> Name calling, and
> I mean the kind that goes beyond neutral feeling attempts to label
> something perjoratively, are aimed at intense feelings. There is a
> purpose or strategy, i.e. intense feelings narrow consciousness down.
> The frontal lobe is shut down as it were to much lower function. The
> ability to "reason and plan" declines. Name calling that aims at
> intense feelings is a primitive means of tying up the other into
> "clumsy" consciousness.
This is a very good point. But I believe it's only part of the picture. As Doyle himself notes below about his own use of intense language, name calling proceeds from intense feelings as well as aiming at them. In fact, "aiming at them" may impute more consciousness to the act of name-calling than it deserves. The regression into "clumsy" consciousness is thus transmitted, like a mental virus. We recognize this process at work in the spread of ethnic hostility, and Doyle is quite right to point it out in the much more commonplace form he's pointing out.
> It is the opposite of trying to build socialist
> awareness. I mean that we want the whole working class fully
> consciously aware in the frontal lobe sense of their rights, their place
> in the world.
And since ethnic hostility has played such a persistent role in fragmenting the American working class, Doyle's extension to a more insidious form of the same dynamic is particularly worth paying attention to.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"