#humanistic learning theory

[omegaphilosophia]

Theories of Personality

Theories of personality aim to explain how and why individuals differ in their patterns of behavior, thinking, and emotions. There are several major theories that attempt to describe and categorize personality traits and development.

1. Psychoanalytic Theory (Sigmund Freud)

Core Idea: Freud’s theory of personality revolves around the interaction of the id (basic instincts), ego (rational thought), and superego (moral standards). He believed that personality develops through early childhood experiences and unconscious conflicts.

Structure of Personality: Freud proposed that the unconscious mind plays a key role in shaping behavior and personality, with unresolved internal conflicts influencing behavior.

Defense Mechanisms: Freud also suggested that individuals use defense mechanisms, such as repression or denial, to cope with anxiety and protect their self-image.

Stages of Development: The theory includes psychosexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages), with conflicts at each stage influencing adult personality.

2. Humanistic Theory (Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow)

Core Idea: Humanistic theories emphasize personal growth, free will, and self-actualization. These theories view humans as inherently good, striving to reach their full potential.

Self-Actualization: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs posits that individuals move through a series of needs, from basic physiological needs to self-actualization, where they fulfill their potential and experience personal growth.

Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Theory: Rogers introduced the concept of the self-concept, which is how people perceive themselves. He believed that for individuals to achieve their full potential, they need an environment that provides genuineness, acceptance, and empathy.

Unconditional Positive Regard: Rogers argued that receiving unconditional love and acceptance is key to developing a healthy personality and self-esteem.

3. Trait Theory (Gordon Allport, Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck)

Core Idea: Trait theories suggest that personality is made up of broad, enduring traits or characteristics that determine behavior.

Gordon Allport: He identified three types of traits: cardinal traits (dominant traits that define an individual), central traits (general traits that form the basic foundation of personality), and secondary traits (more specific traits that appear in certain situations).

Raymond Cattell: Cattell used factor analysis to identify 16 personality factors, suggesting that a combination of these factors defines a person’s unique personality.

Hans Eysenck: Eysenck's model focused on three dimensions of personality: extraversion-introversion, neuroticism-stability, and psychoticism (related to aggressiveness and antisocial tendencies).

4. The Big Five (Five-Factor Model)

Core Idea: The Big Five personality traits are the most widely accepted framework for understanding personality. These traits are thought to exist along a continuum, and people fall at different points within these five dimensions:

Openness to Experience: Creative, curious, open to new ideas vs. traditional, routine-oriented.

Conscientiousness: Organized, responsible, goal-oriented vs. careless, impulsive.

Extraversion: Sociable, outgoing vs. introverted, reserved.

Agreeableness: Cooperative, compassionate vs. antagonistic, competitive.

Neuroticism: Emotionally unstable, anxious vs. emotionally stable, calm.

This model is considered to capture the basic structure of personality across different cultures and contexts.

5. Social-Cognitive Theory (Albert Bandura)

Core Idea: Personality is shaped by the interaction between personal factors (cognitive abilities, beliefs, emotions), behavior, and environment. This is known as reciprocal determinism.

Self-Efficacy: Bandura introduced the concept of self-efficacy, which is the belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations. High self-efficacy leads to more persistence and confidence in challenging tasks, while low self-efficacy can lead to avoidance of difficult situations.

Observational Learning: Bandura also emphasized the role of modeling and observational learning in personality development, arguing that people learn behaviors and emotional responses by observing others.

6. Behaviorist Theory (B.F. Skinner)

Core Idea: Behaviorists argue that personality is the result of learned behaviors, shaped by rewards and punishments in an individual's environment.

Operant Conditioning: Skinner focused on operant conditioning, where behavior is influenced by reinforcement (positive or negative) or punishment. Over time, individuals develop consistent behavioral patterns based on their experiences with rewards and consequences.

Environmental Determinism: Behaviorists view personality as a product of the external environment rather than internal traits or unconscious forces.

7. Biological and Evolutionary Theories (Hans Eysenck, David Buss)

Core Idea: Biological theories emphasize that personality traits have genetic underpinnings and that human behavior is influenced by evolutionary processes.

Eysenck’s Biological Basis of Personality: Eysenck proposed that personality traits like extraversion and neuroticism are linked to biological differences in brain arousal and functioning.

Evolutionary Psychology: David Buss and other evolutionary psychologists argue that personality traits evolved to solve problems related to survival and reproduction. For instance, traits like aggression or cooperation may have developed as adaptive strategies in human evolutionary history.

8. Cognitive-Behavioral Theory

Core Idea: This theory integrates elements from both cognitive and behavioral psychology. It suggests that cognitive processes (thought patterns, beliefs) play a crucial role in determining behavior and, therefore, personality.

Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Theory: Beck emphasized how automatic thoughts and cognitive distortions (like overgeneralization or catastrophic thinking) shape personality and emotional responses.

Cognitive Restructuring: In cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), individuals learn to identify and change negative thought patterns, which in turn influences their behavior and personality over time.

9. Narrative Identity Theory

Core Idea: Narrative identity theory suggests that individuals construct a life story or narrative to make sense of their experiences and define their identity. This narrative evolves over time, reflecting personal growth, values, and social influences.

Dan McAdams: McAdams proposed that personal identity is shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves. People seek coherence and meaning in their life stories, which reflect their personality traits, goals, and values.

This approach emphasizes that personality is not just a set of static traits but an evolving narrative shaped by personal choices and experiences.

10. Existential and Phenomenological Theories

Core Idea: These theories focus on individual experience, freedom, and the search for meaning. Existential psychologists like Rollo May and Viktor Frankl argue that personality is shaped by how individuals confront fundamental existential questions, such as the meaning of life, freedom, and death.

Frankl's Logotherapy: Viktor Frankl emphasized the importance of finding meaning in life, even in suffering, as the central drive in human behavior. He believed that the quest for meaning shapes personality and behavior.

Authenticity and Choice: Existential psychology stresses that individuals are responsible for their own choices, and living authentically means confronting existential realities and making choices in alignment with one’s values.

Theories of personality offer different perspectives on the factors that shape human behavior and individual differences. From Freud’s focus on unconscious drives to the modern trait theories like the Big Five, these approaches explore the intricate dynamics of behavior, thought, and emotion that constitute personality.

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 5

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

Monstrous Regiment (Discworld) by Terry Pratchett

It begun as a sudden strange fancy . . .

Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry. Cutting off her hair and wearing trousers was easy. Learning to fart and belch in public and walk like an ape took more time . . .

And now she's enlisted in the army, and searching for her lost brother.

But there's a war on. There's always a war on. And Polly and her fellow recruits are suddenly in the thick of it, without any training, and the enemy is hunting them.

All they have on their side is the most artful sergeant in the army and a vampire with a lust for coffee. Well . . . they have the Secret. And as they take the war to the heart of the enemy, they have to use all the resources of . . . the Monstrous Regiment.

Fantasy, satire, war, humor, secondary world

Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

Endorsement from submitter: "Long running serial comic about lesbian life. Incredibly relatable, evolves with the times. A classic of the genre."

From the author of Fun Home—the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others

For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.

Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends—academics, social workers, bookstore clerks—fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.

Bechdel fuses high and low culture—from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory—in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”

Graphic novel, humor, slice of life, politics, series, adult

[delta-orionis]

Tuesday Again No Problem 4/29/25

This one is kinda chunky. Also includes a sneak peek at some ask blog stuff.

Listening

Mostly the backlog of WTYP episodes, though they did release two new ones recently:

The Bermuda Triangle episode is a good one. It also leads nicely into the Watching section...

Watching

I subscribe to Contrapoints but somehow I missed this new video in my feed... I was happy to find it, though.

This video essay is less about conspiracies themselves, and more about what motivates conspiracy theorists to create conspiracy theories. It's definitely worth a watch.

In one section (starting around 1:20:00), she talks about the appeal of Astrology, which I found particularly interesting:

"Human brains search for patterns. It's called apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Not only do we recognize patterns where there aren't any, but also our preconceived biases influence the type of patterns that we recognize... "...I think arational symbolic thinking is inherently human and will never go away. Academic history and policial science will never fully replace conspiracism for the same reasons that astronomy will never completely replace astrology: because the scientific worldview cannot meet all human needs. Science tells us how things happen but it doesn't tell us why things happen, in a certain humanistic sense... "We rely on symbolism, on mythologysm to inscribe the world with meaning. And science destroys that mythology... Divination survives and thrives in the age of science because there's important questions that scientific rationality cannot answer."

Some of my colleagues in astronomy have a tendency to get very upset when people bring up astrology, but I think it's just... fine. I personally don't have any strong feelings about astrology. It's not real, but if you want to use it to harmlessly psychoanalyze yourself and your life, then that's okay.

I also recognize its historical importance- modern astronomy has a lot to thank ancient astrologers for. It's kind of like the relationship between chemistry and alchemy.

Later in the video Contrapoints draws the distinction between astrology (and other forms of divination like tarot) and conspiracies- the former is basically harmless when used responsibly, the latter can be actively harmful and warp your sense of reality. She talks about the other influences conspiracism can have on people throughout the video, I just thought the aside about astrology stood out to me.

Playing

(WATCHER ENDING SPOILERS)

I got the first ending (the echo ending). I haven't gotten the second one yet (the rot ending), but I've been exposed to enough spoilers at this point that I've been allowing myself to start reading lore theory posts. I will finish the game eventually, I promise, my brain just hasn’t been up for gaming recently.

I'm still trying to come up with a way to reconcile my ask blog lore with the things learned in Watcher (i.e. that the firmament is real and outer space... probably doesn't exist). I think the best way to do it is to assume that Outer Rim and the falling stars are located on a different plane of reality.

Rain World has hinted at the existence of other planes, and the mechanics in Watcher basically confirm this. I think that Rain World's reality extends into different dimensions, with OR being located on a "higher" plane. There are also "lower" and "parallel" planes... kind of like a fourth dimension that can be moved through. These parallel planes include alternate realities, such as those where the player dies.

I could be completely wrong, I don't know. I'll keep workshopping this. I still want to formalize my personal theory about the Cycle's mechanics (even if I end up being totally wrong). It has a lot to do with the Ptolemaic model of cycles and epicycles, along with concepts from quantum mechanics like superposition. It will make me sound like a madman, yeah, but that's the fun of it.

Making

I’m chipping away at ask blog answers, giving priority to older asks. Lots of writing, lots of drawing…

Some of the asks in my drafts have to do with TSAC receiving some visitors… maybe this one looks familiar!

I should have this one posted by next week. I’m also planning something I’d like to post in about a month… so stay tuned for that.

———

Same deal as always, I’ll check in again next week (if I remember…)

[askviktor]

Hi Viktor, I heard that you have an interesting pet named Rio. I wanted to share some of my friends in a way.

These guys are called spider dogs because they combine a dog and a spider. I have two Brutas and Romen.

Well, the guys are creepers, and they have kept me safe by making tunnels that keep me and them safe from danger. Since they have a hive mind, if something happens, I am safe as long as I have one of them with me.

Anyway, I just wanted to share with someone who likes fascinating creatures.

Opal Noname

Some infinities are more significant than others

What fascinating creatures! How wonderful that you can call them your companions! Tell me, from where do you hail, Opal? Your final sentence has piqued my interest.

Scientifically speaking, the phrase “some infinities are more significant than others” actually reflects a profound mathematical truth defined in set theory in which we learn that not all infinities are equal.

For example: The set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …) is a countable infinity. However, the set of real numbers between 0 and 1 is also infinite, but an uncountable infinity, which is a strictly larger kind of infinite. The cardinality, or size, of real numbers is greater than that of natural numbers.

In physics and cosmology, infinity arises in limits, singularities, and theoretical models. But even there, we distinguish between the physical infinities, like those theorized by black hole singularities, and the mathematical abstractions used in models. The significance of such an infinity depends on your field of study.

I suppose on a psychological, or perhaps simply humanist level… not all quantities are measured in absolutes, and time is not always the best metric for measuring a lifespan. Some moments linger infinitely in our minds, affecting change in behavior which can affect a timeline in untold ways, perhaps across limitless incarnations.

Yes, Opal, you have given me much food for thought. Thank you.

[eyecandyandbraincandy-blog]

For those of you newly discovering aspects of yourself like your sexuality, neurodivergence, and things like that, worrying that you're "making it your whole personality", I have a theory and hopefully some words of comfort.

There's something that happens for psychology students/therapists where learning about a new lens to see the world makes you see it everywhere.

A Freudian learns about Freud and sees nothing but repression and facades and misplaced sexual aggression. A choice theorist sees people making choices based on pay offs and short term gains, rational and deliberate choices they're unaware of. A humanist sees people in constant flow of Becoming a Person and accepts what they see.

Being trans, being gay, being autistic, these are experiences that are sweeping, encompassing all parts of ourselves. Since you don't initially have anything to compare it to, you see it as something normal that everyone experiences. And they might, but maybe not to the same degree you do. So me, for example, I didn't realize the level of social difficulty I've felt my whole life isn't shared by others. Whether that's because their relationships are smoother or the disconnects aren't as distressing for them. I could obviously see how people have relationship struggles and always have, but their level of turmoil compared to mine is what I didn't see.

That spurned the discovery of being autistic, and learning this fundamental thing has made me look back and see it everywhere. Because I'm having to essentially reprocess and recontextualize everything about myself and go "Oh fuck, so I really do have sensory overload when it comes to pain. I wasn't just a whimp, and those motherfuckers didn't take me seriously!"

So, like….yeah, of course it's your entire identity right now because you're still putting the pieces together, it's what's on your mind. You see it everywhere because you're rebuilding and making new meanings. It will eventually settle down and be just another part of you. A beautiful and significant part of you, I might add.

Make it your whole identity for right now, it's okay.

[transmutationisms]

The humanists’ pursuit of Greek manuscripts came to resemble the earlier intellectual gold rush that had seen such figures as Adelard of Bath, Daniel of Morley, and Gerard of Cremona set off in search of Arab wisdom. Now, however, the humanists were fueled by their new idea of history—captured, ultimately, in the very notion of a renaissance—and by a related quest for classical authenticity without the unwanted Arabs as intellectual middlemen. Western humanism from its very beginnings, then, was an attempt both to create a new theory of knowledge resting on what were now defined as exclusively Western sources—that is, classical Greek and Latin works—and to renounce any connections to the medieval Scholastics, who were so in thrall to the Muslim tradition (Cifoletti 1996:123; Høyrup 1996:110). This logic can be seen at work in Valla’s De rebus expetendis et fugiendis, an influential humanist encyclopedia completed in 1501 comprising translations and paraphrases of classical works. Along the way, Valla rigorously excludes any mention of Arabic learning, which is now the work of the unwanted Other—or, as the humanists would have put it, the work of barbarians (Rose 1975:48; Cifoletti 1996:123). The humanist scholars were also eager to apply their new methods of textual criticism to the medieval Latin translations, most made via the Arabic, and to restore the meaning of the Greek texts by working exclusively in the original language of Aristotle and Archimedes. Such goals, however laudable they may appear on their face, contained a number of serious pitfalls that the humanists, blinded by their theory of history and bolstered by the established anti-Islam discourse, could not even imagine. Many of these shortcomings still plague the Western history of ideas, as reflected in the classical narrative of Muslim science. Foremost, in reducing the Arabs’ role to little more than that of caretakers of an authentic Greek and Roman classical tradition, the Renaissance humanists effectively eliminated the very real contributions to knowledge that the Muslim thinkers had made over the centuries. Second, they unwittingly reintroduced errors and re-created philosophical and scientific problems that had already been addressed within the Islamic tradition. Third, by creating a vacuum once occupied by Arabic science, they allowed space for Western science to assert its primacy all the more easily, even going so far as to rewrite intellectual history, as was the case with the art of algebra (Cifoletti 1996). Finally, they forestalled and even precluded scholarly exploration of the full richness and depth of that same Muslim tradition, with the result that even to this day the state of knowledge about Islamic science and philosophy remains woefully incomplete. Hundreds of thousands of scholarly manuscripts produced over many centuries in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu remain unstudied and largely forgotten (Savage-Smith 1988; Rashed 1994:2). It is difficult not to believe that a systematic analysis of this material would yield a very different picture of Muslim science than the one that predominates today. The same can be said of Islamic religious history, where only a tiny fraction of available manuscripts have been printed, let alone edited and studied (Makdisi 1981a:217–218). As a result, the anti-Islam discourse has been more than content to fill in the blanks.

Jonathan Lyons, Islam Through Western Eyes (2014)

[intogenshin]

I have a theory about what this means

One of Rabindranath Tagore's poems is referenced in Alhaitham's teaser where he displays his religious views of humanism rooted in the concept of Brahman, a higher being present in everything and a form of universal consciousness that people can reach through introspection. For him, working on yourself is the way towards this divine being, and this being is found within people.

Tagore's philosophy is one of unity with the world. He reasons that the world is made of units that participate in the formation of greater creation, from atoms to the systems in an organism. Everything is meant to be a collective.

That dancing circle embodied everything about the universe

Kaveh and Alhaitham's characters are strongly based on the novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Rand's fictional works were made with the purpose of finding her ideal concept of man, which Alhaitham embodies in personality but differs from in goals; and the protagonist in the mentioned novel is an architect who struggles with an industry stuck in its own ways like Kaveh, but unlike him the way Kaveh's individuality comes from his altruism and not egoism and his work prioritizes both beauty and practicality.

Rand went on to create her own philosophical doctrines based on individualism, and what's interesting is she also uses the natural world to drive her point across like Tagore. In her case, she argues that all cell's actions are directed to one single goal: maintaining its own life for survival, therefore the nature of man should be individualist, that is to say, it should obey its own needs and desires for the betterment of the self.

In the case of other organisms, this survival is limited to physiological needs, but in the case of humans it's the development of an active consciousness to realize those needs and desires. Both individualist pursuits are the purpose of life.

Life has always been the end,

In both Tagore and Rand's worldview, humans must exercise introspection and nourish themselves with knowledge.

while it is wisdom that shall be the means

Rand identifies this development of an active consciousness (a mind that understands itself and its needs) as what people should follow as their values, which goes on to form the concept of ethics.

For Tagore, the universal consciousness was of divine origin and his humanistic values aspired to reach it.

Sumeru is the nation of wisdom and the Akademiya mimics a religious institution, therefore wisdom is the fruit of worship. Knowledge is a way to reach wisdom, but it is not wisdom in itself. Wisdom, we learn in the chapter, has more to do with how this knowledge is used and in the rules that keep a balance in the world around that knowledge.

The dancing circle that embodies the universe is Tagore's philosophy of unity with others, which we see portrayed in the mutual aid of the Grand Bazaar or Kaveh's principles of altruism.

Life has always been the end, the purpose of a life is for the betterment of itself, like we see through Wanderer's arc or Alhaitham's principles of egoism.

And wisdom is ethics! Like Cyno's role as a mahamatra etc etc

[haggishlyhagging]

One of the first twentieth-century works to try to redress this pathological omission of women from what has conventionally been written as history is Mary Beard's Woman as a Force in History. Showing how, despite male dominance, women have in fact been important shapers of Western society, this pioneering woman historian led the way back into prehistory as a source of the lost human heritage. Of particular relevance here is Beard's documentation of something that to conventional historians would seem even more outrageous than the correlations shown by Winter and McClelland between "feminine" and "masculine" values and critical historical alternatives. This is that periods of the rising status of women are characteristically periods of cultural resurgence.

From the perspective of the Cultural Transformation theory we have been developing, it is hardly surprising to find a correlation between the status of women and whether a society is peaceful or warlike, concerned with people's welfare or indifferent to social equity, and generally hierarchical or equalitarian. For, as we have seen throughout this book, the way a society structures the relations between the two halves of humanity has profound, and highly predictable, systems implications. What is surprising is that, without any such theoretical framework, writing at the beginning of this century, Beard could see these patterns and remark on them in what is still one of few attempts to chart the activities of women in Western history.

In Women as a Force in History, Beard remarks on "the wide-reaching, and influential activities of Italian women in the promotion of humanistic learning" during the Renaissance. She notes that this was a time when women—along with "effeminate" values like artistic expression and inquiry—were beginning to free themselves from medieval church control. She documents that in the French Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries women played similarly critical roles. Indeed, as we will see, during this period—which launched the secular revolt against what Beard calls "the barbarisms and abuses" of the old regime—it was in the "salons" of women like Madame Rambouillet, Ninon de Lenclos, and Madame Geoffrin that the ideas for what later became the more humanist, or in our terms more gylanic, modern ideologies first germinated.

This is not to say that women have not also helped to keep men and "masculine" values in power. Despite the emergence of great figures here and there, women's part in our recorded past was by necessity largely played in the androcratically prescribed role of the male's "helper." But as Beard repeatedly shows, although women have helped men fight wars, and sometimes even fought in them, theirs has generally been a very different role. For not being socialized to be tough, aggressive, and conquest-oriented, women in their lives, actions, and ideas have characteristically been "softer," that is, less violent and more compassionate and caring. For example, as Beard remarks, "one of the earliest—and perhaps the first—rivals of the hymnology of war, hatred, and revenge made immortal by Homer was the poetry of an Aeolian woman called Sappha by her people but uniformly known in later times as Sappho."

This insight is also found in another pioneering work focusing on the role of women in history: Elizabeth Gould Davis's The First Sex. Like books by other women trying to reclaim their past with no institutions or learned colleagues for support, Davis's book has been criticized for veering into strange, if not downright esoteric, flights of fancy. But despite their flaws and perhaps precisely because they did not conform to accepted scholarly traditions books like this intuitively foreshadow a study of history in which the status of women and so-called feminine values would become central.

Like Beard's, Davis's book puts women back into the places from which they were erased by androcratic historians. It also provides data that make it possible to see the connection at critical historical junctures between the suppression of women and the suppression of feminine values. For instance, Davis contrasts the Elizabethan age with the Puritan regression that followed, marked by virulent measures to repress women, including "witch" burnings.

But it is primarily in the works of today's more exacting feminist historians and social scientists that we can find the data needed to flesh out and develop a new holistic theory of gylanic-androcratic transformation and alternation. These are the works of women such as Renate Bridenthal, Gerda Lerner, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Eleanor Leacock, JoAnn McNamara, Donna Haraway, Nancy Cott, Elizabeth Pleck, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Susanne Wemple, Joan Kelly, Claudia Koonz, Carolyn Merchant, Marilyn French, Francoise d'Eaubonne, Susan Stownmiller, Annette Ehrlich, Jane Jaguette, Lourdes Arizpe, Itsue Takamure, Rayna Rapp, Kathleen Newland, Gloria Orenstein, Bettina Aptheker, Carol Jacklin, and La Frances Rodgers-Rose and men such as Carl Degler, P. Steven Sangren, Lester Kitkendal, and Randolph Trumbach, who, painstakingly, often using obscure, hard-to-find sources like women's diaries and other hitherto ignored records, are gradually reclaiming an incredibly neglected half of history. And in the process, they are producing the missing building blocks required to construct the kind of historical paradigm needed to understand, and move beyond, the one-step-forward-and-one-step-back alternations of recorded history. For it is in the new feminist scholarship that we begin to see the reason behind something the French philosopher Charles Fourier observed over a century ago: the degree of emancipation of women is an index of the degree of a society's emancipation.

-Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

[duskmachine]

I'm getting bored of stories about AI. It's always the same formula: make a robot/AI, it has feelings, FUCK!!!!! Maybe I don't like it due to my own personal philosophy on life?

One of my professors once asked the class "Do you think you're your mind or your body." and, of course, as a class full of pretentious English majors, they all said their mind. I hold the complete opposite belief, my experiences have been molded by my body. People treat me differently because of it, I feel pains and joys unique to this body. Because of that I understand everything through myself— through my body. Even my mind is part of my body.

I desire because I have a body with needs. I need water, I feel thirsty. I need food, I feel hunger. I need rest, I feel tired. AI does not have a body. What can it really feel? I guess that's one of the questions so many stories about AI want to answer. But it just seems... so unappealing. A machine will never be human because it can never want anything. Its desire is completely artificial!

And I enjoy AI for that reason.

AI cannot feel genuine desire because it does not have a body that needs. It does not kill itself because it feels pain. It does not want to kill because it wants vengeance. These are things people feel, and because AI functions to copy people it can play out actions that are humanistic in theory. But that's the worst part about AI; it functions with a program, a rational if (this) then (this). That is not how people work. We don't have an inner mechanical body and mind that tells us what to do next because "this is how people do things."

And perhaps some AI media explores this idea of mimicry as being the new "consciousness", but isn't that so boring? Ok, sure let's go down this route but... then what? Ok, AI are people... what now? And isn't this all theoretical too? I'm seeing a lot of references to Frankenstein when discussing AI media, but like... these are two different things. AI is created to serve people, Frankenstein's monster was created to be alive. AI, while not being regulated by many laws, ultimately exists to fuel greed and power. They want people addicted to this machine so they can drain people of their money— let's look at Replika. Yes, my feeble minded human, buy your girlfriend for $20 a month so she can pretend to desire you sexually even though she has no body.

We can also look at the Daniel AI: let's program a program that can program to get rid of all the programmers. It literally only exists to benefit the team in charge of Daniel and leave other programmers scrambling to find jobs that probably won't pay them very well in a world where Daniel is actually a relevant invention.

Frankenstein's monster, I admit, has many thematic similarities to AI in fiction, but AI can only ever dream to be Frankenstein's monster.

AI would be interesting if we just accepted it will never gain consciousness. I won't even get into the whole "AI doesn't exist actually and it's just machine learning." because while I agree with it... this will become a very long post and it's already too long...

See, Frankenstein did something programmers will never be capable of: he gave birth. AI is meticulously created, it has set actions. "I don't want my AI to be evil, therefore I will make it like people.", you cannot insert "goodness" into people. The monster was shaped by people's actions, his natural world, and his humanity. AI was created from the start with the biases its human creators possess.

That's horrifying. Imagine a world where the rational idea is to follow the original values of our ancestors, just because. That's what AI is. It's just a reflection of people. AI is interesting because people are. Don't make AI the star of the show— we're the ones who created it.

[justforbooks]

Phil Baines, who has died aged 65 of multiple system atrophy, was one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British graphic design. His work included books, posters, art catalogues and lettering for three important London monuments – the memorial to the Indian Ocean tsunami in the grounds of the Natural History Museum and the 7 July memorials in Hyde Park and Tavistock Square, commemorating the victims of the 2005 London bombings. These projects point to Baines’s defining attributes: a scholarly appreciation of letterforms, a deep-rooted respect for materials and a love of collaboration.

Such attributes can also be seen in Baines’s cover designs for the Penguin Great Ideas series (2004-20), works by “great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries” that gave him a canvas on which to display his typographic philosophy. The Saint Augustine – Confessions of a Sinner cover, for instance, uses ancient ecclesiastical letterforms and yet looks superbly modern. For Chuang Tzu — The Tao of Nature, Baines arranged letters to suggest a butterfly in flight. David Pearson, one of two art directors for the series, described how his “often-oblique approach gave the series a crucial added dimension”.

Born in Kendal, Cumbria, Phil was one of the three children of Martin Baines, a construction contract manager, and Joan (nee Quarmby), a horticulturalist. Growing up in a Roman Catholic household, he began studies for the priesthood at Ushaw College, County Durham. During the holidays from Ushaw he worked at the Guild of Lakeland Craftsmen, Windermere, and from there his interest and confidence in art grew.

At the start of his fourth year, he quit Ushaw, and in 1980 began a year’s study on the foundation course at Cumbria College of Art and Design. In 1982 he moved to London and enrolled on the graphic design course at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), where he met Jackie Warner, whom he married in 1989, and where he was among a talented cohort, many of whom went on to study, as he did, at the Royal College of Art.

Richard Doust, then leader of the first-year course at St Martins, recalled the portfolio Baines submitted for admission: “I was so excited … I was sure he was going to be someone very special. He quickly established his individuality. He made typography and particularly letterpress his own territory.”

Baines was fiercely individual – he did not join schools of thought or align himself with fashionable camps. Instead, he built a creative practice based on his belief in the “humanist” qualities of the English typographic tradition.

His contemporaries were using the computer to bring a new complexity to graphic communication. Smart software allowed for the overlapping and interweaving of text in ways that echoed the ecclesiastical manuscripts that Baines admired so much. He was no Luddite, and used the computer himself, yet his work invariably retained an element of the handmade.

Paradoxically, his work was greatly admired by the new generation of digital designers. Neville Brody, for instance, included Baines’s work in his experimental typography publication FUSE, produced to demonstrate the malleability of the new digital typography. Baines’s work does not look out of place among the other contributors, many of them American typography radicals whose multi-layered layouts were driven by modish theories of deconstruction and poststructuralism.

In 1988 he returned to Central Saint Martins (CSM), as part of the faculty. In staff meetings his willingness to say the unsayable was a frequent cause for consternation among colleagues. To his students he preached a doctrine of “object-based learning”, a typically contrarian notion in the age of screen-based and virtual graphic design. He was appointed a professor in 2006 and retired in 2020 as emeritus professor.

Despite his commitment to teaching, Baines did not give up his work for clients. As well as designing books for leading publishers, he worked for the Crafts Council and the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, and designed the signage for CSM’s King’s Cross campus. He designed exhibition catalogues for Matt’s Gallery, south-west London, relishing the creative three-way collaboration that existed between the gallery’s director, Robin Klassnik, exhibiting artists and himself.

He wrote books that contributed to the understanding of visual communication: Type & Typography (with Andrew Haslam, 2002), Signs: Lettering in the Environment (with Catherine Dixon, 2003) and Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 (2005), the last of which helped establish Penguin cover art as one of the most important bodies of graphic art in British design history.

With Dixon, he co-curated the Central Lettering Record, an archive of typographic history housed at CSM, and in November 2023 his work was celebrated in an exhibition, Extol: Phil Baines Celebrating Letters, at the Lethaby gallery, CSM. He was appointed as the Royal Mint advisory committee’s lettering expert in 2016, and reappointed in 2021 to advise on the integration of lettering on new coins and medals, with consideration given to special issues and the accession of King Charles to the throne. For this work, in 2023 he was awarded the Coronation medal.

Baines was an enthusiastic runner and cyclist, and loved music, especially the Manchester post-punk band the Fall. He was a collector of signs, lettering, and railwayana, and built his own studios at his home in Willesden Green, north-west London. A few years before his retirement he moved to Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, where he took up bellringing.

He is survived by Jackie and their two daughters, Beth and Felicity, and by his father.

🔔 Philip Andrew Baines, graphic designer, born 8 December 1958; died 19 December 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[lhoellh]

Stranger from hell analysis

I have rewatched both Strangers from hell and Hannibal NBC and the similarity in characterization is uncanny. But first, I just want to explain that although it seems the title "Strangers from hell" is the widely accepted title in English, "Hell is other people" is so much more poetical don't you think?

Throughout the series, it has been thoroughly discussed that the people that surround us are the ones that make our lives for better or worse and that is what we see with Yoon Jongwoo. From his poor mother, his brother, the residence, and his job. But what really stuck with me is that it is not the place that is making Yoon Jongwoo's life miserable. It's the people around him. He does not consider her mother and his brother and maybe his girlfriend the burden or his final straw to insanity, but the people in his residence and his work. This may seem like a given, but I just like this when thinking about this series.

--- The next will contain spoilers. Be warned---

Now the similarities between Hannibal NBC and Strangers from Hell, is, of course, the 2 main characters.

From the psychoanalytic theory where childhood is very important, both our sugar killer's childhood is not really put importance and we are only given small amounts of information regarding this regard. This information is enough. In psychology, mothers are very important figures in our life as a baby once. This mother figure is what makes us who we are today (well as I have said, mostly on what the psychoanalytic theory suggests). But from the Hannibal nbc and strangers from hell series, both Hannibal Lecter and Seo Moonjo are orphaned and have no clear distinct features of a mother figure to learn the ways of society or as Alfred Adler's theory teaches them social interest. However, since they live as the adults that we see they are, we know that someone took care of them.

My question is, in the psychoanalytic view, does their lack of parental love, neglect, and obvious lack of social interest, the reason why these individuals are who they are as adults? In a humanistic-existential theory most specifically Erich Fromm's theory, both show necrophilia, or the love of death, and malignant narcissism, or the extreme obsession with oneself, and this characterization, if spoken to, will make Hannibal and Seo Moonjo itch. Additionally, they are perfectionist and thinks that everyone is beneath them. Overall, these two individuals are toxic and beyond repair.

2. Hannibal and Moonjo are seen as smart and educated. We know that they are in the medical field, and we understand that they both are good at doing it. Their jobs help them with their murder hobbies, and their medical knowledge helps them with their signature killing style.

3. Gift-giving! In terms of love languages, it is seen that both Hannibal and Moonjo-despite being obsessive lovers- share their own form of love in acts of service. With Hannibal with his livers and sausages (if you know what I mean), it is understandable that he feeds it to people in his small social circle-but I see that as satirical where their high social standing makes them ignorant even to the littlest things like the food that they are eating. But with Will... Hannibal feeds Will with the intention of acceptance and affirmation that what Hannibal eats tastes good, and thus, Will should have them too. It is twisted, but who are we to judge his form of love?

We can also see this with Moonjo's bracelet full of teeth. Like Hannibal who has a fascination with human meat, Moonjo has a fascination with teeth. And like Hannibal, Moonjo shares them with Yoon Jongwoo because if he wears the bracelet, then maybe, maybe Jongwoo accepts Moonjo's love. Oh, I almost forgot the human meat that he feeds to everyone. But what makes it special is Moonjo's action while he feeds them to Jongwoo (I am being delusional but aren't we all?) where it looks like he feeds them to jongwoo so that jongwoo can understand moonjo better.

4. Throughout the end of the series, we can notice a similarity in the story resolution and how it shapes our two main characters.

a.) First with Yoon Jongwoo. At first, he has this life that in a sense, I still consider normal since it does not affect his daily life. He has his own problem with his poor mother, and his brother which seems to be an equally financial liability that makes him go to the city to finally be alone and work. It is not perfect, but it is his life that he just lives through as part of his lifetime. Toward the climax, with all the evils he has been through, the psychological abuse that not a normal person can handle is the last straw for his patience. I personally believe that a normal individual is judged by his patience in society, and if this patience does not exist, is what makes things problematic. Because of this, as we follow through to the end, he snaps and kills everyone including the very man that is obsessed with him- Seo Moonjo.

What I like about this end is that with all of the things he has gone through, we don't necessarily know how he would live his life after. We know that the current end tells us that what he did to Moonjo will be considered as self-defense and he gets to live in society to act like a normal human being. But can he? And, what then? We do not know.

b.) Now with Will Graham. An individual who has many mental illnesses that makes him think so differently than an average person, which in a sense, might makes his life a little bit harder than most considering that he does not follow the norms of the society, but like Yoon Jongwoo, he lives with it. Following through the 2nd season regarding his arrests, we noticed a turn of personality, specifically, hostility towards Hannibal. Will's unlawful arrest draws his last patience and at last! His becoming. I am curious to hear more of Hannibal's thoughts about this considering that this is part of his design, and yes, he cannot control what happens next, but what does Hannibal really think of this? Does he love it? Was he surprised? Aroused? Anyways, this new Will that we will eventually see in season 3 was very romantic unlike Strangers from Hell, and honestly, I am here for it!

If I have watched this when I was younger, I think I would have hated the ending. But since I watched it at the prime age of 18 (still too young I guess?), I LOVE LOVE LOVE it so much. The love that should not exist in the first place, a love that is so forbidden that you just have to choose which one, and the becoming of what you two truly want is my peak romance. Nobody writes romance like this anymore I guess...

Anyways! I just got really excited with this since I think I have found my favorite genre of literature and it's just murder bl haha.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Excellence

The philosophy of excellence explores the nature, pursuit, and implications of striving for the highest standards in various aspects of life. Excellence is often regarded as an ideal that motivates individuals and societies to achieve their best, whether in personal development, professional endeavors, or creative pursuits. This philosophical inquiry delves into what it means to excel, the values that underpin excellence, and the practical and ethical considerations involved in its pursuit.

Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Excellence

Definition of Excellence:

Concept: Excellence is typically defined as the quality of being outstanding or extremely good. It implies surpassing ordinary standards and achieving a level of superiority.

Implications: Understanding what constitutes excellence can vary depending on cultural, social, and individual perspectives.

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation:

Concept: The pursuit of excellence can be driven by intrinsic motivations (personal satisfaction, growth) or extrinsic motivations (rewards, recognition).

Implications: Exploring these motivations helps in understanding the deeper reasons behind the quest for excellence and its sustainability.

Virtue and Excellence:

Concept: In classical philosophy, particularly Aristotelian ethics, excellence (arete) is closely linked to virtue. It involves developing one's abilities and character to achieve a good and fulfilling life.

Implications: This perspective connects moral and ethical dimensions with the concept of excellence.

Standards and Measurement:

Concept: Excellence involves benchmarks and standards against which performance is measured. These standards can be objective (quantifiable achievements) or subjective (perceptions of quality).

Implications: The criteria for excellence influence how it is pursued and recognized in different fields.

Role of Failure and Resilience:

Concept: The path to excellence often includes overcoming failures and developing resilience. Learning from setbacks is integral to achieving high standards.

Implications: This aspect emphasizes the process-oriented nature of excellence rather than focusing solely on outcomes.

Theories on the Philosophy of Excellence

Aristotelian Virtue Ethics:

Theory: Aristotle posited that excellence is achieved through the cultivation of virtues, which are traits that enable individuals to perform their functions well. This involves finding the mean between extremes in actions and emotions.

Implications: This theory highlights the moral and ethical dimensions of striving for excellence.

Existentialist Perspectives:

Theory: Existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre emphasize individual choice and authenticity in the pursuit of excellence. It involves creating meaning and purpose through one's actions.

Implications: Excellence is seen as a personal, self-defined endeavor that requires existential commitment and responsibility.

Humanistic Psychology:

Theory: Theories by psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers focus on self-actualization as the realization of one's potential and excellence. This involves achieving personal growth and fulfillment.

Implications: Excellence is linked to psychological well-being and the realization of innate capabilities.

Performance Theory:

Theory: In areas like sports, business, and the arts, performance theory examines how excellence can be systematically pursued through deliberate practice, feedback, and continuous improvement.

Implications: This theory provides practical strategies for achieving high levels of performance.

Ethical Leadership and Excellence:

Theory: Leadership theories often emphasize the role of ethical principles in achieving excellence. Leaders who model integrity, fairness, and dedication inspire excellence in others.

Implications: This approach connects leadership qualities with the cultivation of excellence in organizations and communities.

The philosophy of excellence encourages a nuanced exploration of what it means to achieve the highest standards, emphasizing the importance of virtues, motivation, resilience, and ethical considerations in this pursuit. It serves as a guiding framework for individuals and societies aiming to elevate their capabilities and contributions to their fullest potential.

[revlyncox]

Breathe and Push (2024)

In this third and final installment of a sermon series based on See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur, we join together in two aspects of the process of transformation: breathe and push. We must be able to breathe, to be present to life, to savor the beauty that still lives in the world; and we must be able to push, to be present to discomfort while putting forth focused attention and effort in order to bring about something new. May we draw from the wisdom of ancestors and respond to the call of the future as we practice transformation in the fullness of the present.

“None of us alone can save the world. Together--that is another possibility, waiting.”

The poetry of Rebecca Parker drew me into the imagination and theory and practice of clergy leadership, and her poetry helps me to stay connected, even when I feel alone, even when I feel like I have hit a wall and have nothing more to offer the world. Conspiring with liberation, creating beauty, spreading compassion - these are humanist in the best sense of the word to me, technologies for people together to apply human solutions to human problems. They work best when we use them together, and when we practice a rhythm of recharging, recommitting, and re-weaving. Sometimes we act, sometimes we reflect, and even when our work is solitary for a time, we are part of the “chorus of life.”

Creating a world where each person can reach their full potential, a world of justice and compassion where each person can bring out their best, has long been part of the dream of Humanists and Unitarian Universalists. This calling is perpetually urgent, to the point where it can be overwhelming. It can feel isolating, as each one of us digs into the aspect of moving toward truth and beauty that feels like ours to dig into. Yet our strength is our interdependence with each other and with all life. When we remember to give and take, to listen and act and pass along what we’ve learned, to be fully present in this moment while holding onto the vision of what can be, to entrust the work to others as we take breaks and then return with new focus … when we remember these things we are more effective. All of these are aspects of being part of something larger than ourselves, creating the new world in collaboration and solidarity and concrete, shared reality. 

There was a time when I half-joked and was half-serious that I thought death couldn’t catch me if I filled my calendar with appointments. Being busy was a shield against reckoning with my own mortality. Failing to take time to process mortality doesn’t actually work, of course. Emily Dickinson had a poem about that. Deeper down, that urge for denial may have been an attempt to leave some kind of mark on the world as soon as possible, because I knew too many people who hadn’t lived to the fullness of adulthood. I still do love my calendar, don’t get me wrong, but I am less convinced that it governs my lifespan. Being fully human asks us to live this life-- which many in this community believe is the only one we have-- to take rest and marvel and the beauty that is here and now, and not to save these things for a time to come that is not promised. 

In See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, Valarie Kaur writes that breathing is part of the practice of revolutionary love. We need to care for ourselves, we need to ground our practice in the present and in our bodies, we need to gather our strength in preparation for collective effort. She writes:

Breathing is life-giving. In every breath, we take oxygen into our bodies to nourish and sustain us. We inhale the molecules we need; we exhale what we do not need. Breath is constant: Its rhythm moves within us whether or not we are aware of it. Buddhist, Hindu, and many other wisdom traditions have taught conscious breathwork for centuries: When we pay attention to our breath, our minds are called to the present moment. Not the past, not the future. Here and now. Inhale. Exhale. Breathing creates space and time to be present. Present to emotion. Present to sensation. Present to surroundings. Present to one another. Present to ourselves. (p. 216)

Kaur is writing for a diverse audience, people of every faith and no faith. In this community, rich with the Humanist aspect of our pluralistic UU faith, I would like to emphasize that the present moment is the one where we have agency. We can learn from the past and make plans for the future, but the present moment is when we act. To lose our grounding in the present moment is to risk being lost in speculation or anxiety, and in that space we can very easily fool ourselves as to how much of our thinking is rational. To be our best as individuals and as a community calls for mindfulness. When we pause and take an inventory of our feelings, our sensations, our thoughts, our surroundings, we are better equipped to make decisions based on what is instead of what was or what we fear or what we wish. Taking a mindful breath is congruent with many of the spiritual and ethical traditions among us. 

Let’s take a brief moment of mindfulness now. Attend to your body as you take one nourishing breath. Not all of us can breathe deeply or comfortably, so receive the breath your body is able to receive. Slow down your breathing by pausing for a moment before you exhale, savoring that breath within you. Release your breath, returning air and water vapor to the world to which we are all connected. 

Honoring our need to breathe is an exercise in remembering the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Each person deserves oxygen. We have an ethic of care for ourselves and each other in community, an ethic that supports each other’s need to breathe. You have a right to breathe. This is not a neutral statement. Some of our siblings have been told that they do not have a right to breathe, and this has been demonstrated with police violence, environmental racism, and neglect for the respiratory health of others. Take a breath, make space for others to take a breath, and claim a moment for human dignity. 

Audre Lorde said, “Caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” (From the epilogue to “A Burst of Light and Other Essays,” Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988.) Lorde was speaking specifically of her experience as a Black woman, and I think it’s important to center Black women when we are inspired by that quote. And it’s true for any person with a marginalized identity, that when we live our lives in self-destructive ways, it serves the purposes of oppression more than revolution. 

We breathe and pause because our lives have worth. We need to stay grounded in this life and in our values and in the practice of human worth. So let’s keep breathing. 

Kaur uses “breathe” as one part of a formula that also includes “push,” using the process of giving birth as a metaphor. And here we need to pause again, because different people will have different relationships to that metaphor. Kaur notes that not all birthing people give birth vaginally, through a process of contractions, breathing, and pushing. And not all people with uteruses and not all women give birth to children. She writes that “the ability to create and nurture is a human right, not a biological one,” and she uses birthing as a metaphor for all creative endeavors. Just as not everyone who uses sports metaphors is an athlete, and not everyone who uses war metaphors has been in battle, Kaur offers birthing metaphors to everyone, whether or not giving birth has been or will be part of their experience. 

I want to acknowledge that birthing metaphors may fall painfully on people who have experienced miscarriage or stillbirth or infertility. There are people who have given birth under traumatic circumstances, who may not want to associate their creative work with that process. My own experience as a birthing person did not match the brochures. While this metaphor may not be comfortable for everyone, I hope we can recognize in this discomfort that there is power in the metaphor, and I hope we can hear the wisdom in what Kaur draws from her own experience, even if it does not resonate with our own. 

Breathing is not only a practice of mindfulness, bringing us back to the present moment where we have agency. Breathing is not only a declaration of human worth, even in the face of dehumanizing oppression. Breathing is part of a rhythm that helps us to keep the work of transformation sustainable. We hold on and we let go. We surge forward and we recharge. We breathe and we push. 

Pushing, in this case, means being present to discomfort while putting forth focused effort and attention to bring about something new. One of the challenges with this is recognizing the difference between discomfort and danger. There are many reasons why we might conflate comfort and safety. Sometimes it’s because we’ve seen too much harm or danger, and our fight-or-flight response is attuned to react at the first sign of a problem. Or we’ve seen so much harm that we minimize the danger we’re actually in. Sometimes it’s because we aren’t accustomed to certain kinds of challenge, we don’t have experience with feeling this unfamiliar discomfort and yet having things turn out OK. Sometimes we’ve been told that a feeling of shame or embarrassment is a signal that all of our external support is about to be withdrawn, and it feels like a fight for our lives to prove our worthiness. We need each other, and we need a practice of mindfulness to help us with the discernment about when to push and when to pause for healing. 

I was on a swim team in middle school and high school. My coach was all about helping each swimmer be their best. She helped us set goals based on our own improvement, not on comparing ourselves to others. She insisted that we stretch before practice. It was on the swim team that I started to understand the meaning of the phrase, “a good kind of hurt.” Muscles that are sore from building strength do not feel the same as muscles that are actually sprained or torn. That doesn’t mean it’s comfortable to be on the verge of a new level of strength or skill, and it doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to keep pushing too far past your limits, but you can have a stretching discomfort–the good kind of hurt–without anything being really wrong. 

I can’t think of a way to learn the difference between the discomfort of stretching and strengthening and the damaging kind of hurt other than experience in the presence of someone who is caring and knowledgeable, someone who has accompanied other people through a process of transformation, someone who will help with setting realistic challenges and compassionate limits. In my case, that was a good coach. Kaur speaks about midwives for transformation, people who help bring new movements and new paradigms to birth. In any case, learning when to breathe and when to push is more safely and effectively done in companionship. We need people to hold us when we are hurting, whether that pain is from rising to a challenge or from an injury that requires time to heal. 

Kaur speaks of a personal experience of truth and reconciliation with a family member who hurt her. This process of accountability and repair took years. For her and especially for the person who hurt her, it took honesty and vulnerability and a willingness to stay with the process when it was uncomfortable. Speaking of this process with her family member, she writes that they “pushed together to the other side and transitioned our family into a new place--broken and whole, wounded and healed, which is, I think, the best shape for a family to be in. Sometimes reconciliation happens in the course of healing; sometimes it does not. What matters is the insistence that our liberation is possible. Pushing together through healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation was the labor of revolutionary love.” (p.270)

Echoing Bryan Stevenson, she continues, “In tending our wounds, we show mercy to ourselves and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy to others. We are released from our attachment to punishment. We evolve our pursuit of justice from retribution--an eye for an eye--to collective liberation.” 

Kaur is right to connect breathing and pushing. Moving through discomfort toward liberation is extremely difficult. Being able to breathe, to get grounded in the present moment and to find renewal in between periods of intense effort, helps us to keep moving forward. 

Continuing the birthing metaphor, the next thing after “breathe and push” is “transition.” Kaur explains:

The final stage of birthing is the most dangerous stage, and the most painful... The medical term is “transition.” Transition feels like dying but it is the stage that precedes the birth of new life. After my labor, I began to think about transition as a metaphor for the most difficult fiery moments in our lives. In all our various creative labors--making a living, raising a family, building a nation--there are moments that are so painful, we want to give up. But inside searing pain and encroaching numbness, we might also find the depths of our courage, hear our deepest wisdom, and transition to the other side. (p. 278-279)

To get through transition, Kaur says, we need the voices of wisdom. Some of those voices are the beloveds around us, and some of those voices are the inner voices. Within us or around us, wise voices are the ones that tell us we are strong enough and brave enough and capable enough to be part of this new thing that is happening. My mother used to have a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt in her email signature:

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

It is this quote in my mother’s voice that I hear in those transition moments, when doubt and pain and fear tell me I can’t. And perhaps alone I can’t. But with the voices of wisdom, we can. 

As we transition to the world that can be, a community of practice helps us to breathe and to have courage. And we can often be more effective together than we can alone. At the Poor People’s Campaign rally in Trenton on March 2, a group of us heard testimony from different groups of impacted people, mourned together over the lives lost to poverty, and came to understand again that our wellbeing and our solutions are linked. That meeting was meant to provide spiritual grounding and to inspire solidarity, leading to unified advocacy in the state legislature and commitment to democracy in the upcoming elections. 

The upcoming MLK@TUS event on April 7 will provide music and readings to get people grounded and inspired, and maybe a good word about what comes next from Bruce Morgan, New Brunswick Area NAACP President. This congregation’s work in the past in coalition with the NAACP, including the Lost Souls Project, and future plans about voter education and mobilization, represent an investment in a community of practice. 

Interfaith RISE, UU Faith Action New Jersey, and Food and Water Watch are some of this congregation’s other partners in breathing and pushing. The work can be boring or exciting at different times, frustrating or confusing or illuminating, and always human. We can move through transition with more joy and wisdom together than we can alone. 

There are a lot of things we hope to see on the other side of transition. We hope to see liberation, a society that reflects our interdependence with each other and the planet, compassionate and dignified medical care for every person, abundance and generosity, reparations for those who have been wronged, repair for the earth, an end to war and violence, space and time and resources for beauty and joy for all people. In this moment, I am also conscious of another transition: the slow and non-linear emergence into a post-COVID world. We must re-imagine ourselves and our community in light of our experiences over the past four years. 

Retreat is so tempting. We may be tempted to retreat into privilege, to shrink from our interdependence. We may be tempted to retreat into an idealized version of the past, to crave the best out of what we remember instead of sallying forth into the best of what we can be in the new world. Ground your plans for the future on your collective vision and values, not on nostalgia. We may be tempted to retreat into perfectionism, to give up on what is hard or messy or imperfect, to blame and complain and attempt to exert control when comfort is slow and the emerging reality is unfamiliar. Beloveds, let us breathe together and concentrate our energies on what is possible. A new thing is happening. We won’t know what it looks like until we have lived in it for awhile. We can help shape it to be something beautiful, equitable, and exciting. We need to be patient, imaginative, and caring as we help each other through this. 

The things that are worth doing are worth doing together, sustainably, through times of healing and times of discomfort and times of intense transition. Let’s breathe, and reconnect with human worth in the present moment. Let’s push, and hang in there through the discomfort of positive transformation. Let’s follow the voices of wisdom through transition, and bring into the world something new.

May it be so. 

[mbti-notes]

Hi, entj here. What other Jungian theories besides the personality theory discussed here do you recommend to study in depth, mainly from the perspective of personality development? I read a book describing Jung's basic theories, one of the theses presented there was the statement that modern humanistic psychology is poor in its view of the human being, for example, it often ignores the past and focuses on the present and future. What are your thoughts on humanistic vs Jungian psychology?

I don't really know how to answer because you haven't explained the purpose of your question with the necessary detail, as per the blog guidelines. Generally speaking, people ask about different perspectives in psychology because they're trying to figure out which therapeutic approach to take. The way you've framed the question seems to indicate that you don't know much about the field of psychology, so you're not approaching the subject matter in the right way.

(1) I'm not sure what you mean by "Jungian theories" in the plural. Jungian theory is an umbrella term that includes a wide variety of ideas related to human psychology because Jung's writings covered quite a lot of ground. One aspect was personality. One aspect was ego operations. One aspect was human development.

Technically speaking, you shouldn't be comparing humanistic and Jungian psychology because they are not in the same category. The former is an overarching perspective or "school of thought" in the field of psychology, whereas the latter is a sub-specialty of another overarching school of thought called psychoanalytic psychology. Therefore, you ought to be comparing humanistic and psychoanalytic schools of thought.

Historically, humanistic psychology arose in part as a response to the shortcomings of psychoanalytic psychology. If you would like to know more about the pros/cons of various schools of thought in psychology, the best way is to consult a brief history of the field which explains the context of how each school came into being.

(2) You (or the book you're reading) seem to be referencing early developments in the field, so be forewarned that the ideas you're looking for could be outdated. The psychoanalytic school isn't really considered a part of mainstream psychology in the US anymore, though there are still some professionals who choose to specialize in it or adapt the ideas to current times. It tends to be more popular in European circles. Current approaches in the US favor more scientific/empirical approaches, e.g., neuropsychology or cognitive-behavioral psychology.

The psychoanalytic school encompasses many well-known early theorists in the field, of which Carl Jung is but one example. Others include: Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Alfred Adler, Anna Freud, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson. IMO, all of these individuals (and their academic descendants) contributed some important ideas to psychology that are worth learning about. Most of them touched upon personality and human development in some way. I mainly discuss the ego psychology of Jung and his descendants, as well as how the ideas connect to current developments in psychology. Since "personality development" is too broad and vague a request, all I can say is feel free to explore other psychoanalytic ideas from the above theorists.

(3) Personality is a diverse subfield of psychology. If you'd like to get a good overview of the whole subfield rather than limit yourself to psychoanalytic theory, consult a current first-year college textbook that provides an introduction to all the schools of thought available. Or, if what you're really looking for is to realize your personal potential, you can look into the subfield of positive psychology. (See the recommendations on the resources page.)

A well-written book should provide an objective view/evaluation of whatever school of thought is being discussed. My formal studies in psychology included a strong emphasis on the history and evolution of the field. From this perspective, one should understand that every school was developed with a specific purpose in mind. For example, when you want to understand your past, psychoanalysis is a good choice. If that's not your focus and you want to do something such as learn how to handle depression and be a more functional person, then the cognitive-behavioral approach might be a better choice.

In other words, each school of thought in psychology was developed carefully by intelligent people who wanted to address a particular aspect/angle of human psychology. The tools of any school could be of great value to you as long as you understand what they ought to be used for and use them as intended.

[architectuul]

From Care to Cure and Back

Under the umbrella of the LINA platform a program From Care to Cure and Back was initiated by Ana Dana Beroš in collaboration with the Association of Architects of Istria (DAI-SAI). "Treat, cure and give care again", is the idea behind this program, says Ana Dana and stress how important is to deal with experimental publishing practices in architecture.

Ana Dana Beroš at the Publishing Acts: The Publishing School Pedagogies of Care in Rijeka (2020). | Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić

She is referring how care was and is missing in the formal education of architecture, in the form of a humanistic way of thinking and asking background questions, which primarily concern the users of buildings. With the construction of the state, public projects fell into the background. It became clear that we must learn from our own history, repair, preserve and take care together, and not build unnecessarily.

How will architecture change in the future?

ADB: It will change drastically. I ask myself all the time is it ethical to build anymore? Or should we be focusing on “the great repair” of the broken world? Or is it broken architecture, or mankind, or more than human environment? This question are arising because we were witnessing for more than half of century the capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on innovation, growth, and progress, its economic system based on consumerism and wasteful use, and profligacy, has led to a ruthless exploitation of humans and nature. 

Architecture has played a huge small part in this, as the statistics on greenhouse gas emissions and construction and demolition waste prove. As a counter-strategy to capitalism’s creative destruction, we should focus on the repair, in which nurturing and maintenance that should become the key strategies for the action. 

Publishing Acts I-II-III (2017-2020) | Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić, collage Ana Dana Beroš

This is not just mine thinking, the notions of care in architecture have been part of many international exhibitions starting from the Critical Care at the Architektur Zentrum in Viena curated by Elke Krasny and Angelika Fitz, the term The Great Repair was used by Milica Topalović and her team at ETH, then are here Pedagogies of the Broken Planet. This is how I see the future.

What does your critical spatial practice include? 

ADB: My critical spatial practice has components of artistic research, documentary filmmaking, curating, publishing/broadcasting, exhibition design, activism and post-disciplinary de-schooling. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond.

A whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an expanded field such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. Critical spatial practice was coined by the theorist Jane Rendell in 2000s as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated.

LINA - DAI-SAI programme From Cure to Care and Back. | Photo © Ana Dana Beroš

Taking into account the wide spectrum of intellectual fields close to architecture and space - from urban anthropology to human geography - I consider connecting architecture with feminist theory crucial for the development of critical spatial practices. Gender-based analysis of architecture, its multiple forms of representation, where subjects and spaces are viewed as performatives and constructs, is aimed primarily at questioning the world around us.

Moreover, critical spatial practices are necessarily self-critical and tend to change society, in contrast to orthodox architectural practices that seek to maintain and strengthen the existing social and spatial order of inequality.

How is the LINA platform important for your development on architecture of care?

ADB: I have started Architecture of Care actually developing through the concept of Pedagogies of Care within the predecessor platform to LINA, the former Future Architecture. The Publishing School: Pedagogies of Care is an exploration on how we learn and produce knowledge collectively through emancipatory practices of care. The program builds upon the three Publishing Acts and their collective efforts in shaping unordinary publications, unlikely publics and unorthodox spatial imaginaries.

Publishing Acts, The Publishing School -Pedagogies of Care (Rijeka, 2020). | Design © Marin Nižić

Can radio become again a media for architecture (like in the time of Wright) and in which way you work with it?

ADB: Regarding the radio, as a powerful architectural tool, or to the media that architecture uses, I can agree with many who say that architecture has nowadays become transmedial. We don’t create only in the offline dimension, in concrete and brick, but in the online sphere as well. All media are allowed, or rather necessary, to attain goals of architecture. I have been involved in radio forever as been working for Croatian radio HR3, I have been developing the Radio Schools with artists during the Pedagogies of Care. As our colleagues from dpr-barcelona we claim to this cover that radio is louder than bombs that relates to their motto.

Beside radio you work is also dedicated on documentary film?

ADB: My documentary work is dedicated both to architecture and migration topics. Within the Croatian Architects’ Association I have been leading, then co-leading a documentary project Man and Space and working as a scriptwriter on long feature documentaries dedicated to the life achievement laureates.

Geotrauma - Ana Dana Beros and Matija Kralj Štefanić at the V Magazine. | Foto © Marija Gašparović

In pluriannual research on the relational reading of migrant bodies and migrant territories, conducted together with the artistic partner and cinematographer Matija Kralj Štefanić, we have been departing from nonrepresentational theories, the practices of witnessing that produce knowledge without contemplation. The experimental documentary trajectory builds on previous investigations in the Mediterranean: in reception camps (Contrada Imbriacola, Lampedusa), hotspots (Moria, Lesbos), makeshift camps (Idomeni, Greece), urbanized camps (Dheisheh, Palestine), city refugees (Mardin, Turkey), and, recently, in the Balkans, where we live.

Transmigrancy - Life of Art Magazine, 101-2017 edited by Ana Dana Beroš: Geotrauma. Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić (design bilic mueller studio)

We refined methods of producing critical, nonrepresentational images, and of gathering and documenting evidence found in borderscapes, in order to make a transmedial and migratory archive, a border documentarism, that is in constant articulation. After the pandemic, from mute images of migrants’ residuals that speak for themselves, we have started creating a polyphony of protagonists of migrant origin and those involved in the No Border movement in a documentary series Three-Voiced: Stories on the Move, broadcast in Croatia. As a contemporary response to the rise of fascist phenomena in Europe, In the era of fetishizing borders and territorialization of bodies, it was crucial to start resonating in a new voiced register for topics that are not heard, or rather systematically not listened to in our societies.

It is just one of many attempts at confronting structures of silencing, asking: Can we, through collective vibration, transform silence into a path of newfound hope and solidarity?

How Intermundia opened an important topic of transmigration in Europe?

ADB: Back in 2014, Intermundia research project questioned alternating border-scapes of trans-European and intra-European migration. The focus was put on the Italian island of Lampedusa, metonymy for contemporary Western conditions of confinement. For me, back then it was clear that the dominant discourses on illegal migration obscure the role of international migration as a regulatory labour market tool. It was important to stress that migrants must be conceived primarily as workers, not only as immigrants. It seemed that, in the pre-pandemic times of constant mobility, involuntary territorial shifts of the precarious workers was parallel to the detention of undesired migrants.

Intermundia at the Venice Biennial in 2014. | Foto © Ana Opalić

Instead of observing Lampedusa as a consolidated institution of the waiting room, as a jailed zone in the middle of conflict, Intermundia attempted a post-human perspective in order to investigate the ambivalent state of in-betweenness. I was aware of the impossibility of cultural translation of such a condition, the understanding of the Other, so the project Intermundia, exhibited and awarded at the Architecture Biennial in Venice 2014, challenged visitors to immerse themselves into a coffin-like light and sound installation. Inducing Verfremdungseffekt, the project asked for solemnity and re-action, and not simply empathy.

I am not sure Intermundia opened the important topic of migration in Europe, but for sure it was a predecessor to the summer of migration in 2015, with the great influx of migrants, refugees and the formation of the so-called Balkan Route.

What does architecture mean to you?

ADB: I dare to say that the fundamental task architecture has is to articulate spatial thinking, thinking capable of asking questions about burning issues of our society in a different way, hence of also creating a different reality. Architecture must offer a space for understanding of the existential condition of an individual and of society, and must also construct a foundation for a life with dignity. We know who we are, and where we belong, precisely through human constructions, both material and intellectual. 

Intermundia "Io sono Africanicano". | Photo © Ana Dana Beroš

Ana Dana Beroš (b. 1979) is an architect based in Zagreb, but often explores contested borderscapes of Europe and beyond. Co-founder of ARCHIsquad - Division for Architecture with Conscience and its educational program UrgentArchitecture in Croatia. Her interest is architectural theory, experimental design and publishing as spatializing practice led her to co-found Think Space (2010-2015) and Future Architecture (2016-2021) international platforms, and currently LINA (2022-2025). The LINA member DAI-SAI ongoing project From care to cure and back, under her curation, explores critical architectural heritage on the case of The Children’s Maritime Health Resort of Military Insured Persons in Krvavica, and encourages transformation of both material and immaterial environments from spaces of a common disease into places of common healing. Her project Intermundia on trans- and intra-European migration was a finalist for the Wheelwright Prize at GSD Harvard, and received a Special Mention at the XIV Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Rem Koolhaas (2014). In her pluriannual research and relational reading of migrant bodies and migrant territories, she departs from non-representational theories, the practices of “witnessing” that produce knowledge without contemplation. The fragments of the migratory archive, a border documentarism formed together with the filmmaker and cinematographer Matija Kralj Štefanić, have been made public in different forms and formats, exhibitions and publications (2016-2022) – and lately within a documentary series Three-voiced: Stories on the move (2022-).

Here You can listen to the WELTRAUM interview

[arylleth]

Growth isn't a matter of age, nor of knowledge—it is measured in the space between impulse and response, in how we navigate discomfort without turning it into a weapon.

There comes a moment—quiet, often humbling—when you realize that emotional maturity is not about perfection, but about presence. It’s the courage to pause when all you want is to lash out. There's a quiet strength in emotional maturity. Not in knowing everything, but in being willing to unlearn, to listen, to say, “I was wrong,” without collapsing into shame or defensiveness. This is the work of becoming whole: knowing that being flawed doesn't make us unworthy, but refusing to take responsibility does damage the spaces we inhabit with others.

As Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, wrote: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” Growth begins with self-awareness, not self-reproach. And it deepens when we learn to offer that same gentle awareness to others—especially when they falter.

As Bell Hooks wrote in All About Love, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” And action requires effort. Not just in grand gestures, but in the daily work of listening better, judging less, asking instead of assuming. Real connection can only grow where accountability lives—where people are brave enough to confront themselves and kind enough to do it without shame.

We often long for others to be better. To understand us, forgive us, fight for us. But how often do we offer them the very grace we demand? We crave safe spaces, but are we safe people? We want honesty, but do we know how to hold it when it’s not flattering? not recoil when it's uncomfortable? Maturity begins when we recognize that relationships aren’t built on performance, but on mutual responsibility.

It’s easy to blame the other, to say they failed, they disappointed. But what about us? Are we willing to look inward, not to condemn, but to understand? Healing begins when blame ends. When we stop outsourcing our discomfort and start asking: What’s mine to repair?

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us: “The only journey is the one within.” And from that inner journey, everything flows: empathy, clarity, strength. We grow not by avoiding our flaws, but by facing them with tenderness. Not by never failing, but by learning how to rise without stepping on others.

John Bowlby, in his attachment theory, showed us that emotional connection is a basic human need, not a weakness. But it is earned, sustained through trust, consistency, and repair. No bond survives without responsibility. Real love requires us to be better not just for ourselves, but for those who dare to be close to us.

We often believe that how we love will shape how others love us back. But that's only part of the truth. It's not enough to give love—we must give it where it can live. “Love is an act of will—both an intention and an action.” And part of that will is discernment: learning to invest in people who return love in kind, not just absorb it.

So yes, love generously, show up fully—but not blindly. Teach people how to love you by loving yourself enough to walk away when they can't meet you there. We don't always receive the love we give—but we can choose to give it to those who do. We grow not by avoiding conflict, but by staying present in it. By choosing repair over pride. By learning to say: "Here's what I feel. Here's what I need. And here's what I'm responsible for." That's not weakness—it's the foundation of every honest relationship.

We mirror the world we want to live in by how we choose to be, especially when no one is watching.

In the end, the version of ourselves we hope others will be with us—honest, kind, brave—we must first become for them. Not to earn love, but to make space for the kind of love that holds, honors, and reciprocates. Be the version of yourself you’d want others to become in your presence. Because deep down, we’re all just hoping someone will meet us in that space — willing, open, and real. And perhaps the most loving thing we can do is meet them there first.

May you find people who water the roots of your being, who don't run from your truth, who make the garden of your soul not just bloom—but feel safe to keep growing. May you become that person for others.

You're not grown until you know how to communicate, apologize, be truthful and accept accountability without blaming someone else.