Research: Does Conservative Negativism
Repress Rational Thought?

Conservatives are fond of identifying “enemies” and using strong negative words and images to describe them. I wrote about this in the essay Conservatives Depending on Emotional Words to Persuade where excerpts of a GOP memo from Newt Gingrich suggest words to describe “our opponents” including: failure, pathetic, lie, liberal, betray, hypocrisy, radical, etc.

Psychologists have already discovered that emotions affect higher brain functions including attention, memory, vision and motor control. Now, researchers are discovering that negative language inhibits the lower level retrieval of knowledge and subconscious information processing. A Bangor University study initially expected that negative emotional words would be arousing and stimulate reasoning capacity. Instead, they found that negative words suppressed certain cognitive responses.

I suggest that combining these two observations may show that repeatedly describing liberals [or another race, or immigrants, or non-believers] in negative terms may reduce the audiences’ ability to reason critically about the information they are receiving.

Virtuous Judging of Others

"Judging individuals and organizations is not inherently wrong, but doing so out of bigoted prejudice, is. Yes, too many authority figures are actually bad and too many people are actually criminals or racists. But, the first step in solving any problem is being aware of it and giving it a name."
~ David Satterlee

Essay: Walking with the flow of Tao in a modern world

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Walking with the flow of Tao in a modern world

From the book: Chum for Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by David Satterlee

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Read or download this essay as a PDF file at: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4eNv8KtePyKSVRLUURhMFdlWkE/edit?usp=sharing

Chum For Thought:
Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters

Walking with the flow of Tao in a modern world

The Chinese character for Tao combines two signs: head and foot. It reflects the concept of walking consciously. It is simply “the way” and implies that the walker is in conscious harmony with the existing order of things. His/her actions are intentionally harmonious rather than in conflict or opposition to what is. The way of Tao tends to rely more on sensitized intuition rather than reasoning and logic.

The practical application of Tao-living leads to competences that Westerners would consider “giftedness.” For instance, an archer living with Tao would not attempt to mentally calculate trajectories and influences of a cross breeze, but would experience a sense of fullness with his environment, visualizing the arrow’s destination. He would release his arrow toward the target when the moment and position seemed right. Skilled basketball players (or golfers, etc.) can have the same reflexes for making good shots or right moves. Many of us feel the same sense of effortlessness while driving in traffic.

The research psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes a similar state of mind that he calls “flow.” Flow may occur while

Essay: Buddhist “Right Speech” as a practical virtue

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Buddhist “Right Speech” as a practical virtue

From the book: Chum for Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by David Satterlee

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Read or download this essay as a PDF file at: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4eNv8KtePyKZG9KZVRoYXhGUmM/edit?usp=sharing

Chum For Thought:
Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters

Buddhist “Right Speech” as a practical virtue

You may know that I am writing a book about virtues. I added the Buddhist “Noble Eightfold Path” to my listing of virtues after an unproductive search for a virtue that fully embodied “delicacy of speech.” That is, the deliberate choice of words that carefully avoids damaging the fragile stem of newly-sprouted expression in others. It was gentler than tact. It was more specific than thoughtfulness. It was more loving than kindness or even loving-kindness. It was a gentler movement of a whispered expression than love. I could think of nothing more apt then the first Eightfold path virtue of “Right Speech.”

The Buddhist concept of Right Speech, of course, covers the courser commissions of lying, malicious slander, harsh anger, and idle gossip. However, to me, in this moment, it also needed to go past “do no harm,” and past pure and absolute gentleness–all the way to nurturing delicacy without hint of harm; speech that was fully, aptly, right.

I have been in the writing practice of completing a fully-formed suite of ideas, usually about a single-spaced page, and taking it downstairs to read aloud to my wife. She is usually quite tolerant and will pause in whatever she is doing to receive it. She rarely responds with anything but mild acceptance or a simple, thoughtful word of approval. Sometimes she notices one of my characteristic shifts in verb tense or a typo and I am grateful to her for noticing that.

Last night, she called up the stairs to say that I she had sent me an e-mail and asked if I had read it. No, I wasn’t aware of it yet, but I would check it out. I discovered that she had written the first chapter of a children’s book, based on her childhood experiences. At the end, she had written,

Poem: Pogo Had it Right

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Pogo Had it Right

Life Will Get You in the End:
Short Stories by David Satterlee

from the book: Life Will Get You in the End:
Short stories by David Satterlee

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Read or download this story as a PDF file at:  https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4eNv8KtePyKUjBtRWptWFVWaFU/edit?usp=sharing

This is an allusion to (or, at least, what should be) an iconic story in mythology about men doing battle with themselves. 

Pogo was a cartoon character created by Walt Kelly. Among many other wise and witty things, he said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." There, that should get you started. 

Pogo Had it Right

I enter the plains to do battle.

I gird up my loins for the fight.

I turn to my bearer for armor.

My helper is nowhere in sight.

In panic I fumble to unsheath my sword.

Striking blindly, I render the air.

I search for the foe that I might dispatch.

But, I’m really the only one there.

In confusion, I retreat from this threat with alarm—

Begging my mind to admit this a dream

Of the night before more than just here and now

In this day, as it truly does seem.

I turn again to check the field

And find it not clear as before,

As I am there to face myself;

A foe that I cannot ignore.

We fought for years to find out who

Was good and who was bad.

But, when at last I won, I lost

The horrible dreams that I’ve had.

But, who can say that I had won,

And who can name the foe?

Yes, who of you can read my heart,

And of its ways to know?

                            December 7, 1970

 

Re: the 2nd stanza: Bingo. I just made a note to someday write a SciFi story about two friends in a remote battle control room discovering that the field-droid avatars that they are controlling are actually fighting each other. "Oops, 'sorry dude." Remember, you read the surprise ending here first.