In the 1980s, The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an organization co-founded by Tipper Gore and the wives of several other Washington power brokers, launched a political campaign against pop music, hoping to put warning labels on records that promoted Sex, Violence, Drug and Alcohol Use. Along the way, the PMRC issued “the Filthy Fifteen,” a list of 15 particularly objectionable songs. Hits by Madonna, Prince and Cyndi Lauper made the list. But the list really took aim at heavy metal bands from the 80s — namely, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, W.A.S.P., Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, and Venom. (Interesting footnote: the Soviets separately created a list of blackballed rock bands, and it looked pretty much the same.)
Above, you can watch Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider appear before Congress in 1985 and accuse the PMRC of misinterpreting his band’s lyrics and waging a false war against metal music. The evidence 40 years later suggests that Snider perhaps had a point.
A study by psychology researchers at Humboldt State, Ohio State, UC Riverside and UT Austin “examined 1980s heavy metal groupies, musicians, and fans at middle age” — 377 participants in total — and found that, although metal enthusiasts certainly lived riskier lives as kids, they were nonetheless “significantly happier in their youth and better adjusted currently than either middle-aged or current college-age youth comparison groups.” This left the researchers to contemplate one possible conclusion: “participation in fringe style cultures may enhance identity development in troubled youth.” Not to mention that heavy metal lyrics don’t easily turn kids into damaged goods.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in July 2015.
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You can be forgiven for thinking the concept of “flow” was cooked up and popularized by yoga teachers. That word gets a lot of play when one is moving from Downward-Facing Dog on through Warrior One and Two.
Actually, flow — the state of “effortless effort” — was coined by Goethe, from the German “rausch”, a dizzying sort of ecstasy.
Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.
Author Steven Kotler, Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, not only seems to spend a lot of time thinking about flow, as a leading expert on human performance, he inhabits the state on a fairly regular basis, too.
Chalk it up to good luck?
Good genes? (Some researchers, including retired NIH geneticist Dean Hamer and psychologist C. Robert Cloninger, think genetics play a part…)
As Kotler points out above, anyone can hedge their bets by clearing away distractions — all the usual baddies that interfere with sleep, performance, or productivity.
I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn everything off at the end of the day including unplugging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morning there’s nobody jumping into my inbox or assaulting me emotionally with something, you know what I mean?… I really protect that early morning time.
By contrast, his night owl wife doesn’t start clearing the cobwebs ’til early evening.
In the above video for Big Think, Kotler notes that 22 flow triggers have been discovered, pre-conditions that keep attention focused in the present moment.
His website lists many of those triggers:
Complete Concentration in the Present Moment
Immediate Feedback
Clear Goals
The Challenge-Skills Ratio (ie: the challenge should seem slightly out of reach
High consequences
Deep Embodiment
Rich Environment
Creativity (specifically, pattern recognition, or the linking together of new ideas)
Kotler also shares University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Sawyer’s trigger list for groups hoping to flow like a well-oiled machine:
Shared Goals
Close Listening
“Yes And” (additive, rather than combative conversations)
Complete Concentration (total focus in the right here, right now)
A sense of control (each member of the group feels in control, but still)
Blending Egos (each person can submerge their ego needs into the group’s)
Equal Participation (skills levels are roughly and equal everyone is involved)
Familiarity (people know one another and understand their tics and tendencies)
Constant Communication (a group version of immediate feedback)
Shared, Group Risk
One might think people in the flow state would be floating around with an expression of ecstatic bliss on their faces. Not so, according to Kotler. Rather, they tend to frown slightly. Good news for anyone with resting bitch face!
(We’ll thank you to refer to it as resting flow state face from here on out.)
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.
In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that waves. Their teacher strikes them both dumb, saying, “It is your mind that moves.” The centuries-old koan illustrates a point Zen masters — and later philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists — have all emphasized at one time or another: human experience happens in the mind, but we share reality through language and culture, and these in turn set the terms for how we perceive what we experience.
Such observations bring us to another koan-like question: if a language lacks a word for something like the color blue, can the thing be said to exist in the speaker’s mind? We can dispense with the idea that there’s a color blue “out there” in the world. Color is a collaboration between light, the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex. And yet, claims Maria Michela Sassi, professor of ancient philosophy at Pisa University, “every culture has its own way of naming and categorizing colours.”
The most famous example comes from the ancient Greeks. Since the 18th century, scholars have pointed out that in the thousands of words in the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer never once describes anything — sea, sky, you name it — as blue. It wasn’t only the Greeks who didn’t see blue, or didn’t see it as we do, Sassi writes:
There is a specific Greek chromatic culture, just as there is an Egyptian one, an Indian one, a European one, and the like, each of them being reflected in a vocabulary that has its own peculiarity, and not to be measured only by the scientific meter of the Newtonian paradigm.
It was once thought cultural color differences had to do with stages of evolutionary development — that more “primitive” peoples had a less developed biological visual sense. But differences in color perception are “not due to varying anatomical structures of the human eye,” writes Sassi, “but to the fact that different ocular areas are stimulated, which triggers different emotional responses, all according to different cultural contexts.”
As the AsapSCIENCE video above explains, the evidence of ancient Greek literature and philosophy shows that since blue was not part of Homer and his readers’ shared vocabulary (yellow and green do not appear either), it may not have been part of their perceptual experience, either. The spread of blue ink across the world as a relatively recent phenomenon has to do with its availability. “If you think about it,” writes Business Insider’s Kevin Loria, “blue doesn’t appear much in nature — there aren’t blue animals, blue eyes are rare, and blue flowers are mostly human creations.”
The color blue took hold in modern times with the development of substances that could act as blue pigment, like Prussian Blue, invented in Berlin, manufactured in China and exported to Japan in the 19th century. “The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.” Color is not only cultural, it is also technological. But first, perhaps, it could be a linguistic phenomenon.
One modern researcher, Jules Davidoff, found this to be true in experiments with a Namibian people whose language makes no distinction between blue and green (but names many finer shades of green than English does). “Davidoff says that without a word for a colour,” Loria writes, “without a way of identifying it as different, it’s much harder for us to notice what’s unique about it.” Unless we’re color blind, we all “see” the same things when we look at the world because of the basic biology of human eyes and brains. But whether certain colors appear, it seems, has to do less with what we see than with what we’re already primed to expect.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.
Despite his one-time friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western self-understanding, I would argue it is Carl Jung who is still most with us in our communal practices: from his focus on introversion and extroversion to his view of syncretic, intuitive forms of spirituality and his indirect influence on 12-Step programs. But Jung’s journey to self-understanding and what he called “individuation” was an intensely private, personal affair that took place over the course of sixteen years, during which he created an incredible, folio-sized work of religious art called The Red Book: Liber Novus. In the video above, you can get a tour through Jung’s private masterpiece, presented in an intensely hushed, breathy style meant to trigger the tingly sensations of a weird phenomenon called “ASMR.” Given the book’s disorienting and often disturbing content, this over-gentle guidance seems appropriate.
After his break with Freud in 1913, when he was 38 years old, Jung had what he feared might be a psychotic break with reality as well. He began recording his dreams, mystical visions, and psychedelic inner voyages, in a stylized, calligraphic style that resembles medieval European illuminated manuscripts and the occult psychic journeys of Aleister Crowley and William Blake.
Jung had the work bound but not published. It’s “a very personal record,” writes Psychology Today, “of Jung’s complicated, tortuous and lengthy quest to salvage his soul.” Jung called this process of creation the “numinous beginning” to his most important psychological work. After many years spent locked in a bank vault, The Red Book finally came to light a few years ago and was translated and published in an expensive edition.
It’s practically guaranteed that we now have more stupid people on the planet than ever before. Of course, we might be tempted to think; just look at how many of them disagree with mypolitics. But this unprecedented stupidity is primarily, if not entirely, a function of an unprecedentedly large global population. The more important matter has less to do with quantity of stupidity than with its quality: of all the forms it can take, which does the most damage? Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature, addresses that question in the clip above from an interview with podcaster Chris Williamson.
“What makes people stupid,” Greene explains, “is their certainty that they have all the answers.” The basic idea may sound familiar, since we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture the related phenomenon of the Dunning-Kruger effect. In some sense, stupid people who know they’re stupid aren’t actually stupid, or at least not harmfully so.
True to form, Greene makes a classical reference: Athens’ leaders went into the Peloponnesian War certain of victory, when it actually brought about the end of the Athenian golden age. “People who are certain of things are very stupid,” he says, “and when they have power, they’re very, very dangerous,” perhaps more so than those we would call evil.
This brings to mind the oft-quoted principle known as Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” But even in otherwise intelligent individuals, a tendency toward premature certainty can induce that stupidity. Better, in Greene’s view, to cultivate what John Keats, inspired by Shakespeare, called “negative capability”: the power to “hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, two thoughts that apparently contradict each other.” We might consider, for instance, entertaining the ideas of our aforementioned political enemies — not fully accepting them, mind you, but also not fully accepting our own. It may, at least, prevent the onset of stupidity, a condition that’s clearly difficult to cure.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nauseatingly difficult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this controversy? What is the evidence brought against the famed Swiss psychiatrist and onetime close friend, student, and colleague of Sigmund Freud?
Truth be told, it does not look good for Jung. Unlike Nietzsche, whose work was deliberately bastardized by Nazis, beginning with his own sister, Jung need not be taken out of context to be read as anti-Semitic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psychotherapy Today, in which he marvels at National Socialism as a “formidable phenomenon,” and writes, “the ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” This is only one of the least objectionable of such statements, as historian Andrew Samuels demonstrates.
One Jungian defender admits in an essay collection called Lingering Shadows that Jung had been “unconsciously infected by Nazi ideas.” In response, psychologist John Conger asks, “Why not then say that he was unconsciously infected by anti-Semitic ideas as well?”—well before the Nazis came to power. He had expressed such thoughts as far back as 1918. Like the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Jung was accused of trading on his professional associations during the 30s to maintain his status, and turning on his Jewish colleagues while they were purged.
Yet his biographer Deirdre Bair claims Jung’s name was used to endorse persecution without his consent. Jung was incensed, “not least,” Mark Vernon writes at The Guardian, “because he was actually fighting to keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish individuals.” Bair also reveals that Jung was “involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essentially by having a leading physician declare the Führer mad. Both came to nothing.” And unlike Heidegger, Jung strongly denounced anti-Semitic views during the war. He “protected Jewish analysts,” writes Conger, “and helped refugees.” He also worked for the OSS, precursor to the CIA, during the war.
His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung’s “deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for.” Dulles also cryptically remarked, “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.” These contradictions in Jung’s words, character, and actions are puzzling, to say the least. I would not presume to draw any hard and fast conclusions from them. They do, however, serve as the necessary context for Jung’s observations of Adolf Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most often do so for his supposed characterization of Hitler as “Wotan,” or Odin, a comparison that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Germans did, use ancient European belief systems as clothes hangers for modern racist nationalism.
In his 1936 essay, “Wotan,” Jung describes the old god as a force all its own, a “personification of psychic forces” that moved through the German people “towards the end of the Weimar Republic”—through the “thousands of unemployed,” who by 1933 “marched in their hundreds of thousands.” Wotan, Jung writes, “is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.” In personifying the “German psyche” as a furious god, Jung goes so far as to write, “We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims.”
“One hopes,” writes Per Brask, “evidently against hope, that Jung did not intend” his statements “as an argument of redemption for the Germans.” Whatever his intentions, his mystical racialization of the unconscious in “Wotan” accorded perfectly well with the theories of Alfred Rosenberg, “Hitler’s chief ideologist.” Like everything about Jung, the situation is complicated. In a 1938 interview, published by Omnibook Magazine in 1942, Jung repeated many of these disturbing ideas, comparing the German worship of Hitler to the Jewish desire for a Messiah, a “characteristic of people with an inferiority complex.” He describes Hitler’s power as a form of “magic.” But that power only exists, he says, because “Hitler listens and obeys….”
His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people he would be nothing.
Jung’s observations are bombastic, but they are not flattering. The people may be possessed, but it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. “The true leader,” says Jung, “is always led.” He goes on to paint an even darker picture, having closely observed Hitler and Mussolini together in Berlin:
In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.
His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism.
With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?
Read the full interview here. Jung goes on to further discuss the German resurgence of the cult of Wotan, the “parallel between the Biblical triad… and the Third Reich,” and other peculiarly Jungian formulations. Of Jung’s analysis, interviewer H.R. Knickerbocker concludes, “this psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
In the 1950s, it was fashionable to drop Freud’s name — often as not in pseudo-intellectual sex jokes. Freud’s preoccupations had as much to do with his fame as the actual practice of psychotherapy, and it was assumed — and still is to a great degree — that Freud had “won” the debate with his former student and friend Carl Jung, who saw religion, psychedelic drugs, occult practices, etc. as valid forms of individualizing and integrating human selves — selves that were after all, he thought, connected by far more than biological drives for sex and death.
Now Jung’s insights permeate the culture, in increasingly popular fields like transpersonal psychology, for example, that see humans as “radically interconnected, not just isolated individuals,” psychologist Harris L. Friedman argues. Movements like these grew out of the “counterculture movements of the 1960s,” psychology lecturer and author Steve Taylor explains, “and the wave of psycho-experimentation it involved, through psychedelic substances, meditation and other consciousness-changing practices” — the very practices Jung explored in his work.
Indeed, Jung was the first “to legitimize a spiritual approach to the practice of depth psychology,” Mark Kasprow and Bruce Scotton point out, and “suggested that psychological development extends to include higher states of consciousness and can continue throughout life, rather than stop with the attainment of adult ego maturation.” Against Freud, who thought transcendence was regression, Jung “proposed that transcendent experience lies within and is accessible to everyone, and that the healing and growth stimulated by such experience often make use of the languages of symbolic imagery and nonverbal experience.”
Jung’s work became increasingly important after his death in 1961, leading to the publication of his collected works in 1969. These introduced readers to all of his “key concepts and ideas, from archetypal symbols to analytical psychology to UFOs,” notes a companion guide. Near the end of his life, Jung himself provided a verbal survey of his life’s work in the form of four one-hour interviews conducted in 1957 by University of Houston’s Dr. Richard Evans at the Eidgenossische Technische Hoschschule (Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich.
“The conversations were filmed as part of an educational project designed for students of the psychology department. Evans is a poor interviewer, but Jung compensates well,” the Gnostic Society Library writes. The edited interviews begin with a question about Jung’s concept of persona (also, incidentally, the theme and title of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece). In response, Jung describes the persona in plain terms and with everyday examples as a fictional self “partially dictated by society and partially dictated by the expectations or the wishes one nurses oneself.”
The less we’re consciously aware of our public selves as performances in these terms, the more we’re prone, Jung says, to neuroses, as the pressure of our “shadow,” exerts itself. Jung and Evans’ discussion of persona only grazes the surface of their wide-ranging conversation about the unconscious and the many ways to access it. Throughout, Jung’s examples are clear and his explanations lucid. Above, you can see a transcribed video of the same interviews. Read a published transcript in the collection C.G. Jung Speaking, and see more Jung interviews and documentaries at the Gnostic Society Library.
What do you imagine when you hear the phrase “cat piano”? Some kind of whimsical furry beast with black and white keys for teeth, maybe? A relative of My Neighbor Totoro’s cat bus? Or maybe you picture a piano that contains several caged cats who shriek along an entire scale when keys are pressed that slam sharpened nails into their tails. If this is your answer, you might find people slowly backing away from you at times, or gently suggesting you get some psychiatric help.
But then, imagine that such a perverse oddity was in use by psychiatrists, like the 18th-century German physician Johann Christian Reil, who—reports David McNamee at The Guardian—“wrote that the device was intended to shake mental patients who had lost the ability to focus out of a ‘fixed state’ and into ‘conscious awareness.’”
So long, meds. See you, meditation and mandala coloring books.… I joke, but apparently Dr. Reil was in earnest when he wrote in an 1803 manual for the treatment of mental illness that patients could “be placed so that they are sitting in direct view of the cat’s expressions when the psychiatrist plays a fugue.”
A bafflingly cruel and nonsensical experiment, and we might rejoice to know it probably never took place. But the bizarre idea of the cat piano, or Katzenklavier, did not spring from the weird delusions of one sadistic psychiatrist. It was supposedly invented by German polymath and Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), who has been called “the last Renaissance man” and who made pioneering discoveries in the fields of microbiology, geology, and comparative religion. He was a serious scholar and a man of science. Maybe the Katzenklavier was intended as a sick joke that others took seriously—and for a very long time at that. The illustration of a Katzenklavier above dates from 1667, the one below from 1883.
Kircher’s biographer John Glassie admits that, for all his undoubted brilliance, several of his “actual ideas today seem wildly off-base; if not simply bizarre” as well as “inadvertently amusing, right, wrong, half-right, half-baked, ridiculous….” You get the idea. He was an eccentric, not a psychopath. McNamee points to other, likely apocryphal, stories in which cats were supposedly used as instruments. Perhaps, cruel as it seems to us, the cat piano seemed no crueler in previous centuries than the way we taunt our cats today to make them perform for animated GIFs.
But to the cats these distinctions are meaningless. From their point of view, there is no other way to describe the Katzenklavier than as a sinister, terrifying torture device, and those who might use it as monstrous villains. Personally I’d like to give cats the last word on the subject of the Katzenklavier—or at least a few fictional animated, walking, talking, singing cats. Watch the short animation at the top, in which Nick Cave reads a poem by Eddie White about talented cat singers who mysteriously go missing, scooped up by a human for a “harpsichord of harm, the cruelest instrument to spawn from man’s gray cerebral soup.” The story has all the dread and intrigue of Edgar Allan Poe’s best work, and it is in such a milieu of gothic horror that the Katzenklavier belongs.
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