CRISIS a Two-Edged Sword

Janov's Reflections   (click to access!)

Psychology and Ideology.  By Peter Prontzos (6/6)

My comment:

Crisis a Two-Edged Sword.  

You have been focusing on important and mostly unconscious factors able to shaping ideologies and behaviors which are problematic and potentially dangerous. This leads you to conclude that “crisis such as war, poverty and global warming can never be solved if we continue to be at the mercy of such forces”. I would like to mention that I had never succeeded to go to Primal Therapy and to be successful had it not been because of a severe personal crisis.

The general fear of crisis is a two-edged sword. The terrible wars / economic crisis, during the last 150 years in Europe and America, led to huge leaps in progress. The industrial revolution multiplied time and again the development and has, despite an unfair distribution, by all available measures reduced the trend of the average global poverty. As a consequence of the digital revolution (comparable to a mini-Big Bang with all its own mini crisis) we are witnessing a new democracy painfully being born. This has quickly led to and will continue to lead to a new direct democracy through an infinite number of super fast social, international networks. Many of these changes are bound to create a dramatic crisis (political and economic), which the evolution, in its deterministic ambition will create solutions for.

It is interesting that all your compassionate, rational and liberal opinions and immense knowledge make a leap, of some 2500 years, backwards to find explanations and understanding of humanity like the Plato’s “zoon politikon / political animal”, which can be defined as: “A certain “ratio” of political animals is capable of ruling. A larger “ratio” are capable of being ruled. A certain “ratio” is farmers, shepherds, pottery makers, cooks, mathematicians, military strategists, soldiers, fine artists, politicians, philosophers, etc. etc. So in that sense of varios RATIOS of human beings specializing in different jobs, man is still a “rational animal” as well as a “political  animal. All human beings specialize in a huge diversity of complementary activities when they go beyound the state of mere self-sufficiency (hand to mouth existence) and grow into the fullness of their nature, according to Aristotele, which is to be city-building and city-dwelling animals.”  Turning to the historic Greek model of civilization might be considered as a version of “Evolution in Reverse”. However, it may be even more difficult to apply correctly than the version being defined in Primal Therapy.

Thank You for six inspiring and challenging articles and for mentioning Kahneman. I want to paraphrase him by saying: “That the test of learning human belief and behavior is whether our understanding of the new, provocative situations we encounter has changed, not whether we have learned new facts”.

Jan Johnsson