People Would Rather Get An Electric Shock Than Just Sit And Think

Alan: Over the years I have debunked a torrent of right-wing emails forwarded by biker pal Georgie. 

A dozen years into these exchanges, Georgie confessed: "I like being partly right." 

When we delight in being "partly right," our intention is to falsify while pretending to be honest. 

The result is such a neat little system that most often the pretense persuades the pretender.

This urge to be "partly right" is common. 

But while everyone feels the impulse, liberals refrain from egregious monstrosities like representing "anti-Christ Barack HUSSEIN Obama as a Kenyan-born Muslim socialist, anti-American, job-killing quisling, who schemes to surrender the United States to a One World Government headed by Arab sheikhs."

The "new thing under the sun" is that conservatives -- corrupted by Ronald Reagan's allegation that "Government is the problem" -- are now obliged to espouse continual falsehood to forfend the collapse of their "philosophical" foundation.

"Bill Maher: The Zombie Life Cycle Of Republican Lies. They Never - Ever - Die"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/bill-maher-zombie-life-cycle-of.html 

"The American People Will Come To Despise Ronald Reagan. Here's Why"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-american-people-will-come-to.html

Since it is impossible to build an honest - or effective - political party on the grievances of angry white guys, the GOP -- at least as the uncompromising, obstructionist organization we now know -- will fall apart when the pending demographic hurricane propels a non-white storm surge that will change the political landscape forever. 

At bottom, the "problem" with richly contextualized truth is that it requires learning and thinking across a wide range of disciplines -- history, science, social science, economics, archaeology, philosophy, religion -- and, finally, the courage to be guided by "the fullness of truth" rather than "partisan partiality." 

Contemporary conservatives are convinced that decibelage wins arguments and that a sufficiently squeaky wheel silences truth - whether it be the truth of evolution, anthropogenic global warming or the fact that societies are healthiest and most prosperous when private and public sectors strive for The General Welfare under aegis of The Common Good.

The "warp of thinking" interwoven with the "weft of learning" are such painful prospects for most people that they never embrace the twin discipline, resorting instead to sound bites first heard at Daddy's knee, clinging to puerile simplifications like children gorging on "comfort food" regardless its nutritional value. 

In a word, it is "easy" to live lives of perpetual regression while it is hard work to see that the flag's shadow side is a spangled disguise for someone else's shroud.

"Terrorism and The Other Religions"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/terrorism-and-other-religions-juan-cole.html

***

"Republicans For Revolution: A Study In Anarchic Apocalypticism"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/10/republicans-for-revolution-study-in.html

***

Why Is It So Hard for Us to Do Nothing?

A new study shows that many people would rather get an electric shock than just sit and think

It is summer time, and the living is easy. You can, at last, indulge in what is surely the most enjoyable of human activities—doing absolutely nothing. But is doing nothing really enjoyable? A new study in the journal Science shows that many people would rather get an electric shock than just sit and think.

Neuroscientists have inadvertently discovered a lot about doing nothing. In brain-imaging studies, people lie in a confined metal tube feeling bored as they wait for the actual experiment to start. Fortuitously, neuroscientists discovered that this tedium was associated with a distinctive pattern of brain activity. It turns out that when we do nothing, many parts of the brain that underpin complex kinds of thinking light up.

When people lie in a tube with nothing else to do, they reminisce, reliving events in the past ("Damn it, that guy was rude to me last week"), or they plan what they will do in the future ("I'll snub him next time"). And they fantasize: "Just imagine how crushed he would have been if I'd made that witty riposte."

Though we take this kind of daydreaming for granted, it is actually a particularly powerful kind of thinking. Much more than any other animal, we humans have evolved the ability to live in our own thoughts, detached from the demands of our immediate actions and experiences.

Descartes had his most important insights sitting alone in a closet-sized stove, the only warm spot during a wintry Dutch military campaign. When someone asked Newton how he discovered the law of gravity, he replied, "By thinking on it continually." Doing nothing but thinking can be profound.

But is it fun? Psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia and his colleagues asked college students to sit for 15 minutes in a plain room doing nothing but thinking. The researchers also asked them to record how well they concentrated and how much they enjoyed doing it. Most of the students reported that they couldn't concentrate; half of them actively disliked the experience.

Maybe that was because of what they thought about. "Rumination"—brooding on unpleasant experiences, like the guy who snubbed you—can lead to depression, even clinical depression. But the researchers found no difference based on whether people recorded positive or negative thoughts.

Maybe it was something about the sterile lab room. But the researchers also got students just to sit and think in their own homes, and they disliked it even more. In fact, 32% of the students reported that they cheated, with a sneak peek at a cellphone or just one quick text.

But that's because they were young whippersnappers with Twitter-rotted brains, right? Wrong. The researchers also did the experiment with a middle-aged church group, and the results were the same. Age, gender, personality, social-media use—nothing made much difference.

But did people really hate thinking that much? The researchers gave students a mild electric shock and asked if they would pay to avoid another. The students sensibly said that they would. The researchers then put them back in the room with nothing to do but also gave them the shock button.

Amazingly, many of them voluntarily shocked themselves rather than doing nothing. Not so amazingly (at least to this mother of boys who played hockey), there was a big sex difference. Sixty-seven percent of the men preferred a shock to doing nothing, but only 25% of the women did.

Newton and neuroscience suggest that just thinking can be very valuable. Why is it so hard? It is easy to blame the modern world, but 1,000 years ago, Buddhist monks had the same problem. Meditation has proved benefits, but it takes discipline, practice and effort. Our animal impulse to be up and doing, or at least up and checking email, is hard to resist, even in a long, hazy cricket-song dream of a summer day.