When I was a freshman in high school this album was the cornerstone of my record collection and thus, to a great extent, helped define my identity. I thought Liz Phair was above reproach and that by being a fan her irrefutable coolness gave me a similar luster. I thought I was so cool. Or more accurately, I thought I was so uncool that I came around the block back to cool. You see, Liz Phair was an artist. She played guitar, she wrote all her own songs, she had indie cred and she was a critical darling. Listening to her made it easy to feel superior to all the music they played on the radio, which I thought to be vapid and devoid of any true artistic merit.
Thank Madonna that’s over. Not that I don’t like Liz Phair anymore, quite the contrary, she’s still one of my favorites, but I couldn’t be more thrilled that that attitude isn’t around anymore. Unfortunately I still know people with that attitude, people who center their tastes around some notion of artistry and authenticity; they listen to “real music.” Here’s the thing though, what does artistry change? If one listens to a song and withholds judgment until they can check the liner notes to see who wrote it and who played what instruments then it becomes clear that said person doesn’t actually like music. They’ve heard the song and decided to judge it, not on the merits of how it sounds, but how it was created and then taken it into their own hands to determine if that process was “respectable” or not. Suddenly, aesthetics play no role in their opinion of music, and what is music if not aesthetics? No, they don’t like music, they like the baggage that comes with taste; they like to be “authentic.” In short, they’ve fetishized authenticity.
This all seems so irrelevant, I know, but here’s the point: I feel that there’s a huge movement in our culture that is actively fethshizing authenticity and that this movement is exemplified by Plato’s theory about the cave. In the same way that many snobs seem to make music about everything except the music, many people have made life about everything except life. There’s constant pressure to find your “real self,” live free of society’s expectations and belligerently not care about what other people think because we’re individuals for crying out loud. Instead of this convoluted process and line of thought I propose this: we are exactly the way we are acting and to change ourselves we need simply to change the way we act, not get in touch with some true self that’s buried deep within us or dwelling outside some cave.
I believe that our actions and beliefs really do define us to a great extent. We are all living in this world, we are all different and anyone who says that they’ve found this world to be fake, and on top of that, found a way for us to shed the fake identity we’ve been living with and exchange it for a real one has fundamentally misunderstood people. There seems to be this contrarian impulse among people that grows larger every day. If the majority of people believe something then we become immediately suspicious of it and begin to take pride in ourselves for simply not being part of something we probably haven’t evaluated properly. One ACU relevant example is the contempt I often hear in the voices of people who don’t like social clubs. They accuse them of brainwashing people and their members of trying to buy friends. The tone in their voice suggests that they fancy themselves to have wandered out of the cave and found the real world, and it did not include social clubs.
The point of all this is that I don’t believe authenticity to be this independently existing entity that we all should strive toward. We become inauthentic when we believe something or feel something and then purposefully act against it, which I don’t want to characterize as inherently wrong, there a lot of potential murderers out there whom I’m glad have decided against authenticity. Our actions make up our authenticity or lack thereof and as such I believe the majority of people to be authentic, but I would be remiss if I didn’t make it known that I hardly consider authentic to be the greatest of compliments.
Josh Morrison on Third-force psychology-Critique and interpretation
5:34 pm, 11.18.10
While I probably like this type of psychology more than you, I do take serious issue with such hesitation to label things. This may well be a faulty assumption but to me the rejection of labels has always come across as the height of smugness. It almost seems as though such a system feels that comparing and grouping people duhamanizes them which is absolutely ridiculous to me when considering exactly how social people are. We yearn to be in groups so why do some take such offense at being thought of as anything other than an individual, unique and one of a kind case? What really makes people so incedible is that we are all such cases yet we still have so much in common. That’s the group dynamic and and an important perspective that seems to be missing from this branch of psychology.
Josh Morrison on Humanism vs. Behaviorism - Empiricism vs. Rationalism redux?
5:27 pm, 11.18.10
It is so frustrating how the answer to these debates seem to always be that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. It is so completely true in most scenarios but it has also started to feel like a copout. There are holes ready to be poked into both theories that prevent either of them from being completely accepted. I wish there was a more complete system of opinions with a more precise name for different dots along the continuum from one extreme to the other. Saying that the answer is in “the middle” just feels sloppy, like it refers to an undifferentiated yet giant mass of land that houses so many different people who are miles and miles away from each other yet still in “the middle.”
Josh Morrison on So vintage.
5:15 pm, 11.18.10
It is actually really interesting that you compare th id and the devil because the supergo encompasses spiritual goals and desires and is shaped by cultural standards. I’m sure a lot of people at ACU have superegos that look like their conception of God. The ego negotiates the territory between the id and supergo and if we continue the metaphor the ego is us, in a constant struggle between “God” and “the devil.”
Josh Morrison on AI of the Future
10:52 pm, 10.24.10
I can definitely see the hazards of technology based communication but for some reason I’ve never been able to get on board with the idea that technology will take us over. I can’t explain why but it never took with me.
Josh Morrison on Should we because we can?
10:50 pm, 10.24.10
I can’t stress enough how disastrous I think reparative therapy is. One of the reasons it is so frowned upon is that it practically never works and almost always ends up causing the patient extreme distress. When one tries to change something that deeply embedded it’s usually because they feel great shame. Reparative therapy only adds a sense of failure to that already existing shame. The people who say it does work are notorious for not being able to back their claims up and the media is riddled with stories of people claiming to be changed hiring prostitutes of the same gender. Reparative therapy is one of the most socially irresponsible things that a professional can engage in.
Josh Morrison on A Formula for Brilliant?
10:42 pm, 10.24.10
That’s a fascinating idea. I’ve thought about that sort of thing before and it is interesting to me that so many people seem to achieve greatness through tragedy in areas other than artistic ones. I can easily see people turning their pain into art but the connection between suffering and greatness in other fields is a little less intuitive.
Josh Morrison on Thoughts on Behaviorism
12:31 pm, 10.11.10
I know exactly whaty you mean about the spitting story! The hold that behaviors can have over people is so fascinating. I never played baseball but I’m sure if I had I would have spat because I know me and I know that rituals and symbols that signify my membership of a particular demographic that I want to be a part of have a huge sway over me.
Josh Morrison on Faith Based on Feelings
12:28 pm, 10.11.10
The most interesting part to me about having such a part in our brains is the potential for activation in nonreligious settings. Like, when a movie or song is so moving that we liken it to “a religious experience.” Does that mean it has touched the same part of us?
Josh Morrison on The Human Machine?
12:24 pm, 10.11.10
For some reason to whole notion of artificial intelligence has just never seemed even remotely likely to me. It has always seemed so far fetched and a little uninteresting. Cloning, on the other hand, is fascinating and I think would definitely be considered natural because all of the parts would be organic.
Josh Morrison on The Human Animal?
10:10 pm, 09.29.10
Debates like this always interest me and stir a particular personality trait within me, namely that I have no sanctimony for humanity. That sounds nihilistic or whatever, but that’s not what I’m intending. It’s like patriotism. I want America to succeed as a country because I live here and so do the people I love and I want us to have good lives. Were I to move to another country, my loyalties would immediately come with me. I don’t have any particular affections for this country. That’s how I am in regards to my species. I care deeply about and find people so interesting only because I am one and not because I think there is inherent cause to. The origin of my species is incredibly irrelevant to me as anything other than a fun fact and regardless of how I exist I won’t feel demeaned by it.