Robert

“The Emotion Revolution Before the current burst of research into emotion, most scientists understood our feelings within a framework that goes all the way back to the ideas of Charles Darwin. That traditional theory of emotion embraced a number of principles that seem intuitively plausible: that there is a small set of basic emotions—fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise—that are universal among all cultures and have no functional overlap; that each emotion is triggered by specific stimuli in the external world; that each emotion causes fixed and specific behaviors; and that each emotion occurs in specific dedicated structures in the brain. This theory also encompassed a dichotomous view of the mind that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks: that the mind consists of two competing forces, one “cold,” logical, and rational and the other “hot,” passionate, and impulsive. For millennia these ideas informed thinking in fields from theology to philosophy to the science of the mind. Freud incorporated the traditional theory into his work. John Mayer and Peter Salovey’s theory of “emotional intelligence,” popularized by the 1995 book of that name by Daniel Goleman, is in part based on it. And it is the framework for most of what we think about our feelings. But it is wrong.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking

“History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“one of the things we’re concerned about is the quest for infinite growth (an unavoidable feature of capitalism) on a finite planet. With that imperative, the biosphere is now subsumed under the economy. This has to be reversed. That is, the biosphere is now seen in strictly utilitarian terms to be simply a storehouse of resources, and/or a receptacle for waste. Also under capitalist compulsion, people now serve the economy, rather than the other way around. Development should be about people, not about objects. Development, often seen as synonymous with progress, is equated with growth, measured as GNP or GDP, sometimes per capita. This must be challenged, and we need differential criteria and different metrics for what constitutes development and progress. Right now these are equated. Development doesn’t necessarily require growth, development has no limits, growth has limits or should. And this is clearly referring back to the growth/de-growth debate that we read about. All of this is underlain by issues of what constitutes happiness, satisfaction, and quality of life. What do these actually essential elements of life actually depend on? At the moment, under our current capitalist system, and its associated common sense, these aspects are measured by the acquisition of more and more things. But we don’t go readily into this mindset, we have to actually be induced or seduced. Global advertising spending in 2014 was $488.48 billion and is projected to grow to $757.44 billion by 2021. So, think about the enormous effort, the enormous, strenuous, and continuous effort to persuade people that things that they merely want are really things that they must have, that they need. And this is the business of marketing and advertising. And as Noam pointed out previously, this completely distorts the notion of the so-called free market in which rational people make rational choices based on real needs.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Thinking in an anxious state, scientists have found, leads to a pessimistic cognitive bias; when an anxious brain processes ambiguous information, it tends to choose the more pessimistic from among the likely interpretations. Your brain becomes overactive in perceiving threats and tends to predict dire outcomes when faced with uncertainty. It’s easy to understand why brains might be designed that way; being in a punishing environment, one would be wise to interpret ambiguous data as being more threatening, or less desirable, than one might if the surroundings were safe and pleasant.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking