reinvestment of legitimate private property (capital) in future production. We remain consistent in that respect by recognizing, as did the classic liberals, that land and raw natural resources are not the fruits of labor, but a common heritage to be accessed on terms that are equal under the law for everyone. The statist system of land tenure empowers non-producing landlords to extract the fruits of tenants’ labor. We also consider ourselves “green” in our respect for the earth as our common heritage. However, we clearly distinguish between land as common property and land as state property. Unlike left-wing or “watermelon” greens, we advocate governance of land in harmony with free market principles, and deny the right of statist bureaucracies to meddle in the affairs of individual land holders. We see ourselves as embracing the best attributes of the Green and Libertarian parties. Geolibertarians also believe in free trade, with no state support for monopoly privileges of any kind. We therefore oppose money monopolies, information monopolies, a host of lesser monopolies, and most of all, monopoly of the power to govern, as embodied by statist political systems.
-
20111209
A century ago a free market meant an economy free of rentiers, free of unearned income, free of landlords, and free of bankers.
