h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was having fun with the concept of 'mind sorking'.

This is an interesting p.o.v., but I think you are way too harsh on Catholics and on Tolkien regarding Sam. Catholics are the ones who get martyred by the CIA in South and Central America for pracitising liberation theology after all! 'Knowing your place and staying in it', that's a Presbyterian thing, believe me, I know!
Otherwise, a good theory...

Unlike orcs, there are good (and wonderful) Catholics. The teaching however is patriarchal, surely you're not denying that?

Nor do Presbyterians have a monopoly on knowing their place . . . you say as though from bitter experience that "knowing your place" is a Presbyterian thing, so I won't dispute it, except to point out that it was Presbyterians who beheaded their king in 1649.

My mother was the granddaughter of a Presbyterian Minister (from his photo, a very dour old man, and semi-famous in the history of Scots settlement in NZ&gt
My mother (who was not heavily involved, except socially) filled our heads with anti-Catholic propaganda all our lives. Then - shock, horror and probe, I *met* some Catholics!
I am *not* a Catholic, but there is such a lot of anti-Catholic feeling on h2g2, and I always feel morally bound to be a sort of defence lawyer, because *sometimes* I wonder if it's just a cse of people who are like we were as kids - knowing only of rumour and innuendo. (I am certain my mother didn't know any Catholics herself! Later in her life, she became a sincere believer, in a non-Presbyterian church, but that's another story...)Scottish presbyterianism in NZ in the 1920s (my mother's childhood) to the 1960s (my childhood) is very different from Scottish Presbyterianism in NZ now (very liberal compared to the '60s) and different again, to 1649!

We have plenty of Presbyterians in the north of Ireland. (I'm from the south; another country.) The northern Presbyterians are staunchly loyal royalists; which is funny as they were once the original republicans. Ho hum.

There is a good deal of atheism in h2g2, suitably for followers of Douglas Adams, who was a good friend of Richard Dawkins and a keen atheist. I find most of the banter good-natured and civilised. Occasionally a creationist post is put into an evolutionary discussion, often I think out of pure divilment. Trolling.

Not intending to defend my country's CIA, who can't find Osama or Saddam.

The places you find liberation theology are in places where there is little or no other theology except Catholicism. This is more due to the fact that in any polity, there are bound to be all kinds of people, even people who don't think in a Catholic manner. Liberation theology is certainly not part of this current pope's OK list, despite the power of the RC church in cracking Poland open. After the Mexican revolution, serious laws were passed against the RC church precisely because they were staunchly supporting the status quo. I think the revolutionaries knew what they were doing at the time.

The church is at its best in opposition. No sooner does it emerge from oppression than it starts oppressing. Inevitable perhaps.

But how did we get on to the church? Ah yes, Tolkien's Catholicism. I do find it slightly stifling (particularly towards female and other "good" characters), though not so much as C S Lewis's Anglicanism.

Sarah Maitland, who has written a lot about women in the church, referred to C S Lewis, as 'that old sexist', which I have to admit he was!
I find a lot of C S Lewis' writings really jarring. His pro-war jingoism for one. I was impressed with my re-reading of LotR, because the NZ media had made such a big deal of how Peter Jackson had worked around Tolkien's sexism, introducing new female characters and making them more active. This is *so* not true! I hadn't read the book since I were a lass, (16) and when I reread it this year, discovered that PJ had *reduced* the roles of the women, especially Eowyn. He turned her into a sap! A lovely, attractive Pre-Raphaelite looking, passive, sighing, love-struck nitwit. In the book, she's a lot more assertive especially against Grima Wormtongue! PJ thus gets credit he certainly doesn't deserve. He is neither an intellectual or even an original thinker, and he is *thoroughly* Americanised! (Which to me, means much more racist, sexist and classist than Tolkien ever was...!)

Some psychobabble for your consideration:

Transactional Analysis says that within each person are three distinct voices - the Child, the Adult and the Parent. Each of the voices is distinct and has a part to play in our decision making process, and each one is "louder" depending on our age and maturity. To give you an idea of how this works...

The Child tends to Want. The Child voice is all about being selfish, it wants the world to revolve around our desires and immediate needs. It has little concept of long term consequence and doesn't tend to think about others.

The Adult tends to moralise. It's all about what you should do. The Adult Voice has more concept of things outside the self, considers others and is better at consequences.

The Parent is more about what Will happen. Whenever possible it tends to mediate between the other two voices and provide a solution to immediate needs and desires that also fulfills the Adult's desire to put gratification aside.

Hobbits, in this model, are mostly Child and Parent. They are not good at the altruistic thought that defines the Adult and so rarely consider it. They are good at thinking of ways to continue to provide the instant gratification they desire but bad at thinking outside their particular box. This kind of thinking is particularly common among adolescent humans. Hobbits are capable of negotiating with others to get what they want but, as we see in The Hobbit and LoTR they generally not accustomed to seeing a bigger picture.

In that sense, the story of Frodo and the others is a Coming of Age talein which the Hobbits acquire a wider understanding of the world around them and become Adults for the first time. The responsibility they end up carrying is the first burden of adulthood - having a charge that is more important than the self and requires sacrifice.

To answer the question, then, behaviour patterns always have a choice about which way they will go, but that choice is limited by their awareness of what the consequences are. This would tend to happen at about the same time the person becomes truely aware that there is a wider world around them and their actions have defintite long term consequences in that world. Isolate a behaviour pattern from this knowledge and it stagnates into self-gratification (Gollum and the Hobbits). Over expose it to too much responsibility and it can create avoidance behaviour to remove the possibility of having to deal with those consequences (Aragorn and Smeagol).

That's a very interesting point of view! I would never have thought of Transactional Analysis in this context...

That's Eric Berne, isn't it, "Games People Play"? Excellent stuff.

I found an even better dissection of levels of awareness/involvement/existence in "Frogs Into Princes" by the people who invented Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Wonderfully clear.

Doctor Tim Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson, also have some fascinating models of conciousness/awareness too. Well worth digging for.

Robert Anton Wilson; Ravenbait advised me to look him up a few pages back.

Some time, perhaps. Too busy with Steven Pinker; still not finished "How the Mind Works" (or was the sorks?) and "The Blank Slate" is queueing up for attention. "Words and Rules" dipped into, "The Language Instinct" not even broached.

When I was seventeen I came across T H Huxley's essays on Darwinism and thought "This changes everything". Later I studied philosophy and thought "Darwin has to be taken into consideration" but couldn't take it on to do it myself. Now Pinker is doing it, along with Dawkins and Dennett.