Friday, 11 October 2024

Cultural Resistance

"The values of the New Enlightenment fostered by the Psychotechnic Institute met increasing cultural and emotional resistance. No amount of psychodynamic manipulation could make pure rationality congenial to the average person."
-Sandra Miesel IN Poul Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 2 (Riverdale, NY, February 2018), p. 51.

The average person needs education and self-realization, not manipulation or pure rationality. Many educated Indians would continue to seek truth and meaning through Yoga, Vedanta etc but these traditions can be interpreted and developed. The Bhagavad Gita teaches karma yoga, the way of action. I once read an argument to the effect that God manifest is higher than God unmanifest! This means: find transcendence through action in the world, not through withdrawal from it.

Psychotechnicians should be able to do a better job of integrating Oriental cultures instead of alienating them.

5 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

It's my firm belief anyone who pretends to know better than anyone else how to run and organize a society, because of some pretentious mumbo jumbo, will always fail. And often fail bloodily and tyrannically.

Ad astra! Sean

Stephen Michael Stirling said...

I would point out that rationality is a tool, a means, not an end. There's no rational reason for wanting to live, for example -- that's purely instinctual and the product of people who wanted to live out-reproducing those who didn't.

(That's rhetorical; the desire to live long antedates the evolution of human beings.)

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

I agree. The drives, urges, passions all humans have will make them act or not in unpredictable ways no "science of society" can foresee.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Motivations are pre-rational. Whether that makes them unpredictable is another matter.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

It is unpredictable. No one, least of all any so called "science of society," can be absolutely sure how anyone will act.

Ad astra! Sean