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Thread: The Stranger Within Us

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    Cosmic Teapot's Avatar
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    Default The Stranger Within Us

    In Politics or Religion, do you think people despise and fight each other because they have more differences or because they are similar to each other? Refer to the book below. Make connections to current events if you like.

    The Stranger Within Us by Arno Gruen, written in 2002
    The book isn't available in English but a summary/analysis can be found here: https://www.arnogruen.net/the_need_t...arno_gruen.pdf

    "We live in a world in which we are becoming increasingly dependent on one another andyet at the same time are turning more and more against one another. Why are peoplehostile to what connects them, to what they have in common - their humanity?
    [...]
    Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo "butcher of Lyon" who tortured a French resistance fighter to death [...] what the butcher did to his victim he did in acertain sense to himself. [...] Hatred of the foreigner always has something todo with self hatred. If we want to understand why people torment and humiliate others, we must first deal with what we despise in ourselves, for the enemy we believe we see inthe other person must originally exist inside. We want to silence this part of us bydestroying the stranger who, because he resembles us, reminds us of it. That is the only way we can distance ourselves from what has become foreign to us in ourselves. That is the only way we can maintain our self-esteem and feel as if we are holding our headshigh."


    book quotes:
    "If we want to understand why people torment and humiliate other people, we must first deal with what we abhor in ourselves."

    "It is the similarities that make people fight each other, not the differences."

    "Empathy is a fundamental ability of all living things. It is the barrier to inhumanity and the core of our humanity, and therefore the core of what is our own. But if this self must be despised and separated as not belonging to us, then empathy can not develop freely."



    Arno Gruen (May 26, 1923 - October 20, 2015) was a Swiss-German psychologist and psychoanalyst.Gruen's place in the history of psychology can be summarized as follows. According to Sigmund Freud, human beings are born with an innate tendency to destruction and violence; throughout his scholarly and clinical career, Prof. Gruen challenged that assumption, arguing instead that at the root of evil lies self-hatred, a rage originating in a self-betrayal that begins in childhood, when autonomy is surrendered in exchange for the "love" of those who wield power over us.
    -Wikipedia

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    Exodus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cosmic Teapot View Post
    In Politics or Religion, do you think people despise and fight each other because they have more differences or because they are similar to each other? Refer to the book below. Make connections to current events if you like.
    Am I being graded?

    "It is the similarities that make people fight each other, not the differences."

    Why would that be true? If the similarities were more significant than the differences you would be fighting yourself, but you're not, you're fighting someone else. So the natural conclusion is that the differences must dominate for there to be a conflict. Likewise our allies are the ones who share some similarity with us in the context of the conflict, and therefore fall on the side of Self.

    What is also true however, is that we don't necessarily fight those with the greatest differences. Often those with certain similarities will tend to compete more with us, and therefore produce more conflicts. Car salesmen compete with other car salesmen, not with fast food restaurants. You can also see this in socionics in terms of Se valuers fighting each other.

    edit: a Jewish friend of mine had this to say about Jews and Muslims fighting, that we're like brothers, and brothers fight sometimes even though they're more similar than they are different.

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    I figured this out before my teen years.

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    What's the purpose of SEI? Tallmo's Avatar
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    It's shadow projection. Jung has lots of stuff about this. Of course it's easier to project on someone who resembles the projection and not somebody totally different.
    Last edited by Tallmo; 08-23-2019 at 12:49 PM.
    The decisive thing is not the reality of the object, but the reality of the subjective factor, i.e. the primordial images, which in their totality represent a psychic mirror-world. It is a mirror, however, with the peculiar capacity of representing the present contents of consciousness not in their known and customary form but in a certain sense sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat as a million-year old consciousness might see them.

    (Jung on Si)

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    Hot Scalding Gayser's Avatar
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    I don't think its about that. You can dislike somebody like yourself, you can like somebody like yourself. You can dislike somebody very different from yourself, and like somebody very different from yourself.

    I think the conflict happens when you value and cherish different things. It might not be so much who you two are, but how you wish other people were like. One person might value sexual liberty and freedom, the other person values traditional family life. This one thing alone won't necessarily make somebody fight- but you get enough of those things boiling together in the pressure cooker of the minds, it can result in a lot of mutual resentment and antagonism. You can also agree on a lot of topics, but then somebody disagrees with you on a very, very core essential value (that maybe you didn't even know you had) - and then your Fi won't be as fond of them.

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    I think so. Yes, it's projection of one's so called shadow in Jungian terms onto others. People are becoming more and more blind to their own dark side in the early 21st century, seeing it reflected in the otherside. This can't be good. I think we're headed for a crisis of some sort (war maybe) on a global level. This prediction is quite banal, and I hope it's wrong. (banal or trendy predictions almost always turn out wrong, so let's hope this one does too).

    Quote Originally Posted by thehotelambush View Post

    "It is the similarities that make people fight each other, not the differences."

    Why would that be true? If the similarities were more significant than the differences you would be fighting yourself, but you're not, you're fighting someone else.
    Oh how you know so little about the dark side of the force.

    The author @Cosmic Teapot is quoting (I never heard of him btw, but I think I get their message) is talking about projection. Obviously you can fight someone similar to yourself. It suffices that they are a different individual. Groups can do this too. The differences can be superficial or partially imaginary. It's enough for you to imagine that you are good and that "the other" is somehow bad for conflict to happen. Obviously it is possible to imagine things that aeren't real, so the conclusion is that it is totally possible to think of someone as an "enemy" or "adversary" because they exhibit certain qualities, or seem to exhibit certain qualities while being blind to the same qualities in oneself. I'm not saying it's like that in every single case, sometimes conflicts arise out of misunderstandings, too.


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    Quote Originally Posted by Uncle Ave View Post
    Oh how you know so little about the dark side of the force.
    I know plenty more than you realize.

    The author @Cosmic Teapot is quoting (I never heard of him btw, but I think I get their message) is talking about projection. Obviously you can fight someone similar to yourself. It suffices that they are a different individual. Groups can do this too. The differences can be superficial or partially imaginary. It's enough for you to imagine that you are good and that "the other" is somehow bad for conflict to happen. Obviously it is possible to imagine things that aeren't real, so the conclusion is that it is totally possible to think of someone as an "enemy" or "adversary" because they exhibit certain qualities, or seem to exhibit certain qualities while being blind to the same qualities in oneself. I'm not saying it's like that in every single case, sometimes conflicts arise out of misunderstandings, too.
    It is possible, yes, depending on your level of self-awareness. But the original claim was "It is the similarities that make people fight each other, not the differences." What you are saying does not prove this in the slightest. In the context of politics and religion it's actually absurd, because the differences between different political and religious groups are far from being imaginary. Communists and capitalists believe different things, and that's why they fight each other.

    If you have an example of similarities causing conflict I would be happy to hear it.

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    Moderator xerx's Avatar
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    everyone knows that you always fight your identical counterpart from the antimatter universe.

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    Quote Originally Posted by thehotelambush View Post
    I know plenty more than you realize.



    It is possible, yes, depending on your level of self-awareness. But the original claim was "It is the similarities that make people fight each other, not the differences." What you are saying does not prove this in the slightest. In the context of politics and religion it's actually absurd, because the differences between different political and religious groups are far from being imaginary. Communists and capitalists believe different things, and that's why they fight each other.

    If you have an example of similarities causing conflict I would be happy to hear it.
    People fighting over different religions are the same in sense they are defending beliefs, but this goes more to how we percieve the situation. Both sides live frustration, fear, or whatever stuff but they live it from their own vision, from their own background... I'd say it's as much the difference as it is the ressemblance: different beliefs, same goal.

    Having heard people bitching people who bitch them though...

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    Ok. so you're all still not looking up r/K selection theory. I am disappoint. Seriously, look it up. It really does explain quite a bit. This next election cycle in America will really drive it home. It's gonna be the 1960's all over again, only inverted. Imagine "right wing" fanatically sober hippies. Imagine the equivalent of Malcolm X breaking bread with a Grand Dragon (technically already happened if you know where to look). I do hope the PTB do not panic enough to outright cap the Donald, for that's an instant trigger for the next civil war.

    I'd rather not have another one of those. If for no other reason than it'd become a proxy war of the most epic of proportions between Russia and China. That's a nuclear holocaust for our entire friggin' planet (i.e. an extinction level event). I'd rather avoid that yes? Please tell me I'm not the only person who'd agree with myself on this one.

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    I'd say it depends on what they're fighting over. Ideologies it would be differences.

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    the question has no simple answer

    conflicts are from differences in aims and prefered ways to them
    when people are similar - those are closer so a conflict becomes more possible

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    some nights ago I had a dream I was shooting my ex SEE and man, it felt good.

    on serious note, when someone was misbehaving with me as a kid, my granma would say "they just jello", and that's the holly truth

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    Whenever I've hated someone I've asked myself about the qualities I hate and how they manifest within myself, since this is a known truth(tm) and I always end up shrugging and going: well, I guess they're around, somewhere.

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    Some people with certain similarities in interest might be more likely to fight simply due to sheer proximity, much like how two nations that share a border are more likely to go to war with each other then ones that don't. The actual source of conflicts however always ultimately stems from differences, not similarities. I know it sounds poetic to say otherwise but I simply don't think that's truthfully the case.

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    I imagine at some level it comes from genuine repulsion of how others are or appear to be - assuming there is a rational reason of course, other than just wanting to fight people. But also, I think it can be elevated beyond all proportion and reason by a feeling of powerlessness.

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    People come into contact over similarities and fight over differences. I'd say people who fight are usually more similar than different, but also, they don't fight over similarities, which is the paradox.

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