If "I'm OK, You're OK" leads to a generation[0] who
...are grown-up children, utterly irresponsible; not immoral but unmoral; they “please to live and live to please” themselves. They do not realise that their actions may prove costly to others and therefore do not count the cost. They are children of impulse not of calculation. [1]
then TA would be completely dandy, but I kind of thought the initial ideal, at least, was that people would attempt to stay in A<->A Straight Talk modes. Should we judge Transactional Analysis by what Berne wrote (TA as antimeme), or by what everyone read or claimed to have read (TA as meme)?
"...your real dandy is not an ordinary man and must not be judged by common standards. He stands outside and above the ordinary rules of life and conduct; he has not any conscience, and questions of morality do not affect him. All that is for us to do in viewing such a one as D’Orsay is to weigh his physical and mental gifts, and to examine the uses to which he put them, to look to the opportunities which were given to him and the advantage which he took of them." [1]
Dandyism as sociopathy? It certainly has a pocketbook-dependent valence: poor dandies are trashy; rich ones, classy.
> I don't play accurately —any one can play accurately— but I play with wonderful expression. —AM
[0] cf the Xenophobe's Guide to the Americans, which claims this behaviour wasn't just the 1970s, it's the national character.
The failure mode of Straight Talk OG TA (according to Berne) is that it's not a universal sol'n (at best a Kolmogorov Option?):
> The somber picture presented in Parts I and II of this book, in which human life is mainly a
process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of
what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait, is a commonplace but not the
final answer. For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of
behavior, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that
is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three
of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they
are, seeking their solutions in popular techniques of social action, such as "togetherness." This may
mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it.
(IIUC after hearing "all three
of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared", Michael Scott would be likely to retort "that's what she said")
Sorry, all I'd meant was that Berne's typical games annoy me in exactly the same way spam or indiscreet advertising does (I have a lot of sympathy for the purported motives of the aliens encountered in Blindsight) so recognising the start of one and then (contra St G, "the ebbing tide"?) tuning out until it recedes, leaving one's kernel of sanity undissolved (and perhaps even lotus-like, letting the muddy vibe just bead up and roll off?), really helps in the equanimity department.
I'll be low on bandwidth for the next few days, but will try to think of insanity inducing games. The glass bead game being good for pareidolia, I could imagine that if one played it to the point of seeing everything connected to everything else might lead to institutionalisation about as often as to enlightenment?
(Mark Vonnegut's experience as detailed in The Eden Express (1975) suggest that mixing psychedelics with stress is an insanity-inducing game)
EDIT: showing up on the client's doorstep has been done by salescritters since the day after commission was invented. A hack involves exploiting a property of a system that no one had previously realised exploitable. (Note here that despite popular usage, I only consider most computer crackers to be airquote "hackers".)
...are grown-up children, utterly irresponsible; not immoral but unmoral; they “please to live and live to please” themselves. They do not realise that their actions may prove costly to others and therefore do not count the cost. They are children of impulse not of calculation. [1]
then TA would be completely dandy, but I kind of thought the initial ideal, at least, was that people would attempt to stay in A<->A Straight Talk modes. Should we judge Transactional Analysis by what Berne wrote (TA as antimeme), or by what everyone read or claimed to have read (TA as meme)?
"...your real dandy is not an ordinary man and must not be judged by common standards. He stands outside and above the ordinary rules of life and conduct; he has not any conscience, and questions of morality do not affect him. All that is for us to do in viewing such a one as D’Orsay is to weigh his physical and mental gifts, and to examine the uses to which he put them, to look to the opportunities which were given to him and the advantage which he took of them." [1]
Dandyism as sociopathy? It certainly has a pocketbook-dependent valence: poor dandies are trashy; rich ones, classy.
> I don't play accurately —any one can play accurately— but I play with wonderful expression. —AM
[0] cf the Xenophobe's Guide to the Americans, which claims this behaviour wasn't just the 1970s, it's the national character.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56581/56581-h/56581-h.htm
EDIT: I prefer https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56581/56581-h/images/illus5.... (who needs a marshall's baton when you have a hunting crop?), but have to admit D'O---y may even have inspired a predecessor of our age's bobbleheads: https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1221047