[Paleopsych] the grief-meter

[Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.]

Howard, I heard your OBL/ Michael Jackson piece with Art Bell last 
night. Our local station replays Art Bell segments on Saturday night, 
and as I was running late evening errands I caught you. Delightful 
interview. Even the scary Agosto 90 stuff.

OBL has one thing that Michael & others in the entertainment industry 
lack, something you can supply, and that is MEANING. MJ supplies 
temporary meaning through creative showmanship. People need a greater 
meaning than that. They need something that calls to them to be more 
than entertained, it calls to them to be transformative to others. They 
need to feel themselves to have personal power. They need to see 
themselves make a difference in the lives of others. They need to hear 
the thanks of others.

You have a vision of capitalism combined with liberal democracy (Dinesh 
Souza?), and how that redeems people. Government must be minimally 
intrusive so as to promote initiative and risk taking; people help each 
other most via direct action in business. Low cost quality goods are a 
form of happiness. As Eastbrook points out, though, our society is 
filled with emphasis on problems, not on the incredible solutions we 
have created. Thus, Ireland a bit over 1/4 of our living standard, but 
is actually happier (David Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness, p 35.). 
Myers and others find that happiness is found not by consumption but by 
service and meaning. Optimism, according to a recent email I received 
from the Seligman group (www.authentichappiness.com) is one of the keys 
to enduring happiness. Yet our whole system, politics and commerce, is 
too tied into Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. We must turn out society 
toward optimism, hope, service, and meaning.

You can help reawaken a national spirit of optimism and joy, and your 
Reinventing Capitalism book. I am sure it can be a powerful and 
transformative tool. Let's get it published, Howard!
With warmest wishes,
Lynn Johnson
Salt Lake City


HowlBloom at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 8/28/2004 11:53:55 PM Eastern Standard Time, BMC273 
> writes:
>
>     Mike Levine had a great show on Suitcase Nuclear bombs last
>     Monday, did you catch it? I think he said OBL had purchased 40 of
>     these from Russia.
>
>  
> hb: aha.  so you missed my art bell show appearance saturday night 
> discussing islam's nuclear threats for three hours.  i'd have liked 
> your opinion of it.
>
>
>
>     As for the issue about who suffers more...men or women, my friend
>     had a good point - she said its true we all suffer as humans but
>     dont the POOR suffer more than the RICH? So there are
>     differences...(I still think she is right that women do suffer
>     more then men in general). What do you think?
>
> hb: in his Progress Paradox, Glenn Eastbrook sums up the literature on 
> happiness and comes to the conclusion that no matter how rich you get, 
> you still manage to fill some internally driven quota of discontent 
> and misery.  I believe that Timothy Wilson in his book on the adaptive 
> subconscious also shows a lot of evidence that we have an internal 
> set-point for misery that manufactures miseries when we're in clover 
> and manufactures blessings when we are truly laid low.
>  
> You dream of winning the lottery and are miserable because you are not 
> wealthy as a prince.  Then you win the lottery and are miserable 
> because you have no more goals to pursue and your former friends no 
> longer come to you to chat or watch the ball game on tv.  All they 
> want from you is money. 
>  
>
> You come down with a dire disease.  You fight it like hell.  You feel 
> it strengthens you and gives you new insight.  And things that others 
> take for granted become delights to you.
>
>  
>
> This isn’t poetry, it’s the result of research.  The happiest people 
> tend to be the disabled and the chronically ill.
>
>  
>
> In technical terms, we have a homeostatic mechanism that makes sure 
> that we each have our tiny share of joys and our far larger parcel of 
> griefs.
> Howard
> ----------
> Howard Bloom
> Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the 
> Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From 
> The Big Bang to the 21st Century
> Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; 
> Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
> www.howardbloom.net
> www.bigbangtango.net
> Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: 
> Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; 
> founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of 
> Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 
> American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human 
> Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human 
> Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor 
> -- New Paradigm book series.
> For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: 
> www.paleopsych.org
> for two chapters from
> The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
> History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
> For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the 
> Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>paleopsych mailing list
>paleopsych at paleopsych.org
>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych
>  
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/attachments/20040829/526ff27f/attachment.html>