The protean self
by Robert Jay Lifton · first published 1993
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…regularly saw editorials by conservatives who were interested in emulating the strategies of the communist theorist Antonio Gramsci. You should see the Robert Jay Lifton book: https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmen... that both left-wing and right-wing activists have that "postmodern personality disorder" that Chris Lasch warned you about.
on “Ask HN: Do the stuff that did Cambridge Analytica actually work?” ↗…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas Robert Jay Lifton described two examples of postmodern personality types in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmen... one of those was environmental activists, the other was fundamentalist Christians, which represent a particularly stark example of turning their back on rationality. Fundamentalists…
on “The Two Wings of Postmodernism” ↗…only because that opinion is based in a longer time horizon than I imagine you were looking at. As an engineer I'm trained to look at the entire lifecycle. Totalism and the antithesis ideology of the protean self are aspects that are covered in depth by Robert Lifton, some of which I disagree with. With total control which is what the former ideologies go towards, the flexibility and adaptibility vanish. This…
on “Kids with Smartphones Less Depressed, Anxious, Bullied Than Peers Without Them” ↗