wenglund wrote:Liz alerted me to this thread, and while I haven't bothered to read through it (I am okay with people having fun at my expense, particularly since I have had so much fun at theirs'), I am pleased that so many people have take such a deep interest in me personally.
Thanks, for your deep and abiding interest, -Wade Englund-
wenglund wrote:Since Beastie is once again acting like she knows me better than I know myself, and putting words into my mouth. And, since thews keeps asking me question that presuppose things I have not said not do I purport; there is evidently no need for me to be involved any longer with this "discussion." So, I will leave my part of this thread in the hands those intent on speaking for me. Perhaps, though, I will look in from time to time to see what all you have had to say for me and about me. LOL
Thanks, -Wade Englund-
beastie wrote:You clearly don't know Wade at all. There was no exaggeration in my comments. In fact, I forgot one episode: his determination to portray critics as bigots.
http://pacumenispages.yuku.com/topic/87 ... try?page=4
So are you going to "translate" Wade for me, so I can see where I've so egregiously misunderstood his words?
stemelbow wrote:
I've seen Wade over the years, not in person. Well once in person but he didn't know who I was since I post anonymously. I don't agree with many things he says. I really don't care about that though. I simply take issue with the atmosphere here. This thread surely outlines an issue I have with this place. I have no interest in engaging with you one whether you think your mirroring approach regarding Wade is a good thing.
Look at it this way. If some anti-mormon Christian individual set up a website, and pretended there was a "center" behind the website, and called the "center" The Center Investigating Nonsensical New Religions - or CINNRS - and on the website's introductory website, the "center" proclaimed interest in investigating the following nonsensical new religions: Mormonism, David Koresh's group, Jim Jone's Group, Heaven's Gate, and Wayne Bent's group - what would your reaction be? And if that same person then visited a board for Mormons, and proclaimed his interest in working with Mormons for this center's study, and invited them to his website, and on the front page they saw Mormonism linked with religions that engaged in homicidal, suicidal, or sexually predatory behavior, what would those Mormons think? And if that same person put on a polite face on the LDS board, and then chastised the Mormons for reacting harshly and negatively to him, what would Mormons think? And how about if that same person spent many years talking about Mormonism on various boards, and consistently attached the worst traits to Mormonism and explained that he wasn't "obsessed" with Mormonism (despite no evidence he investigated any other new religion), and that he was simply concerned with the over-all trajectory of our society, what would you think?
The center should also purport to study cultivated, uncritical laudatory temperament syndrome, or CULTS for short.
EAllusion wrote:You also forgot his phase where he described apostates critics of Mormonism, especially atheists and agnostics, as having an authoritarian personality (and fundamentalist). This involved some creative redefinitions of terms and pleas of being misread as he contradicted himself, but that was a notable phase in the life of Wade. The schtick of course was to flip the 'script on the authoritarian, fundamentalist streak in Mormon culture back at critics in an epic trolling move. I guess it's easy to forget, but that was Wade's entire posting persona for a little while.
EAllusion wrote:Wade's contribution was the focus on authoritarian personality. The gimmick is that Mormonism is a highly authoritarian religion and here he is accusing people who are critical of that religion of being blinded by their authoritarian personality. Plenty of those people surely pride themselves in rejecting an authoritarian mindset, so the accusation is just too rich. And he choose to go after the secular types - those most likely to not be authoritarian - as opposed to the fundamentalist evangelicals. It was trolling, just like "SAD," plain and simple.
Mr. Englund:
I have no idea what you've actually read. I read through this entire thread and your "anti-bigotry" website to try to determine that, but came up empty (though I did note some references to "college textbooks" as sources for your grounding concepts. You do realize that textbooks only give simplistic summaries of ideas, and sometimes innaccurate ones at that, don't you?).
I suspect you have read some book which describes a volume called "The Authoritarian Personality." While Adorno did participate in the making of this work, it is extremely uncharacteristic, if not nearly antithetical, of his work in general.
First of all----Adorno is NOT A PSYCHOLOGIST.
"or example, as Adorno and other psychologists have theorized, if one is raised in a rigid authoritarian environment (whether real or perceived), where love is conditional, that may cause one to be continually self-conscious of one's ignorance and inabilities, thereby potentially exacerbating, rather than allaying, feelings of frustration, bewilderment, fear, insecurity, weakness, helplessness, and loss of control. "
I don't know what you are quoting or referencing, but whoever came up with that description is insane.
Adorno is a marxist cultural theorist whose work was often produced in collaboration with the group of german intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School. The focus of his work was philosopy, culture and aesthetics. While he sometimes made use of the general conceptual appratus of Freudian psychoanalysis, he was very critical of mainstream psychology, seeing it as a bourgeois tool for producing conformity.
For Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt School, the most urgent task facing intellectuals was an analysis of fascism---not only in the form it took in 1930's Germany, Nazism, but also the fascistic potental latent in contemporary so-called democracies, foremost of all, the United States. Their work drew on an economic account of fascism as one of the crisis modes of capitalism (a method of dealing with surplus labor) as well as a critique of the authoritarian and conformist tendencies in capitalist mass culture (which produces a surface "variety" of products and choices that masks the political limits of a society organized purely around profit).
The members of the Frankfurt School were forced to flee Germany with the outbreak of WWII (most of them were Jews, although not religious). Adorno, along with the bulk of the group, ended up in the United States---where they found they had exchanged a blatant authoritarian society for a tacit one.
While in the U.S., the sociologist Max Horkheimer, who Adorno worked with closely throughout his career, became interested in the methodolgies deployed by the American branch of the discipline---specifically the use of empirical studies and research. Although more sceptical of empiricism, Adorno agreed to work with the American Jewish Committee's Department of Scientific Research on one volume of their "Studies in Prejudice" largely because Horkheimer had been chosen director of the Department.
Adorno contributed to some of the general analysis of data found in "The Authoritarian Personality," but the bulk of the work was done by Nevitt Sanford, Daniel Levinson and Else Frenkel-Brunswik of the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group. He was ambivalent at best about the results, feeling that the volume contributed to a dangerous understanding of "authoritarianism" as primarily individual or subjective in cause, rather than political or institutional.
Despite its fetishization of the personal questionaire, "The Authoritarian Personality" does yield some intriguing insights with which Adorno agreed. Over and over again it associates "authoritarianism" with conservative politics, hierarchal organizations and any structure which demands its members uncritically follow the leader.
The "authoritarian personality" is also defined by the individual's desire to be part of institutions which offer ready-made "cosmic" explanations of existence and that micro-manage member's time and daliy lives. According to the study, the desire for an "absolute security" or "safety" becomes dangerously congruent with conformity.
All in all, "The Authoritarian Personality" describes institutions and psychological phenomena that are more characteristic of the LDS Church than of its critics.
Furthermore, in all his writing, even in his aesthetic theory, Adorno is most explictly critical of what he calls "identity thinking"---the supression of heterogeneity in the name of identity. Any philosophical, political or cultural system that ultimately seeks to change that which different to that which is same, is emphatically rejected by Adorno.
A religion which has as one of its aims the eventual conversion by proxy baptism of every person in human history is an Adornonian nightmare of totalizing identification, a literalization of the fear of another Frankfurt School theorist of the authoritarian, Walter Benjamin, that "even the dead will not be safe from the enemy."
I hope it is clear that to summon Adorno's name in the cause of demonizing those who reject a hierarchical system like Mormonism betrays an utter incomprehension of anything and everything Adorno ever wrote. The whole project outlined in both this thread and your website, that of smearing anti-authoritarians and anti-fundamentalists as themselves fundamentalist authoritarians, is the kind of work Adorno devoted his life to negating.