2. Jennifer Armstrong's answer to What is the mainstream philosophy in the West? - Quora



    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong, Educator ESL and Western business knowledge
    If you are talking about not so much the academic mainstream philosophy, but the populist one, then the mainstream idea is a kind of quasi-Christian notion that we are all born with an immutable “soul” (or self-identity), and that we make our way through the world as separate individuals on the basis of what can be quantified as our inherited inner wealth, which most often codified as our degree of intelligence.
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  3. Jennifer Armstrong's answer to Why do narcissists claim to be the victim but don’t exhibit any typical signs and symptoms of a victim of abuse? Don’t they realize they would be messed up, like the victims are? - Quora



    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong, Educator ESL and Western business knowledge
    The thing with exhibited signs or symptoms of abuse is that these are no way to separate the proverbial sheep from the goats. To think that way, one would have to include a lot of baseless assumptions, such as that inner attitudes are transparent toward us, and that we all react about the same to the same sorts of things.
    I do think this is a very dangerous way to be thinking. What it does is enforce a kind of conformity requirement within the ranks of victimhood. For instance a victim has to have the sort of emotions that are relatable to me, within my own social and cultural context. A victim can’t have emotions that are not socially understood, or else their victim status is debatable.
    Also, what is your definition of “messed up”? I guess it implies emotional effusiveness, or something like that which is very obvious and externalized. But this criterion is also very arbitrary, or at best a cultural preference or determinant. Just because somebody’s life has been messed up does not imply that they have to express it as a set of symptoms you can recognize.
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  4. (1) Jennifer Armstrong's answer to Does the Nietzschean philosophy imply to take things away from the weak? - Quora



    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong, studied Nietzsche since 1996
    It doesn’t imply this in in the way that the question is probably being asked. No, one should not go out of one’s way to take things from the weak. Let us try to unravel his real meanings as best we can:
    life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;--but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Beyond Good and Evil
    This is a difficult text to grasp, because Nietzsche is encouraging us to see how life works, but without giving the words a negative meaning, despite that they have been typically used to condemn us for living.
    To try to put it in a different context, I had a discussion with my husband the other day about the ideology of anarchism. Our discussion noted that contemporary anarchists seemed to identify themselves as “cat people”, not “dog people”, because they considered dog owners to be authoritarian.
    I think this indicates that anarchists are those with an exquisite sensitivity to those kinds of things Nietzsche mentions in the quote above: “appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation”. If we think about it, the dog owner has incorporate the love of the dog, in order to be the dog’s pack leader, and to direct the dog where he or she will. The owner orders the dog around. But the cat lover does not dominate the cat, and indeed cats cannot be dominated, arguably. The cat, by contrast, comes and goes as it pleases.
    So where does that leave us? Well, one is permitted to subsist with cats, but not with dogs, according to the anarchist’s preferential ideology. But subsisting with cats is an ideology of diminishing returns. After all, a cat cannot love you like a dog does, as it is less close to the human species in its mentality, being more wild. A dog’s evolutionary branching has been toward humanity, on the other hand. Dogs and humans have formed a symbiotic relationship that goes back thousands of years into history. And what does the anarchist seem to say to this? They say, “Give it up, because it is not worth it. You are dominating the dog by owning it. You are not really its true pack leader.” (Actually anarchists would not be nearly as articulate as this, in terms of drawing the logical conclusions from their fundamental anti-domination posture.)
    What I have attempted here is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum of an anti-dominance position. I am fully aware that many people reading the paragraph above will not see any absurdity in the implied suggestion that dog owners give up their dogs, so that the species can die out, or (more idealistically), dogs can go back to the wilderness and become wolves again. Others might imagine that there are no particular conclusions that can be drawn from the particular anarchist stance that I have been critiquing. (I would agree that idealists typically do not draw any practical conclusions from their own stances. That is part of the whole evasive mechanism involved in being an idealist.)
    But, what I am trying to get at here is that life diminishes once the critique of dominance is applied and takes hold. We start having to give things up because as Nietzsche said, the very fabric of things already involves implicit structures of dominance and control, and all those other kinds of things that idealists find reprehensible.
    Now, to address the question more acutely, if we take dogs as kind of an analogy representing life as consisting of such things like incorporation (of the dog into humanity), suppression (of its original wolflike nature), and severity (disciplining the dog when that is applicable), we may be understanding very well what Nietzsche is getting at.
    By contrast, I think a very wrong reading would be to say, “life is about domination, so let me take the bone away from the dog, and not let him have it.” (That would be according to an instruction one had heard or misheard to “take things away from the weak”.) No, one should not do that. One doesn’t need to deprive the dog of his supper, and it makes no sense to go around on principle taking things away from the weak.
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  6. Jennifer Armstrong's answer to Why do psychologists work for slot machine / poker machine makers? - Quora



    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong, PhD African Literature & Psychology, The University of Western Australia (2010)
    Psychologists live in a Capitalist market place, and therefore virtually every single one of them are hired guns, who can be solicited to provide information according to the needs of the industrialist. In fact, working for an industry like the gambling industry would tend to be far more lucrative than providing personal counselling services.
    The morality of the individual worker is ever a facet of the dominant or prevailing system. One cannot go against the grain too much and expect to thrive. Therefore there will be many psychologists working in direct line with the grain of Capitalism, in order to assure their relevance.
    Strangely, on Quora, there is almost an idealization of psychologists, in the same way that the mythical beast, “Empath”, is idealized. I think this is a Star Trek notion, that psychologists are somehow pure beings, with perfect emotional sensitivity and attunement to things. This lack of realism is a bit of a flaw that I see in an otherwise intellectually rigorous forum.
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  7. Brian Bryant's answer to What kind of parents cause narcissism? - Quora





    Brian Bryant
    Brian Bryant, Survivor of 30 Years NPD Abuse / Decades of Research


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    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong
    Just now
    Whether right or wrong, I really think your analysis falls on the side of promoting much healthier reactions to this phenomenon of narcissism than the other one does, which in effect excuses everything as a developmental problem. I find that people like me, who did struggle to form my sense of identity against malicious forces and impossible odds ends up in the same basket, according to contemporary psychology, as these deviants and thugs. I must say I always struggled with integrity, so I do not like that outcome at all.







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  8. Jennifer Armstrong's answer to Did Nietzsche hate everybody around him? - Quora



    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong, studied Nietzsche since 1996
    I think there tends to be a misunderstanding about these sorts of things from the standpoint of the modern sensibility. The service mentality that prevails in the contemporary times is linked to market survival. In other words, there is a fake lovey-dovey orientation that is nurtured in people generally, especially in Americans, because not having an ingratiating personality means that one is almost certainly doomed economically as well.
    Nietzsche, however, was not brought up in these market place circumstances, and moreover he made a virtue out of honesty. His attitude to those he disagreed with was complex. He thought that one honors somebody when one makes them an enemy, because one is taking them seriously and also helping them to gain a stronger foothold in life through a mutual agonistic struggle. If he really hated someone, on the other hand, he would ignore them, much as he ignored his mother and his sister most of the time.
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  10. Jennifer Armstrong's answer to Does social media worsen symptoms of narcissistic personality disorders? - Quora



    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong, Educator ESL and Western business knowledge
    I honestly don’t think that is how things work. I think the current spate of narcissism is cultural, but in a way that predates the Internet. Look at it this way. There are two major forms of human adaptation. Simply put, one method involves that sense that one is part of society and interdependent with it. The other method involves the idea that one is just a lone individual, making its way in the world. When one embraces the first paradigm, one will seek to get along though mutual reciprocation. If one embraces the second view, however, one is a lone wolf trying to get what it can from others, for its survival. The first type of attitude fits a certain type of society, where some degree of emotional repression is necessary in order for everyone to get along. Such societies you can find in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, among other places.
    However in the contemporary West, one has to be a lone wolf, at least in many ways. In theory one is free to express any kind of emotion, and one does not have to reciprocate.
    As Margaret Thatcher said back in the eighties, when narcissism first took hold as a social disease, “There is no society.” And According to Reagan, around this time, one just had to be a good actor to get rich and extremely powerful.
    So it was that Westerners learned the lessons of narcissism and became narcissists. They learned to look on their coworkers as those whom they could potentially stab in the back, to climb higher. Care and consideration for others were re-framed as signs of mental weakness. That is how it all began.
    But social media is just people putting up pretty pictures of themselves. That is not doing any harm to others, although it may have limited scope and appeal in the long term.
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  11. Jennifer Armstrong's answer to Is political correctness good or bad for an artist's creative imagination? - Quora



    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong, Educator ESL and Western business knowledge
    It’s actually very bad, and yet it is imposed with regularity by certain gate-keepers. I must say that I have learned the most in life by those whom the gate-keepers believed to be politically incorrect. Amazingly even skin color or “race” is not an impediment to these gate-keepers, if they feel their ideal vision for the world is being infringed upon.
    Here is a black author expressing derision for the reduction of his language to only what is politically correct:
    He lost his arms, his legs, his trunk
    All that remained was from the neck upwards
    Grinning sheepishly, apologetically
    He was a poem pared down to its essentials
    Grinning sheepishly, apologetically, honest!
    His father died in primary school
    His father rose again to run the factory
    Turning on his bicycle the axis of the moon
    Turning in his sleep, this endless sweep of stars
    Aphrodite sealed between two sides of the coin
    Is it your shrieks I hear when my gold jingles?
    Sword-bearing arm cleaves day’s placid leg
    I cannot bear all thought to food
    In the bucket is whitewash enough
    To make our world realistic
    “But you can’t love your sister that way!”
    In every dustbin, in every rubbish heap
    A teacher pleading innocence
    Pleading ignorance.
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  12. Jennifer Armstrong's answer to Is feeling 'white guilt' on benign information on racism completely the fault of the people who feel it? - Quora



    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong, PhD African Literature & Psychology, The University of Western Australia (2010)
    So long as the information is benign. But I have seen things said about South African farmers who were target for farm terrorism, and it’s basically like, “So what? You reap what you sow.” And things like that. I really don’t think that “white guilt” is an appropriate reaction to that kind of provocation. Rather one should come down to where these opinion makers live and pour fire on their heads and destroy them physically.
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  14. Jennifer Armstrong - Quora





    Poppy Fields
    37m ago · 1 upvote from Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong
    Jennifer Armstrong
    1m ago
    Of course, we have minds, which should ideally be able to register both positive and negative things occurring in life. This can be difficult to do both at the same time, but a very strong, or persistent mentality can yield good results. Unfortunately these can be undermined by contemporary theoreticians and contemporary individualistic values that strip the meaning from their original contexts.
    To forgive oneself for having been victimized can be tougher than it sounds. One benefits by having others on one’s side as witnesses to the actual situation. If the potential witnesses become turncoats by stripping the original context of its historical and cultural meaning, then one finds oneself so utterly confused that damage more or less ensues.
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