Well, I guess we’re doomed. If object constancy is developed by age 3 months then that implies that there is no plasticity of the brain. But as someone who recently began attending adult children of alcoholics, organization, I realize that my upbringing really screwed me over. I didn’t control that. All I can control now is my understanding and my compassion. One of the elements missing from this excellent article is the influence of social media. When we have friends, we never met and can “unfriend“ anyone we decide we no longer need in our sphere of influence that has a direct impact on our emotional growth. Thanks for the thought-provoking article, Dr. Rochat!
Please consider that neuroplasticity never has to stop. I have taught many old dogs some new tricks, myself included!
Don't get me started on social media, but I will say that I have a dear real type friend (on the opposite coast) as a result of our previous engagement in Old-Twitter-Not-Xitter.
Rather -- first -- it's the enterprise to replace the human (emotions, memory, first love, personal debts, humor) with abstractions, categories, and group logic.
Standardized testing can replace the human all the more easily if humanities disappear first from the schools. That's why the Powell memo's main earliest foundations (a new Heritage, an expanded Hoover, and a new ALEC) all spent the 1970s killing off the human, our humanities, in schools.
When the Powell memo started, August 23, 1971, it was visceral. All the corporate players knew only that many novels, films, and songs of the 1960s helped energize, focus activists in anti-war, civil rights, environmental, and feminist causes. It was all too human. For the business-friendly, easily measurable, finally countable, totally abstracted and packaged alternatives to the human, standardized testing came as a Godsend to the nihilists already dehumanized. They the rich and corporate serving were already dehumanized themselves, and intended all of America, all of the world to sink to what we would call their fill-in-a-b-c-d and later their algorithms.
Sink we have. Dehumanized we have. So we've finally achieved rule by a convicted criminal (and rapist, and fraud, and perpetual liar) and all his "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" fellow crippled.
I maintain that there is, however, a larger political divide in America as there is around much of the world, with characteristics that make the numerous instances recognizably similar. In this divide, one major direction appears more capable of emotional permanence and may even have the potential to bring back the humanities, while the other major direction is maliciously capitalizing on those without emotional permanence.
Powell of the ongoing, murderous Philip Morris legacy is indeed a conundrum, as his long overdue death is incomplete without mentioning Roe (and Regents), which seems to be on a lot of people’s minds these last two years for some reason.
And while I’ll agree that the Powell memorandum promoted the Philip Morris “success” with anti-intellectual manipulation which we have since witnessed to blossom into the Gospel of Project 2025, I’m not of the American exceptionalism view that the entire world took Powell’s memo as a specific roadmap any more than Joe Biden caused worldwide inflation.
Would it be just as fair to say that in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 was the inspiration for the 1971 Powell Memorandum? Or that Joseph Goebbels’ 1930s Big Lie was George Orwell’s inspiration?
At what point do we acknowledge that the power hungry and greedy have always manipulated masses to do their bidding, and successfully so — for a time? Subsequent iterations have then of course sought to learn from their predecessors’ failures, to be even more awful.
AI should really throw gasoline on the fire, so maybe climate change isn’t relevant after all.
To me, Trump is just 10 lbs of orange lipstick on the same damn pig that we still don’t understand well enough to keep this history from repeating itself.
Yes, Johnny, "the power hungry and greedy have always" done as you say.
Since Herodotus. Since Jesus. Since Mohammed. Since Buddha.
Starting points? Turning Points? I'm reading Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Stolen Pride," a dive into the lives of Appalachian people centered around a neo-Nazi march Pikeville, Kentucky, spring of 2017, that morphed into the larger march in Charlottesville, Virgina, later that summer.
She's so good at pausing to acknowledge the books, films, and songs that figured in the people's lives there. Direct, measurable, linear causality? No, but centrality, yes.
I've also been living some years now in the mountains of Kyushu, Japan. And I can report that, yes, the U.S. fixation on killing humanities in schools, and replacing them with the totality of standardized testing has poisoned this country, too. Minae Mizumura discusses this in "The Fall of Language in the Age of English" (English trans., Columbia U Press, 2016).
The arrogance of our elites hit smaller cultures all over the world as first condition to the triumph of Putin, Trump, and their masses of surrogates and sycophants.
You're doing a book on this? Great. Very, very much look forward to it.
At first I thought I’d reply that at least the documentation of each attempt to destroy humanity should improve with technology, but I reconsidered that it will more likely curve back as the destroyers learn to destroy any bread crumb trails we might leave behind for some smarter survivors.
I’ve seen many academic elites just figure that evidence, logic, ethics, and critical thinking and such will get them out of any hole - as an oncologist, it was difficult to watch how helpless they became, rapidly, when their well-planned out paradigm shifted.
Well, I guess we’re doomed. If object constancy is developed by age 3 months then that implies that there is no plasticity of the brain. But as someone who recently began attending adult children of alcoholics, organization, I realize that my upbringing really screwed me over. I didn’t control that. All I can control now is my understanding and my compassion. One of the elements missing from this excellent article is the influence of social media. When we have friends, we never met and can “unfriend“ anyone we decide we no longer need in our sphere of influence that has a direct impact on our emotional growth. Thanks for the thought-provoking article, Dr. Rochat!
Thanks Connie,
Please consider that neuroplasticity never has to stop. I have taught many old dogs some new tricks, myself included!
Don't get me started on social media, but I will say that I have a dear real type friend (on the opposite coast) as a result of our previous engagement in Old-Twitter-Not-Xitter.
It's not, first, a political divide.
Rather -- first -- it's the enterprise to replace the human (emotions, memory, first love, personal debts, humor) with abstractions, categories, and group logic.
Standardized testing can replace the human all the more easily if humanities disappear first from the schools. That's why the Powell memo's main earliest foundations (a new Heritage, an expanded Hoover, and a new ALEC) all spent the 1970s killing off the human, our humanities, in schools.
When the Powell memo started, August 23, 1971, it was visceral. All the corporate players knew only that many novels, films, and songs of the 1960s helped energize, focus activists in anti-war, civil rights, environmental, and feminist causes. It was all too human. For the business-friendly, easily measurable, finally countable, totally abstracted and packaged alternatives to the human, standardized testing came as a Godsend to the nihilists already dehumanized. They the rich and corporate serving were already dehumanized themselves, and intended all of America, all of the world to sink to what we would call their fill-in-a-b-c-d and later their algorithms.
Sink we have. Dehumanized we have. So we've finally achieved rule by a convicted criminal (and rapist, and fraud, and perpetual liar) and all his "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" fellow crippled.
Phil, I appreciate your thoughtful comments.
I maintain that there is, however, a larger political divide in America as there is around much of the world, with characteristics that make the numerous instances recognizably similar. In this divide, one major direction appears more capable of emotional permanence and may even have the potential to bring back the humanities, while the other major direction is maliciously capitalizing on those without emotional permanence.
Powell of the ongoing, murderous Philip Morris legacy is indeed a conundrum, as his long overdue death is incomplete without mentioning Roe (and Regents), which seems to be on a lot of people’s minds these last two years for some reason.
And while I’ll agree that the Powell memorandum promoted the Philip Morris “success” with anti-intellectual manipulation which we have since witnessed to blossom into the Gospel of Project 2025, I’m not of the American exceptionalism view that the entire world took Powell’s memo as a specific roadmap any more than Joe Biden caused worldwide inflation.
Would it be just as fair to say that in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 was the inspiration for the 1971 Powell Memorandum? Or that Joseph Goebbels’ 1930s Big Lie was George Orwell’s inspiration?
At what point do we acknowledge that the power hungry and greedy have always manipulated masses to do their bidding, and successfully so — for a time? Subsequent iterations have then of course sought to learn from their predecessors’ failures, to be even more awful.
AI should really throw gasoline on the fire, so maybe climate change isn’t relevant after all.
To me, Trump is just 10 lbs of orange lipstick on the same damn pig that we still don’t understand well enough to keep this history from repeating itself.
Yes, Johnny, "the power hungry and greedy have always" done as you say.
Since Herodotus. Since Jesus. Since Mohammed. Since Buddha.
Starting points? Turning Points? I'm reading Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Stolen Pride," a dive into the lives of Appalachian people centered around a neo-Nazi march Pikeville, Kentucky, spring of 2017, that morphed into the larger march in Charlottesville, Virgina, later that summer.
She's so good at pausing to acknowledge the books, films, and songs that figured in the people's lives there. Direct, measurable, linear causality? No, but centrality, yes.
I've also been living some years now in the mountains of Kyushu, Japan. And I can report that, yes, the U.S. fixation on killing humanities in schools, and replacing them with the totality of standardized testing has poisoned this country, too. Minae Mizumura discusses this in "The Fall of Language in the Age of English" (English trans., Columbia U Press, 2016).
The arrogance of our elites hit smaller cultures all over the world as first condition to the triumph of Putin, Trump, and their masses of surrogates and sycophants.
You're doing a book on this? Great. Very, very much look forward to it.
At first I thought I’d reply that at least the documentation of each attempt to destroy humanity should improve with technology, but I reconsidered that it will more likely curve back as the destroyers learn to destroy any bread crumb trails we might leave behind for some smarter survivors.
I’ve seen many academic elites just figure that evidence, logic, ethics, and critical thinking and such will get them out of any hole - as an oncologist, it was difficult to watch how helpless they became, rapidly, when their well-planned out paradigm shifted.
I prefer the title of: President Convicted Felon. It's a shame it isnt used more often.