Free your mind of being yourself by Ron Immink on December 20, 2018 in Blog “The Greatest Habit You Can Ever Break Is the Habit of Being Yourself” is a great book about your mind, brain imaging, neuroplasticity, epigenetics, psychoneuroimmunology, quantum entanglement, neurochemicals, and meditation The power of the mind If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors. In 2000, my widowed mom, having voted for 14 Republican presidential nominees in a row, quit a party that had become too Christian for her. Self-concept tends to be more malleable when you're younger and still going through the process of self-discovery and identity formation . long definition: 1. continuing for a large amount of time: 2. being a distance between two points that is more than…. Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? D. Laing (The Divided Self) and Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness). Bellicose: aggressively angry, from the synonym for warlike 11. Almost a quarter believe that vaccines cause autism, and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2016. ... We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. ... We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. Only in the fall of 2016 did he grudgingly admit that the president was indeed a native-born American—at the same moment a YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that a majority of Republicans still believed Obama probably or definitely had been born in Kenya. A single idée fixe like this often appears in both frightened and hopeful versions. Yet because I’m an American, a fortunate American who has lived in a fortunate American century, I remain (barely) more of an optimist than a pessimist. “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”, “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”, — Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961). They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric. He is, first and last, a creature of the fantasy-industrial complex. Since 1981, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty around the globe has plummeted from 44 percent to 10 percent. Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right. One reason, I think, is religion. This was understandable, given the times: colonialism ending, genocide of American Indians confessed, U.S. wars in the developing world. Soul or psyche (Ancient Greek: ψυχή psykhḗ, of ψύχειν psýkhein, "to breathe", cf. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Be thoughtful. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people. What connects an Islamic-mausoleum-themed casino to a short-lived, shoddy professional football league to an autobiography he didn’t write to buildings he didn’t build to a mail-order meat business to beauty pageants to an airline that lasted three years to a sham “university” to a fragrance called Success to a vodka and a board game named after himself to a reality-TV show about pretending to fire people? In 1969, the SDS’s most apocalyptic and charismatic faction, calling itself Weatherman, split off and got all the attention. How America Lost Its Mind. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Yes: “Every dream you’ve ever dreamed for your country” will come true. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. You know how young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it? In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. But what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional for its entire history. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. Synonyms for excited include enthusiastic, eager, buoyant, delighted, desirous, elated, jovial, joyful, joyous and thrilled. Again, knowing how you work can mitigate this setback and help you keep the big picture in mind. Whether you want to entice your visitors to read a blog post, opt into your email list, or click the “Buy Now” button on your sales page, power words are arguably the quickest and easiest way to increase your conversion rates. Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. In 2011, he became the chief promoter of the fantasy that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a fringe idea that he brought into the mainstream. The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false. Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians. The rules of the scientific method had to be revised. The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. 53 synonyms of intent from the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, plus 103 related words, definitions, and antonyms. Entirely new edition. Learn more. Americans were ready to believe von Däniken’s fantasy to a degree they simply wouldn’t have been a decade earlier, before the ’60s sea change. The party is the American coalition of white Christians, papering over doctrinal and class differences—and now led, weirdly, by one of the least religious presidents ever. How America Lost Its Mind. But hanging with the young people had led him to a midlife epiphany and apostasy. A senior physician at one of America’s most prestigious university hospitals promotes “miracle cures” on his daily TV show. Self-concept tends to be more malleable when you're younger and still going through the process of … 501 Synonym & Antonym Questions Keep your focus. The notion of an immense and awful JFK-assassination conspiracy became conventional wisdom in America. New York Times Bestseller Over 3 million copies sold For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare -- poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights.But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself from a depressed, overweight young man with no future into a U.S. Armed Forces icon and one of the world's top endurance athletes. the anti-Christ. What's the origin of the phrase 'Lose your marbles'? Stages are not an excuse; they are just a stage. And fight the good fight in the public sphere. Realize there are stages to your aspirations. Its members believed that they and other young white Americans, aligned with black insurgents, would be the vanguard in a new civil war. American moxie has always come in two types. See more. Blue in the face: see frustrated, from the idea of facial discoloration caused by extreme emotion 14. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”. Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites. The husband and wife were undoubtedly sincere believers. Be thoughtful. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. If he were just a truth-telling wise guy, however, he wouldn’t have won. During the campaign, Trump repeated the falsehood that vaccines cause autism. In 1966, he had started teaching an undergraduate seminar called “The Individual in America,” for which he assigned fiction by Kesey and Norman Mailer. This was the big idea behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, of course. Bitter: harshly upset due to resentment 13. It’s horrible.” The Fox News anchors interviewing him didn’t challenge him or follow up. Learn more. global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Realize there are stages to your aspirations. If reality is simply the result of rules written by the powers that be, then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? I have students in lots of different careers who pursue singing. Found inside – Page 186Comb must allow for 'combing' your house in search of a lost book, ... filed with “search your house” and “hunt everywhere in your house” under “synonyms. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish. I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. When he’d chalked a statistical table on a classroom blackboard, one of his students had reacted with horror: “Mr. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false. Being detail-oriented can also have its downfall if you get lost or overwhelmed in the details. long definition: 1. continuing for a large amount of time: 2. being a distance between two points that is more than…. Twitter became his unmediated personal channel for entertaining outrage and untruth. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Belief in gigantic secret conspiracies thrived, ranging from the highly improbable to the impossible, and moved from the crackpot periphery to the mainstream. Foucault’s suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded in American academia. The inevitable/imminent happy-cataclysm part of the dream didn’t happen, of course. The manifesto is sweet and reasonable: decrying inequality and poverty and “the pervasiveness of racism in American life,” seeing the potential benefits as well as the downsides of industrial automation, declaring the group “in basic opposition to the communist system.”. See more. ... We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? 2005-11-11T17:01:18-05:00 It reflects our blithe conviction that America’s visions of freedom and democracy and justice and prosperity must prevail in the end. The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. Reason was chucked. 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