"Sometimes he was up half the night, using tweezers to paste sesame seeds onto hamburger buns or mixing and coloring the salty dough that looked more like ice cream in pictures than real ice cream did."
You do realize that the discussion is both very old, and conceptually a contradictory dialectic, or in human language, a paradox, in Vaudeville, you get a honk, as a standup comic, you get a rimshot.
Each cultural decade for some time has its version of a social thing which implies access to a high status feature which is exclusive and necessarily unconscious. A few words such as “Groovy”, “Classy”, “Real”, “Hip”, “Natural”, “Sincere”, “Chic”, “Trendy”, “cool”, “it” revolve around the idea.
The problem is that the moment someone declares something or someone “groovy”, for instance, it is instantly “square”. A declaration of hipness is profoundly unhip. The mere consciousness of the state destroys it - a social correlative of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Remember Heisenberg - you cannot know the position and momentum of a particle. You cannot be conscious of authenticity and be authentic simultaneously - the more certain you are of one, the less the other is possible.
I’ll leave with two quotes and a lyric.
One is attributed to so many people from George Burns to Groucho Marx, I don’t know where to start. To paraphrase:
To be a great actor (salesperson, lover, parent…) you must be sincere. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
The other is definitive: February 1895 at the premiere of “The Importance of Being Earnest” we first heard “To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
Lastly, August 1978 the word poet Cheryl Lynn (reminiscent of the poet Joyce Kilmer, though he wrote ‘trees’ 75 years prior) published in lullaby sonata form the timeless “To Be Real”
Got To Be Real"
What you find-ah
What you feel now
What you know-a
To be real
What you find, ah
(I think I love you, baby)
What you feel now
(I feel I need you, baby)
What you know-a
To be real
Ooh, your love's for real now
You know that your love is my love
My love is your love
Our love is here to stay
What you find-ah
What you feel now
What you know-a
To be real
Ooh, your love's for real now
You know that your love is my love
My love is your love
Our love is here to stay
What you find, ah
(I think I love you, baby)
What you feel now
(I feel I need you, baby)
What you know-a
To be real
What you find, ah
(I think I love you, baby)
What you feel now
(I feel I need you)
What you know-a
To be real...
And I mean every word of this comment from the bottom of my 💖
There is so much juice here. About the underground movements in various disciplines and what happens when it gets too much air from outsiders who deeply desire to be insiders? Why do people abandon their lesser known cult bands when they become famous? So much of the interesting parts in the real world continue to be ignored by social scientists. Thanks for expanding on this
The 'person-environment fit' such a helpful framing Todd. I've been thinking something similar about self-actualisation with my PhD.
Kurt Goldstein, who coined the term 'self-actualisation', seems to infer in his writing that well-being is an outcome of achieving person-environment fit. Self-actualisation, then, is the process of finding the right environment for the organism to express it's innate potentialities.
Lo-and-behold, 20 years later, Maslow and Rogers get a hold of self-actualisation, and become the forefathers of the church of authenticity.
Thanks Ryan. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know his work. Please let me know where I should start. It sounds as if we all should be digesting Kurt’s work. We finally have the data analytic tools and methods to test these models.
Fascinating history. I’ve said this before your breadth and depth of history is your strength.
Goldstein was a neurologist and psychiatrist that worked with a number of soldiers, who at the time, likely had some significant PTSD, or brain-damage from war.
He introduces the concept of 'self-actualisation' in 1934, in his book 'The Organism'. Defining it as: “[A] drive for self-preservation . . . [to] utilize the preserved capacities in the best possible way . . . an organism is governed by the tendency to actualize, as much as possible, its individual capacities, its ‘nature’, in the world”.
He argues that all drives are partial expressions of the fundamental motivation towards self-actualisation. Hungry? Motivated to eat? That's an expression of self-actualisation. Hungry to learn? That's the drive to self-actualisation, again! All human behaviour is governed by the drive towards self-actualisation.
Interestingly, Maslow's biographer, Richard Lowry, writes that Goldstein wasn't happy with Maslow’s interpretation and use of self-actualization.
I haven't read 'The Organism' from front to back yet, it's a lofty text. But, it's easy enough to find the chapters on self-actualisation from the index.
You do realize that the discussion is both very old, and conceptually a contradictory dialectic, or in human language, a paradox, in Vaudeville, you get a honk, as a standup comic, you get a rimshot.
Each cultural decade for some time has its version of a social thing which implies access to a high status feature which is exclusive and necessarily unconscious. A few words such as “Groovy”, “Classy”, “Real”, “Hip”, “Natural”, “Sincere”, “Chic”, “Trendy”, “cool”, “it” revolve around the idea.
The problem is that the moment someone declares something or someone “groovy”, for instance, it is instantly “square”. A declaration of hipness is profoundly unhip. The mere consciousness of the state destroys it - a social correlative of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Remember Heisenberg - you cannot know the position and momentum of a particle. You cannot be conscious of authenticity and be authentic simultaneously - the more certain you are of one, the less the other is possible.
I’ll leave with two quotes and a lyric.
One is attributed to so many people from George Burns to Groucho Marx, I don’t know where to start. To paraphrase:
To be a great actor (salesperson, lover, parent…) you must be sincere. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
The other is definitive: February 1895 at the premiere of “The Importance of Being Earnest” we first heard “To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
Lastly, August 1978 the word poet Cheryl Lynn (reminiscent of the poet Joyce Kilmer, though he wrote ‘trees’ 75 years prior) published in lullaby sonata form the timeless “To Be Real”
Got To Be Real"
What you find-ah
What you feel now
What you know-a
To be real
What you find, ah
(I think I love you, baby)
What you feel now
(I feel I need you, baby)
What you know-a
To be real
Ooh, your love's for real now
You know that your love is my love
My love is your love
Our love is here to stay
What you find-ah
What you feel now
What you know-a
To be real
Ooh, your love's for real now
You know that your love is my love
My love is your love
Our love is here to stay
What you find, ah
(I think I love you, baby)
What you feel now
(I feel I need you, baby)
What you know-a
To be real
What you find, ah
(I think I love you, baby)
What you feel now
(I feel I need you)
What you know-a
To be real...
And I mean every word of this comment from the bottom of my 💖
There is so much juice here. About the underground movements in various disciplines and what happens when it gets too much air from outsiders who deeply desire to be insiders? Why do people abandon their lesser known cult bands when they become famous? So much of the interesting parts in the real world continue to be ignored by social scientists. Thanks for expanding on this
It was a funny fun read...
The 'person-environment fit' such a helpful framing Todd. I've been thinking something similar about self-actualisation with my PhD.
Kurt Goldstein, who coined the term 'self-actualisation', seems to infer in his writing that well-being is an outcome of achieving person-environment fit. Self-actualisation, then, is the process of finding the right environment for the organism to express it's innate potentialities.
Lo-and-behold, 20 years later, Maslow and Rogers get a hold of self-actualisation, and become the forefathers of the church of authenticity.
Thanks Ryan. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know his work. Please let me know where I should start. It sounds as if we all should be digesting Kurt’s work. We finally have the data analytic tools and methods to test these models.
Fascinating history. I’ve said this before your breadth and depth of history is your strength.
Goldstein was a neurologist and psychiatrist that worked with a number of soldiers, who at the time, likely had some significant PTSD, or brain-damage from war.
He introduces the concept of 'self-actualisation' in 1934, in his book 'The Organism'. Defining it as: “[A] drive for self-preservation . . . [to] utilize the preserved capacities in the best possible way . . . an organism is governed by the tendency to actualize, as much as possible, its individual capacities, its ‘nature’, in the world”.
He argues that all drives are partial expressions of the fundamental motivation towards self-actualisation. Hungry? Motivated to eat? That's an expression of self-actualisation. Hungry to learn? That's the drive to self-actualisation, again! All human behaviour is governed by the drive towards self-actualisation.
Interestingly, Maslow's biographer, Richard Lowry, writes that Goldstein wasn't happy with Maslow’s interpretation and use of self-actualization.
I haven't read 'The Organism' from front to back yet, it's a lofty text. But, it's easy enough to find the chapters on self-actualisation from the index.
oh damn. I need to get this book.
it makes sense. what is not in service of the biggest ass goal there is in your humanity?
Really interested on your takes and reactions if you get your hands on it.