Wednesday, 3 April 2013

On the development of psychopathy

It's worth taking a look at how the hasnamuss/psychopath is trained, molded, taught to feel and behave in our present society. Teaching people to behave in a way that they don't feel so as to look good in the workplace trains the charismatic psychopath into place. They themselves suffer as much as those they hurt but they don't acknowledge it because they have trained themselves to buffer it in such a way that they'll die before accepting that there's something out of place in their charisma. It's the false ego of the age at its most powerful but children have been learning it from their executive parents for a few generations now and that is the refinement of the sociopathy. 

"Goleman encourages us to manage what we feel more than simply what we feign such that through developing our EI we learn actually to become more empathetic, sympathetic, positive, gregarious, etc. since these are the traits of ‚winners and stars.‛37 Here one can also observe the significance of emotional authenticity to the discourse of EI. Goleman 
understands the feigning of emotions as, under many circumstances, emotionally unintelligent. He advocates that we should learn to be emotionally direct, open and honest, at the right times. This honesty in human exchanges is, he suggests, in turn premised upon the ideal of ‚self-awareness‛ — greater understanding of our own emotions; learning to recognise our ‚true‛ feelings; learning to classify and monitor 
these; and so forth. In this sense, the discourse of EI evidently constitutes more than a set of emotional scripts to be per-formed irrespective of our ‚true‛ feelings. However, despite its rhetorical emphasis on emotional liberation and authenticity, the discourse of EI — particularly in relation to its emphasis on harnessing emotions for personal and professional success — equally appears to mark a continuation of processes that have involved an increasing ‚commercialisation of feeling.‛ The term ‚emotional labour‛38 
has come to gain considerable intellectual currency as a referent to such processes, and more specifically as a conceptualisation of increasingly sophisticated managerialist at- tempts to engineer corporate emotional landscapes through the exploitation of employees’ emotion management in the service of commercial ends." 

Jason Hughes 2010 
ISSN: 1832-5203 
Foucault Studies, No. 8, pp. 28-52, February 2010 

Emotional Intelligence: Elias, Foucault, and the Reflexive Emotional Self 
Jason Hughes, Brunel University

Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Poem


The streets might remind us of a whole nation’s dream
but it’s when you cross the door of each house
that people’s life weaves in between
for parents are just parents… until you cross the inner street
and the father becomes The Father
while the mother is dressed in myth
and your sweet life is revealed

Gods, they too have children
And father and mother them
But parents stand in between
Time and eternity
Bring the past present
Open the future past
And condense it all in you

Parents!
They play with time like shufflers
Deal out the cards one by one
Keep the numbers tight
The stakes high
The little rivers of history
all in one:
Us!