карточный домик

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Another important way to develop effective boundaries is to make and keep effective agreements. People with counter-dependent behaviors often have trouble with both parts of agreements. First, they often make agreements they can’t keep, because they want to look good. Then they don’t keep agreements, because they don’t want to be controlled. When they break an agreement, they often try to blame it on others or on circumstances beyond their control and refuse to take responsibility for breaking the agreement.

Janae Weinhold, Barry Weinhold, The Flight From Intimacy: Healing Your Relationship of Counter-dependency — the Other Side of Co-dependency

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[…] increasing economic affluence also serves to stimulate the demand for psychotherapeutic services. As soon as people have more money than they need for whatever they consider the necessities of life, they expect to be happy. And since most people still will not be happy, some will use some of their money to seek happiness through psychotherapy. From this point of view, the social function of psychotherapy is similar not only to that of religion, but also to that of alcohol, tobacco, cosmetics, and various recreational activities.

Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

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Socially deviant or obnoxious behavior may be classified in numerous ways, or may be left unclassified. Placing some physically healthy persons in the class of sick people may indeed be justified by appeals to ethics or politics; but it cannot be justified by appeals to logic or science.

Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

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Psychologists and psychiatrists deal with moral problems which, I believe, they cannot solve by medical methods.

Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

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Psychiatry is conventionally defined as a medical specialty concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases. I submit that this definition, which is still widely accepted, places psychiatry in the company of alchemy and astrology and commits it to the category of pseudoscience. The reason for this is that there is no such thing as “mental illness.” Psychiatrists must now choose between continuing to define their discipline in terms of nonexistent entities or substantives, or redefining it in terms of the actual interventions or processes in which they engage.

Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

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by David van Mill, from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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    It only remains now to speak of ecclesiastical principalities, touching which all difficulties are prior to getting possession, because they are acquired either by capacity or good fortune, and they can be held without either; for they are sustained by the ancient ordinances of religion, which are so all-powerful, and of such a character that the principalities may be held no matter how their princes behave and live. These princes alone have states and do not defend them; and they have subjects and do not rule them; and the states, although unguarded, are not taken from them, and the subjects, although not ruled, do not care, and they have neither the desire nor the ability to alienate themselves. Such principalities only are secure and happy. But being upheld by powers, to which the human mind cannot reach, I shall speak no more of them, because, being exalted and maintained by God, it would be the act of a presumptuous and rash man to discuss them.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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by Alex Cornell

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by Gene Keyes

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    Those who solely by good fortune become princes from being private citizens have little trouble in rising, but much in keeping atop; they have not any difficulties on the way up, because they fly, but they have many when they reach the summit. Such are those to whom some state is given either for money or by the favour of him who bestows it; as happened to many in Greece, in the cities of Ionia and of the Hellespont, where princes were made by Darius, in order that they might hold the cities both for his security and his glory; as also were those emperors who, by the corruption of the soldiers, from being citizens came to empire. Such stand simply elevated upon the goodwill and the fortune of him who has elevated them—two most inconstant and unstable things. Neither have they the knowledge requisite for the position; because, unless they are men of great worth and ability, it is not reasonable to expect that they should know how to command, having always lived in a private condition; besides, they cannot hold it because they have not forces which they can keep friendly and faithful.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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How could one know that one had shrunk, if one’s frame of reference had itself shrunk?

Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On

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    Recently I had to have […] some electrical stimulation, to some injured neck muscles. Every time the current stimulated the trapezius muscles in the neck I had a sudden impulse to shrug my shoulders, to shrug them expressively, in the gesture ‘So?’ It would occur to me to shrug my shoulders, as it might occur to anyone; except that the occurring only occurred when the trapezius was faradised. I found this experience amusing, fascinating — and somewhat shocking; for it showed, very clearly, that one could have a sense or an illusion of free-will, even when the impulse was primarily physiological in nature. At such times, in effect, one was no more than a puppet — there were random compelled to react, but imagining that the reaction was free.

Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On

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    Put your hand in an open flame and subconscious reflex will snatch it back long before you’re even aware of the pain. It is only when some other agenda is in conflict—your hand hurts, but you don’t want to spill the contents of a hot serving tray all over your clean rug—that the self awakens and decides which impulse to obey. Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition.

Peter Watts, Echopraxia

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Канатоходец Ник Валленда в центре Чикаго. Спортсмен без страховки и с завязанными глазами прошел по тросам, натянутым между тремя небоскребами. Фото: Charles Rex Arbogast / AP, найдено на Esquire.ru.

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[…] fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generation—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty- first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.

Peter Watts, Echopraxia

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    […] All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savanna—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.     Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.     Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savanna and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.

Peter Watts, Echopraxia