Existentialism was a reaction against Essentialism- the silly notion that an
a priori analysis gave us access to what is true about a thing in all possible worlds. Knowing the essence, we could predict or prescribe the trajectory or teleology of a thing, including the very thing we would be doing thereby, thus rendering the action silly or meaningless. The Existentialist slogan was 'Existence precedes Essence'. This, being a statement about all possible worlds, was Essentialist and therefore silly or meaningless. Still, Existentialism allowed stupid pedagogues to tell silly just so stories about how they came to be such worthless tossers. They pretended that everybody in their identity class was equally fucked up. Thus they were patient zero of a zombie apocalypse affecting people like themselves.
However, their vaunted 'existential psychotherapy' was based on telling stupid lies. The psychiatrists who jumped on this bandwagon- nutters like R.D Laing about whom a film has just been released- were mad, bad and dangerous to everybody they knew.
If Existentialism was a worthless academic availability cascade which enabled Liberal Arts types to talk shite and work a public mischief, then
Econometrics was the equivalent for Economics or Social Psychology majors, permitting them to tell stupid lies, based on shite Maths, and further pollute Public Discourse.
I suppose it was inevitable that Existentialism and Econometrics would discover each other and bump uglies. Is the progeny of their mindless rutting stupider than either?
Let us see.
Consider the following paragraph-
Boarding a train in France a few years after the Second World War, a medical student specialising in psychiatry at a prestigious university, a man who had previously volunteered and fought for the Free French forces against the Nazis, found himself being pointed out by a small child: ‘Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!’For the student, those words triggered a psychic storm of associations and identification that crystallised the racism of his society into one intense episode of distress.‘I cast an objective gaze over myself,’ he later wrote of the incident, and was ‘deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders’ and, above all, the pidgin refrain of the grinning cartoon character in adverts for a banana-flavoured breakfast cereal.These associations that made up the stereotype of un nègre carried with them an incoherent mix of condescension, pity, fear and disgust. The child was amused, then scared. The student’s distress was in seeing himself through this cluster of negative associations and feelings.
The above was written not by a child but by an adult. It is an extract from an essay in Aeon magazine by Prof. Jonathan Webber of Cardiff University.
This Philosopher says he is 'working on the ways in which moral thinking should be shaped by scientific psychology'. What fucking scientific psychology makes it plausible that a big black ex-serviceman would get triggered by the excited exclamation of a little child?
Now, it is true I do burst into tears when called a big fat blackie but that's coz I dun bin dieting and anyway the little girl in question is a Telugu speaking Iyengar. Manusmriti very clearly states that 55 year old Iyers are permitted to steal any 4 year old Iyengar's dessert and to hog the remote. It is deeply unfair and highly traumatic for me personally if those little people retaliate by calling attention to my physical grossness.
Returning to Webber's screed, the question arises, how can any 'moral thinking' be based on stupid, obvious, lies? Adults know that kids say the darnedest things. What kiddies don't possess is the ability to generate cognitive associations of a complex, historicist, kind. If a kiddie can trigger you- you need psychiatric help. If you are a psychiatrist and do get triggered by a kid, report it truthfully by all means. But, that testimony is something which would have to be examined skeptically. We would need to separate out a genuine psychotic flight of ideas or images from the confabulation which structures it as a narrative.
Turning to Fanon's actual experience, what happens when we apply a skeptical test? First, let us note, France had just been liberated by soldiers of various nationalities- many of whom were dark skinned. For one such ex-serviceman, the usual response to a little kid pointing and calling at you would be to smile and offer the little tyke a piece of chewing-gum- or, if you were yourself French, a
Gitane or a string of garlic. Only a lunatic would fear regression to cannibalism and fetishism under the imperious White gaze of... a cute little kiddie.
Does Webber believe he is quoting an actual nut-job? Let us see.
That student was Frantz Fanon, and his description of this incident is central to his analysis of the psychic distress caused by racism.
The description is wholly fraudulent- unless Fanon really was a lunatic. His analysis is worthless. There was no racism and no psychic distress. The guy was just writing high falutin' shite of a stripe considered smart by stupid French pedagogues.
The alternative explanation is that he shared a gene with V.S Naipaul by reason of a common East Indian ancestor. In that case, his whining is wholly Hindu- like my whining about all them Iyengars wot look down their noses at me me jus' coz I be shite at Math and once put garlic in the
sambar.
He initially wrote this as the dissertation for his medical degree, but his supervisor thought such an unusual work was unlikely to pass.
Coz it was a pack of lies. There were plenty of Black ex-serviceman in France. If the experiment was repeated and each was confronted by a little kiddie saying 'Look Maman, a negro!' not a single one would exhibit signs of psychosis. Annoyance, maybe- but laughter would be the more usual reaction. Nobody would start babbling about fetishism and cannibalism.
Consider the following-
The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not
know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through
the other. Of course I have talked about the black problem with
friends, or, more rarely, with American Negroes. Together we
protested, we asserted the equality of all men in the world. In
the Antilles there was also that little gulf that exists among the
almost-white, the mulatto, and the nigger. But I was satisfied with
an intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really
dramatic. And then. . . .
And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white
man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world
challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color
encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema.
'bodily schema' sounds Medical. It is the kind of thing one could measure. The Army would be interested in this research. After all, 'improper development of bodily schema' would affect the fitness and fighting ability of recruits. Yet, black troops performed well. So did black athletes. Black savants did not turn into drooling spastics when delivering lectures to white audiences.
By contrast, I do spaz out if an Iyengar is in the vicinity. It's coz of the way they look at you- like a
jivanmukta can't exist! Yeah right! Fuck you Iyengars! Your Trinity of
bimba,
pratibimba and
darpan is like totally false. Image and pre-image can exist without need for a mirror. Reflect on that, you
Vishistadvaita swine! You think you are soooo superior just coz you mugged up Wren & Martin and know from English grammar but genuine British peeps- like Queen gorrbless'er- are speaking like me only, innit? Mind it kindly! Aiyayo!
Come to think of it, Fanon may well be descended from Iyers. There were probably some Iyengar descended peeps in Martinique and they gave him a hard time. This caused him to write shite like-
Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere
of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have
to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying
at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the
drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all
these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit
knowledge.
The guy writing this can see the ciggies. He can remember where he put the matches. This is not 'implicit knowledge'. It is articulate knowledge based on perception and recall.
There is no 'negating activity' going on at all.
A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle
of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema.
If you are waking up in hospital after a massive head trauma- sure. Not otherwise.
It
does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring
of the self and of the world—definitive because it creates a real
dialectic between my body and the world.
This sentence I agree with. I hate it when an unreal dialectic between my body and the world is created because the structuring of my self and the world is not definitive which is a real pain in the bee-hind coz...urm...well, it just is, okay? Anyway, it's probably the fault of those damn snooty ass Iyengars.
Still, you gotta admit Fanon was a very promising Man of Science- as witness
For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce
a serum for “denegrification”; with all the earnestness in the
world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible
for the miserable Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off
the burden of that corporeal malediction.
Fanon does not mention the diabolical Iyengar conspiracy to produce a serum for de-Iyerification. Fuck you Iyengars! By the Grace of Lord Shiva, you will never succeed!
Below the corporeal
schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema.
Fanon, mate, your corporeal schema was shite. It was no good for Medicine or even Sanity. Stop making a fool of yourself by using abstruse jargon.
The elements
that I used had been provided for me not by “residual sensations
and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and
visual character,” but by the other, the white man, who had
woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.
Fanon's non-White ancestors were either slaves or, after the end of slavery, indentured laborers who were brought to Martinique because of their pre-existing agricultural skills for a purely economic purpose. No 'white man' cared to weave any narrative around them.
I thought
that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self,
Biology had been beforehand in that department. Labor must have a physiological self before it can be exploited.
to
balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on
for more.
Fanon is saying he had to construct a new body to experience the reality the White gaze had imposed on him. If he genuinely suffered from a mental illness then he wouldn't be lying.
But consider what happens next-
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over
me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.
“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made
no secret of my amusement.
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened!
Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind
to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.
I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were
legends, stories, history, and above all historicity, which I had
learned about from Jaspers.
That's it. The giveaway. A psychotic flight of ideas does not feature 'historicity' which the subject 'had learned about from Jaspers' (who was a psychiatrist).
This is self-dramatization not of a hysterical, but deeply pseudo-intellectual, type.
Then, assailed at various points, the
corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal
schema.
Again, this sounds like something a mentally ill person might say. Disordered perceptions of one's body is a common psychiatric symptom. But is our good Doctor faking?
In the train it was no longer a question of being aware
of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train
I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped
being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates
in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward
the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque,
transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. . . .
So, this is Satrean bullshit is all. Now, if Fanon was on speed or some other such drug, he could have had a psychotomimetic episode but, like Roquentin's in Nausea, it wouldn't be literally derivative.
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race,
for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination,
I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was
battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all:
“Sho’ good eatin’.”
Oh dear. This concatenation of cliches is the opposite of authentic. What then is it? Programmatic, apple polishing, shite.
On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with
the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I
took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made
myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation,
an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with
black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization.
All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to
come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to
build it together.
But I rejected all immunization of the emotions. I wanted to be
a man, nothing but a man. Some identified me with ancestors of
mine who had been enslaved or lynched: I decided to accept this.
It was on the universal level of the intellect that I understood this
inner kinship—I was the grandson of slaves in exactly the same
way in which President Lebrun was the grandson of tax-paying,
hard-working peasants. In the main, the panic soon vanished.
There was no panic. This was a laborious homage to Sartre which served a Careerist or Credentializing purpose.
Why was this shite not accepted as a contribution to Psychiatric Science? My guess is that it is because it made no mention of, that staple of French Medicine, the suppository. But then, if Fanon had stuffed Being & Nothingness up his arse, how would he have been able to talk out of it?
This is a question which Prof. Webber skirts. He writes
Fanon submitted a dissertation on spinal degeneration instead, and his theory of the psychological structures and effects of racism became his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
So the guy was a careerist. His dissertation on spinal degeneration was no great shakes but his Sartrean book was a successful imposture on a topical subject. Still, the fact is Fanon had medical training. He was aware that there was a Racialist pseudoscience which he could himself have done useful research to debunk.
Vide- '
In the first chapter of the history that the others have compiled
for me, the foundation of cannibalism has been made eminently
plain in order that I may not lose sight of it. My chromosomes
were supposed to have a few thicker or thinner genes representing
cannibalism. In addition to the sex-linked, the scholars had now
discovered the racial-linked. What a shameful science!'
Why write worthless Satrean shite about being a man among other men when you are more than a man, you are a qualified M.D, and could work on genes and chromosomes and all that other fancy stuff dem clever-too-clever Iyengars are using to keep us Iyers down?
Prof. Webber thinks Fanon made an important discovery-
Fanon’s theory rests on the idea that we unwittingly inherit aspects of our worldview from our society.
That's an idea? It is a thoughtless assumption which makes it possible to whine on and on about what a precious little snowflake one is.
In this way, it bears important parallels with Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of gender in The Second Sex, published only three years earlier.
Beauvoir did not have a theory of anything. She just wrote self-regarding shite about how women were denied something called transcendence which only existed in some wholly worthless theory which a few pedagogues earned money by gassing on about.
Consider the following passage from Webber's book-
Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, however, that freedom can be constrained
by the individual’s circumstances. To identify this argument, we need first to solve a
puzzle about Beauvoir’s use of the term ‘transcendence’ in that book. Within the space of a
few sentences in the Introduction, she identifies ‘transcendence’ as the structure of ‘every
subject’, but then talks of its ‘degradation’ as ‘transcendence lapses into immanence’, a
degradation which one ought not cause in oneself or in others (SS: 17). How can
transcendence be the structure of human existence and yet vary between individuals? The
answer cannot be that Beauvoir is here using the term ‘transcendence’ in two different
senses. For the whole argument of the book is that there is a ‘lived contradiction’ between
the humanity of woman and the conditioning imposed by her situation (Young 1980: 141;
Sandford forthcoming). Woman ‘is denied transcendence’ (SS: 677). This contradiction is
felt as frustration, which engenders resentment and recrimination (SS: 661-4, 770).
Yet the term ‘transcendence’ does have two aspects in Beauvoir’s book. For it can be
opposed either to ‘facticity’ or to ‘immanence’, which are not equivalent to one another.
Facticity is the set of one’s own physical features and the physical and social features of
one’s situation, the facts that one has to deal with. But our situation comprises more than
our facticity. The structure of human existence is that we pursue projects, we endorse
values, through which we experience our facticity as a field of reasons. This is the
ontological aspect of our transcendence (P&C: 97-9). The projects we pursue can either
transform that facticity or can simply maintain it. A sense of powerlessness is engendered
in women through being denied the education and skills available to boys and men,
Beauvoir argues. In response, women tend to value obedience to men and their own
confinement to cyclical repetitive tasks like housework (SS: 654-60). This leaves women
with the task of maintaining their facticity rather than transforming it. Only through paid
employment, argues Beauvoir, can women escape this life of immanence and regain the
kind of transcendence that transforms facticity (SS: 737).
4 / 20
Thus, a woman talking worthless derivative shite about transcendence can't achieve it unless she is paid for it. This is a view one can sympathize with. If I say I am a gigolo servicing beautiful young heiresses then you may well question the veracity of my claim. However, if I can show regular pay-checks from at least one celebrity client, then I am what I claim. You may still cavil that my services comprise being on the receiving end of a strap-on. Still, different strokes right? I'm getting paid by a horny young woman. You are not. I win.
Suppose I got paid even a very small amount of money for my horrible poetry. Then, I could introduce myself as a poet. Obviously, I'd have to write worse shite than I currently do- but it is a price most poets willingly pay.
Getting paid is the difference between being a worthless sociopath as opposed to a gangsta, a shitty little rapist rather than a pimp, or a babbling fool as opposed to a tenured Professor of Philosophy.
Transcendence is what you achieve if you get paid for talking about it. Beauvoir made some money with her brand. The Maharishi made a lot more with his Transcendental Meditation. But then his shite was about being able to levitate and thus spread peaceful energy. He died a billionaire.
Boudoir & Fanon were not considered to be philosophers but were appreciated as writers applying Sartre's philosophy to the ethical dilemmas facing women & colonized people respectively. Boudoir's shtick was how women should get jobs- which was happening anyway- and Fanon's was about how colonized people should kill colonizers unless they left of their own accord. Again, this was already happening. Economics had already achieved what Existentialism agonized about.
Webber takes a different view-
Both these philosophers argue that ideas and values instilled in us through childhood shape our adult lives, often in ways that we are unaware of.
Neither could argue their way out of a paper bag. What they
exhibit by their tedious shite is the stupider-than-thou protective mimicry of gesture political pseudo intellectuals everywhere.
If 'ideas and values' matter, Economics and Geopolitics do not. The French would still be ruling Vietnam and Algeria.
They agree that these aspects of our outlook can remain quietly influential on our thought and behaviour, even after we have rejected them.
Thus, not reading their shite is the best course. Otherwise those idiots may unconsciously affect our thought and behaviour even after we have rejected them as worthless shitheads.
Both consider the tension between our own ideas and values and those inherited from our society to be a source of difficulty and distress.De Beauvoir identifies this social conditioning as the origin of gender.
Which is why girls brought up as boys have dicks and can't give birth to babies.
Society enforces different expectations of boys and girls, presented as reflecting natural differences between them. Boys are encouraged to explore and dominate their environments. Girls are required to be helpful and pleasing. Different values are thereby instilled in boys and girls, along with a shared belief in the supposedly natural differences between the sexes. Even a woman who has rejected these ideas in adult life cannot easily escape their influence on her thought and behaviour.
Which is why women must not be allowed to bring up their own daughters. Indeed, women should be segregated from Society lest their unwholesome thoughts and behaviour infect the rising generation.
Fanon’s analysis of racial categorisation is similar. Black and white children in French culture at the time were all raised on the same stories and films, which presented Europeans as superior to Africans. All children were taught to consider themselves European, which helped to instil in black children the same image of African inferiority that was instilled in white children. Adults who reject this stereotype, argues Fanon, cannot easily overcome its influence on their thought and behaviour.
Thus non-European populations should be repatriated to their region of origin so as to spare their kids some supposed trauma.
Current research in social psychology confirms that our outlooks incorporate ideas and values that we do not endorse but have absorbed from our societies.
Actually, current research shows that gender is not a 'social construct'. It is biological, wholly. Race could be a social construct iff there were an instinctual aversion to miscegenation. I suppose, back in the Fifties there were some people who thought inter-racial sex was 'unnatural'. They also thought that homosexuality could be cured. We have no truck with any such pseudo-science. Why should we bother with Fanon or the Beaver?
But this research into what has become known as ‘implicit bias’ focuses on its effects on our behaviour towards other people.
Consider the research of a super-star Dutch Social Psychologist which showed that white people sit further away from black people in a rubbish strewn vicinity. This makes sense. Racism could have a biological basis in 'pathogen avoidance'. A dirty environment causes people to avoid those of a different race who may have different antibodies.
Sadly, the Dutch researcher was
a fraudster. He faked all his results. What is interesting is that, to avoid detection, he had to show a barely significant effect. This means that sooner or later, as Social Psychologists got better instruction in Statistics, the effect would have been discovered to be an artifact anyway.
Existentialism might have thought of itself as having some connection with Science through the Phenomenological work of Husserl. But, like the Dutch fraudster's experiments, it was a case of telling a stupid portion of the world whatever shite it wanted to hear. This involved lying about how the savants in questions themselves felt and thought.
De Beauvoir and Fanon, by contrast, focus on its effects on the opportunities that seem open to us and on how we think about ourselves. Their analyses from this different perspective could open up fruitful new avenues for research into the nature and effects of implicit bias.
A better 'Structural Causal Model'- i.e. one which would permit changing parameters so as to get better outcomes- is what 'opens up fruitful new avenues for research'. Moreover, the thing pays for itself. Fanon & the Beaver were stupid and ignorant. They dramatized themselves to gain an audience. They had no Structural Causal Model to offer. Thus Fanon didn't find a way to cure Schizophrenia and the Beaver didn't find a way to genuinely go crazy and stab someone.
One kind of implicit-bias research has focused on the associations that make up stereotypes. Experiments show these associations influencing people’s behaviour, even when they explicitly deny that the association is true. When asked to identify objects very quickly, for example, people’s responses can indicate an association between black men and handguns, even when they deny that there is any such association.
When asked to duplicate these experiments, Researcher's responses can indicate an association between black men with handguns who brutally sodomized them till they faked the whole thing.
In one experiment from 2006, pictures of handguns and power tools appear in quick succession, and people have to identify each object.
The experiment was an example of
p-hacking. It is as likely to be disconfirmed on reduplication. For a large enough sample, the effect disappears.
Before each picture appears, there is a brief image of a face. When this is the face of a black man, people correctly identify handguns more quickly and misidentify power tools as handguns more often than they do when it is the face of a white man. This happens only at high speed.
The problem here is that at rapid speeds any picture atypical of the population norm will cause misidentification. If you don't see what you expect to see, you change your decision. It's like a Monty Hall problem. Still, the effect is not significant because
Given just a little thinking time, people easily distinguish handguns from power tools, regardless of the face they have just seen.
The one thing we all learn to do as little babies is to outsource our threat detection to the smarter people around us and to curb our own Epimethean reactions. Thus the old guy who freaks out coz the surgeon who is going to operate on him is a woman of a different race soon gets reassured by the deference shown to her by her colleagues. He calms down and lives to drop the n-bomb another day.
In another experiment from 2002, participants play a video game where images of people appear on the screen, some of them carrying handguns. The player must press one button to shoot an armed character or another button to register that the character is unarmed. The scoring system requires players to make this decision quickly. When the decision time is very quick, players shoot unarmed black characters more often than they shoot unarmed white characters, and they fail to shoot armed white characters more often than they fail to shoot armed black characters.
Videogames are the product of a highly competitive and innovative market process. It may be that they have evolved to take advantage of some pleasurable connection between different types of neurological reactions or processes. But, this tells us nothing about the real world.
Suppose you have a gun and are approached by a guy you think is armed. Should you shoot him? No, because he could get off a shot and kill you. What is effective, however, is screaming loudly and firing into the air. It may be that there is an incentive to have a rep. as a shootist. In that case, pick on unarmed guys whom others might plausibly consider to be armed and dangerous.
Inter-species violence tends to feature signaling displays rather than instinctual reflexes. Videogames, of course, aren't genuinely violent at all. They are pleasurable because of a feedback loop between reflexive actions and the cognition of rewards.
When this experiment is slowed down so that players have a little more time to make their decision, they are much more accurate in shooting all the armed characters and not shooting any unarmed ones. But even in this version, players make the decision to shoot more quickly when an armed character is black than when he is white. And they make the decision not to shoot more quickly when an unarmed character is white than when he is black.
Why does this happen? It looks like a combination of two things. People’s minds include an association between black men and handguns.
A 2012 study shows that Asians evoke the same reaction as black men. What matters is beliefs re. interpersonal threats.
Across two studies, participants with strong beliefs about interpersonal threats were more likely to mistakenly shoot outgroup members than ingroup members; this was observed for unfamiliar, arbitrarily formed groups using a minimal group paradigm (Study 1) and racial groups not culturally stereotyped as dangerous (Asians; Study 2).
It is unlikely that experiments of this sort will get subjects who willingly admit to being racist. Yet Webber writes-
And those people reject the idea that there is such an association in the real world. When they have time to prevent this association from influencing their action, they can do so.
In other words, even Racists can, given time, compensate for their bigotry and make rational decisions. However, rational decisions increase utility and alter network composition such that the original bias is no longer reinforced.
Considers what happens when a fat elderly fuck starts going to the gym. Initially I hate all them muscular young men with great hair. Then they spot me a coupla times and I see they aren't that bad. Still, I express surprise when I hear one of them has just become a dad. I thought you needed to make love to a woman for that to happen. You can't tell me guys with six packs and great hair aren't all total benders.
But when they have to make their decision very quickly, the association influences the action.
There is no decision, only a reaction. Your lovely old granny could give you a scare if you thought you were alone in the house and she suddenly pops up behind you. We don't say, 'I decided Gran was an intruder. Then I thought about it for a little and decided she was not an intruder but someone I like kissing and accepting cookies from.'
The same association might involve negative feelings in a police officer but positive feelings in a gangsta-rap fan
There is no 'association' because nothing is being reinforced. Granny didn't cosh you on the head. Instead she smilingly accepted some kisses and promised to give you cookies.
Why pretend that police officers are trigger happy creatures of instinct? As for 'gangsta-rap' fans- are they all really incessantly engaged in drive-by shootings? Does Webber really believe that writing shite like this represents 'working on the ways in which moral thinking should be shaped by scientific psychology'.
So far, this fits very well with Fanon’s description of his experience.
So, some bigot thinking a black guy is more likely to be armed is exactly the same as thinking a little child, excited to see a person of exotic appearance, intends to utter a racial slur and to humiliate and cause psychic pain to a complete stranger.
Although he is describing a traumatic experience rather than a split-second decision, the underlying point remains the same: the influence of a cognitive association deep in the mind of someone who does not agree with it.
So, Webber believes Fanon really was traumatized by a little kid. He doesn't understand that Fanon was merely indulging in rhetoric for a specific purpose. Fanon did not really associate his ancestors with cannibalism and fetishism. If they had indeed been such savage creatures, as opposed to industrious agriculturists, there would not have had a price higher than most White people on the Slave Markets of the Seventeenth Century.
Still, in fairness, we can discount the possibility that, because he became a Psychiatrist, he was fundamentally stupid and had a tropism to a more mischievous delusion system than any patient he might treat.
Two details of these experiments confirm this alignment with Fanon’s theory. The bias does not correlate with the ethnicity of the person whose behaviour is being monitored. In the video-game experiment, black players and white players show the same bias. But the bias does correlate with knowledge of the relevant stereotype. Before playing the video game, players were asked to estimate how aggressive, dangerous and violent most white Americans consider African Americans to be. Each player’s bias in the game correlated with their responses to these measures.
Asians are considered non-threatening. Yet, a 2102 study showed the same effect. But then any study can show any effect. It would still be junk.
These details support Fanon’s contention that we have all ‘breathed in and ingested the myths and prejudices’ embodied in our media, and that these can influence our thought and behaviour even though we reject them.
Nonsense! Our instinctive reactions or 'blink' responses or what we are 'primed' to do have zero impact on important decisions or worthwhile thought or the sort of behaviour by which we join or sustain networks.
Economics, not Psychology, matters. Even Behavioural Econ has hit a reduplication crisis. Meanwhile, mathematical techniques have greatly advanced decision theory.
Telling stupid lies so as to get a bit of publicity and go on a book tour may be financially rewarding for worthless shitheads with Credentials in bogus subjects. But so is pretending to have been abducted by aliens or to be Elvis's love-child by Jackie O.
But these experiments offer Fanon only limited support.
They offer nothing to anybody. They are junk.
His theory is about a network of associations triggered simultaneously. Social psychology tends to measure associations individually without testing for the relations between them.
Perhaps more importantly, Fanon’s theory is that these associations carry negative feelings with them. This is why Fanon labels the stereotype of black men ‘negrophobia’.
Right! Coz that's a real thing. It explains why 'mixed-race' is the fastest growing ethnic group in the US and UK.
Implicit-bias researchers do investigate positive and negative feelings. One experiment from 1998 asks white people to classify names (such as Ebony, Jed, Katie, Lamar) as typically names of white people or of black people, at the same time as classifying other words (crash, happy, peace, rotten) as describing pleasant or unpleasant things.
The experiment shows subjects classifying the names more quickly when one button is used for white names and pleasant things, and another button for black names and unpleasant things. They respond more slowly when the button for white names is also for unpleasant things, while the other button is for black names and pleasant things. People who show this bias deny preferring white people to black people, and there seems no reason to suspect that their denial is not sincere.
Why believe they aren't racist? How is it scientific to just take their word for it?
Social psychologists call this kind of bias a prejudice. They call the other kind, such as the association of black men with handguns, a stereotype. Investigations of prejudices tend to be separate from experiments into stereotypes. This separation limits social psychology’s investigation of the kind of holistic racial categorisation that Fanon articulates, which clusters a whole host of associations and feelings so tightly that they can be triggered together in a single overwhelming experience.
So this branch of Junk Social Science offers no support whatsoever for Fanon's bogus Psilosophy.
Our decision making improves when we get rid of biases and stereotypes. This means we can make more money or be happier. Genuine research involves a Structural Causal Model which gives us instruments by which we can change parameters and improve outcomes.
A further important difference concerns the effects of these internalised ideas. Social psychology tends to investigate the influence of implicit bias on our behaviour towards other people. Classic experiments measure how likely you are to misperceive an object in someone’s hand as a gun, how highly you rate someone’s career experience as set out in a job application, how far you choose to sit from someone in an otherwise empty waiting room, how much eye contact you make with someone, how long your conversation with someone lasts, and so on.
None of these aspects of behaviour result from conscious decisions. How you perceive the world, how impressed you are by someone’s job application, exactly how far you stand or sit from someone, how much eye contact you make, and how long you chat are not usually things that you explicitly think about. You just do or feel them. They result from automatic cognitive processes.
This is why a Corporation intent on boosting competitiveness will implement systems to correct for cognitive biases. Indeed, this may also be required by Law as Statistical evidence of discrimination based on data-mining alone is increasingly accepted by the Courts.
The Profit motive militates for finding Structural Causal Models which can guide us to useful instruments. Fanon & these Social Psy fraudsters may be able to jump on bandwagons but they can't steer them anywhere useful.
What these guys are doing is virtue signaling. They want to show themselves to be deep thinkers profoundly disturbed by Society's dirty little secret.
In this regard, they are like the intense feelings of distress that Fanon describes. But unlike those feelings, these are all aspects of how you behave towards other people. Fanon’s theory is concerned with this too. The child who points him out on the train is expressing an internalised image of a black man in his exclamation, amusement and fear. Fanon goes on to describe the child’s mother’s apologies – ‘he doesn’t realise you are just as civilised as we are’ – which are well-meant but betray the same internalised racial schema.
Clearly, the right thing to do under these circumstances is to make ooga-booga noises and lick one's lips suggestively. Little kids with their Mums like to be scared by big creatures who clearly want to eat them. Civilization does not come into it. It is
de rigueur, in the best vegetarian families, to chase one's little nephews while growling and slavering. Failure to do so suggests you are no fun.
However, Fanon’s primary focus in Black Skin, White Masks is not on behaviour towards other people. His central concern is with the problems this racial schema of the black man causes to black men who have internalised it.
Yes! It's about time our terrible traumas were recognized! I iz a bleck man wot internalised how, like, asking me to put the garbage out triggers ancestral memories of being sold down the river so Missy can buy herself a new sun-bonnet. Tell the truth, you're just using me for my big black cock.
He is not focused on the moral question of how we treat one another, but on the existential question of how we have become the people we are. This existential context shapes his approach to the psychiatric and therapeutic questions of how distress comes about, and how it can be alleviated.
Distress is caused by doing stupid shit which harms you. It is alleviated by not doing stupid shit. Being an Existentialist involved being distressed and causing distress to others. But the same can be said about being an asshole.
There are always smart things which a person or a bunch of people can do. But this involves disintermediating worthless shitheads peddling silly books.
Internalised stereotypes shape the goals we pursue in childhood, adolescence and adult life,
A goal has no shape. It is the end state of a sequence of purposive actions. Stereotypes represent background knowledge. They may provide information on what is desirable. However, we quickly give up on goals which are unattainable. Instead we focus on what can be achieved and is rewarding.
Neoteny is about plasticity. We have a long childhood and adolescence precisely because stereotypes and innate releasing mechanisms have little survival value on our fitness landscape. Pretending otherwise may allow an adult to make a little money selling a worthless book, but the thing is puerile.
A different area of social psychology – one related to but distinct from implicit-bias research – might seem closer to this existential concern. Research into what has become known as ‘stereotype threat’ is concerned with the effect of internalised stereotypes on the behaviour of the people they stereotype. Experiments have concluded that, for example, the stereotype of women as less good than men at mathematics can influence women’s mathematical performance. In one experiment from 1999, two groups of women took the same test, with only one group being told that the test is likely to show a gender difference. That group performed less well than the women who had not been told this.
Three separate analyses of stereotype-threat research, however, have concluded that this effect is at best very weak and perhaps entirely nonexistent. Overall, the evidence simply does not support the idea that stereotypes exert a significant influence on the behaviour of the stereotyped in this way.
Yes. Every single 'result' of this sort has been discovered to be either bogus or wholly meaningless.
Social Psychologists have begun speaking of a 'decline effect' whereby the effects they discover disappear over time thus explaining away their subject's replication crisis. It appears, the term was first coined by ESP researchers in the Thirties.
Where does this leave de Beauvoir’s version of the existentialist idea that internalised gender stereotypes shape the person you become?
In the crapper.
Her theory does seem to predict that the association between mathematics and maleness should influence the mathematical achievements of women overall. But it does not predict that the stereotype has the kind of influence that the stereotype-threat experiments look for.
De Beauvoir’s theory is not that being reminded of the stereotype will temporarily lower a woman’s mathematical abilities. Rather, it is that internalised stereotypes shape the goals we pursue in childhood, adolescence and adult life. De Beauvoir argues that, because we all internalise the stereotypes of gender from a young age, and because we develop interests and experience according to our expectations of ourselves and of one another, those stereotypes shape whom we become.
So, kids brought up with different stereotypes would have different abilities. Thus, the Cold War was won by the side which was more ruthless in taking babies from their families and bringing them up to be super-soldiers or super-scientists or telepaths or whatever. Everybody else was brainwashed into being cannon fodder or worker ants requiring only a bare subsistence.
The analyses that show stereotype threat to have little or no influence on behaviour are consistent with de Beauvoir’s theory of how stereotypes shape our lives. These analyses have indeed found a gender disparity at the highest levels of performance on mathematics tests. It is not at all clear why there is such a disparity. Could it be the effect of gender stereotypes shaping the abilities that people develop, as de Beauvoir suggests?
Most cultures didn't have any stereotypes regarding mathematical ability because the thing was- till quite recently- neither particularly prestigious nor lucrative. In any case, calculating stuff is kinda girlie. Suddenly, it became a fast track to good money and thus a desirable field. Since money boosts a boy's reproductive success much more than it does a girl's- there was an incentive asymmetry. No doubt, males could make classrooms uncomfortable for girls and lecherous lecturers didn't help. However, the truth is, there's a lot of shite Math out there. The genuine article is produced by genuine mathematicians who wouldn't bother to test well. Focusing on the number of graduates you are producing in a particular discipline is not helpful. What matters is creative thinking and a capacity for sustained research. Both require a socio-economic scaffolding which is costly. To improve the return to this scaffolding, one has to get rid of tests or selection procedures which reflect the biases of stupid teachers or administrators. Instead it is genuine creative ability which needs to be identified. As the utility of mathematics increases, we see this happening despite, not because, of stupid ideologues. To bang on and on about stereotypes and the dangers of 'gendered language' is to add noise to signal. It won't improve outcomes. Rather, it will divert resources to worthless availability cascades.
Evidence that stereotypes do shape relevant abilities and experiences is provided by a recent study of 1,400 teachers in Italy and their students.
That's a strong claim. The Structural Causal Model behind it gives teacher's attitudes a predominant role in determining outcomes regarding ability. In the case of Italy, there is some research which suggests that the Italian school simply reproduces the prejudices of the wider Society. Thus, one would first have to change Society in order to change teacher's attitudes.
One reason to abandon this approach is because there is evidence that low gender inequality countries have lower female participation in STEM subjects compared to high gender equality countries. The explanation seems to be that the former type of country also has a better 'social minimum' and thus economic factors have less salience in female choice of subject.
Economic incentives are things which policymakers can directly impact on. After all, stereotypes are simply heuristics- rules of thumb- we use for a specific purpose. As our economic horizon changes, our stereotypes too would change.
This study measured the teachers’ gender stereotypes using a standard psychological experiment. The teachers were asked to respond to names and academic subjects as these appeared on a screen. They were to press one button for male names and another for female names. Those two buttons were also used to sort the academic subjects between sciences and humanities. Each teacher took two versions of the experiment, with the order of these determined randomly.
In one version, one button was used for male names and sciences, and the other button for female names and humanities. In the other version, one button was used for male names and humanities, the other for female names and sciences. The experimenters measured the difference in response speed in the two versions. If your responses are significantly faster when using the same button for male names and sciences than when using the same button for female names and sciences, this indicates the influence of gender stereotypes on your perception of academic disciplines.
This influence might not be something you agree with. If asked about gender and academic disciplines, you might reply that there are no academic differences between male and female students. But this would be consistent with the stereotype being deeply embedded in your mind and influencing your thought and behaviour in subtle ways that you do not notice.
The experimenters analysed the performance of these teachers’ students on standardised mathematics tests. They found that the gender gap in a class of students correlated with the strength of their teacher’s gender stereotyping of academic disciplines.
There is an alternative hypothesis- viz. that some teachers are better at teaching a subject to a specific gender. They come to believe there is an objective gender difference because of something they themselves are doing.
They also found that female students’ confidence in their own mathematical abilities was lower if their teachers showed a strong gender stereotype when sorting academic disciplines. And they found no significant differences across these groups of students in terms of social background or performance in earlier mathematics tests.
Therefore, gender disparity in mathematical performance at school seems to be significantly influenced by teachers’ stereotyped expectations of student abilities. Together with the influence on student confidence, this suggests that gendered teacher expectations influence students’ choices of academic disciplines, and partly explain the gender disparity in mathematical and scientific careers.
It is reasonable to suppose that, ceteris paribus, teacher's expectations influence student's choices. But, it is not reasonable to suppose that those 'expectations' would not change if the teacher's incentives changed. The reverse is not the case. Thus incentives matter, expectations don't because people can consciously revise our expectations. Even if this is not the case, the same result obtains if those who do not do so are culled from the population by some economic mechanism.
Even women who have repudiated the stereotypes of their upbringing find them influencing their thought.
It may influence how they feel or how they present themselves but, if they are doing maths, it can't influence their thought. A proof is either right or wrong. Whether it was presented with conviction or in a tentative manner does not matter.
De Beauvoir’s analysis of gender in The Second Sex describes precisely this kind of process. ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.’
Nobody becomes anything without being born. It is something visible at birth which determines how one is brought up.
So begins de Beauvoir’s analysis of childhood and adolescence, the formative years when parents, teachers, the media and the wider community all influence the goals we pursue, and so shape the abilities we develop.
But there is an aspect to de Beauvoir’s slogan that this experiment does not investigate. Her theory, like Fanon’s theory, focuses on the internalisation of stereotypes deep in the minds of the stereotyped. Gender is not only produced by the thinking and behaviour of the people around you. It is also, de Beauvoir argues, the result of gender stereotypes being deeply embedded in your own mind, shaping your outlook. ‘It is clear that woman’s whole “character” – her convictions, values, wisdom, morality, tastes, and behaviour,’ de Beauvoir concludes, ‘is explained by her situation.’
This is a marvelously sexist and racist doctrine. Women mustn't be allowed to take leadership roles in Feminist thought- indeed, they should not be allowed to bring up girl children- because they have all been mentally raped into cretinism. The same goes for Black Males- coz they've internalized 'negrophobia' and get very frightened if they suddenly see themselves in a mirror.
De Beauvoir mentions that this can be a source of frustration and distress. Even women who have repudiated the stereotypes of their upbringing, she argues, still find these influencing their thought and behaviour in unwanted ways. She does not dwell on this point in The Second Sex. De Beauvoir is a philosopher by training, not a psychiatrist or therapist. But this is the point that brings her theory of gender closest to Fanon’s theory of racialisation. Fanon was a psychiatrist, and this kind of distress was his central concern in Black Skin, White Masks.
There's another name for this sort of shite. It's called 'gaslighting'. It's what creeps do when they hit on kids and try to get them to believe they are repressing their own desire to suck on needle-dicks.
The similarities between the theories elaborated in these two books are remarkable, especially as Fanon’s book never refers to de Beauvoir’s.
He knew her work. Critics chalk this up to his sexism.
This common idea that they both elaborate in different contexts and with different purposes fits very well with today’s experimental social psychology of implicit bias.
Today's experimental social psychology of implicit bias tries to explain why its results were fraudulent. Fanon's and Boudoir's books belong to a period when Marxian 'false consciousness' and Freudian 'repression' made paranoid theories bulletproof.
The common idea between these disparate projects was to try to appear to be smart while talking stupid shite.
But it also offers some important avenues for further research. How do your own implicit biases shape the abilities you develop and the opportunities you pursue?
They don't if you are smart enough to pay smart people to explain your opportunity set. If you don't have any money, Tardean mimetics is the way to go.
Human beings would not have lasted very long on the planet if 'implicit biases' shaped our ability to survive.
Still, if you are selling stupidity, you can always find some suckers by gaslighting them.
What effects do they have on your own mental health? How can we be liberated from the constraints they quietly impose on us and from the distress they can cause us?
Buy my worthless book and all will be well- till I've got another book to sell.
The existentialism of de Beauvoir and Fanon suggests that we cannot answer these questions if we continue to investigate individual associations or individual prejudices.
However, if we discontinue our investigations and return to Quantico, we may find out that the ghost of Edgar Hoover is in a live-in relationship with an underwear model from Syracuse. This explains why Senator McGubbins was letting the dog Scooby Do lick his face even though it had just finished licking its own scrotum. Could somebody please make a Netflix series out of this?
We need a model of how the tight knot of associations and feelings that constitute an overall stereotype is held together.
Reinforcement. If we get rewarded for acting in accordance with such a model, then the thing holds together. If we miss out on rewards, or are punished, the thing erodes though, statistically speaking, some will withdraw into a more paranoid version of the same thing. This creates a 'discoordination game'.
We need to understand what makes possible the distressing cascade of ideas and feelings that Fanon described so eloquently.
We get this understanding quite quickly when we read a little Sartre and understand the fellow was a Drama Queen. Fanon was bucking for promotion is all. That's why he wrote hysterical garbage.
And for that, we need to shift from the piecemeal perspective of the experimenter to the holistic perspective of the philosopher.
Sartre's holistic perspective required the consumption of a lot of speed. But that perspective was slow witted shit.
Perhaps the existentialist theories of de Beauvoir and Fanon would be a good place to start in building that model.
If you are stuck in a late Fifties time-warp- sure. The Americans wanted to break up monolithic Communism by getting the wimmin and the darkies and the homos and so forth to rebel against 'Party Discipline'. Also, everybody spouting pseudo-Hegelian shite would confuse the fuck out of the Commissars whose job was to keep a lid on such things.
Sartre was considered to have given the Americans a win when he said Existentialism was a Humanism- that was the shite America was promoting back then coz Humans want nice shiny things and some Marshall or USAID plan could provide this- but Sartre later backtracked and tried to make out he understood 'Dialectical Reason'. He didn't. He was just strung out on speed. As for the Beaver, French women did get the vote in 1945 and did manage to get rid of licensed brothels and had indeed managed to rise up a little. Sartre too managed to avoid assassination at the hands of the OAS and lived long enough to approve of other types of terrorism. France became somewhat less shitty and under Mitterand shook of its stupid Communist party. Then came Disneyland Paris, and France could at last embrace its de Tocquevillean destiny.
