Can we change attitude?

coberst,
It is interesting that your simultaneous blitzing of unsolicited "advice" has got you banned on “The StudentDoctor Forum” but applauded on the “Interfaith Forum”.

Ha! Now that's funny

I have wondered about that myself. Why are some forums so quick to ban someone differnt than the normal crowd while others are not. I suspect that two factors come into play: age of members and the availability of monitors. Generally large forums have very young members and many monitors which makes it almost a certainty that I will not be allowed to post there.

Is that why you think you were banned? Because you're "different from the normal crowd"? Do you really think that is the reason?

Coberst's conception of himself as "different" sits well with his messianic mission of "re-educating" the USA by spamming dozens of forums. The Messiah does not debate. He handles dissenters in the traditional messianic style of "I forgive you, because you know not what I know" He simply refuses to see that this activity is a sad obsession of an aging academic trying to rationalize what he fears is an otherwise meaningless retirement.

What do you think might be the reason?

The same reasons have been stated on many forums. Here's an example from when you were banned from the "BookTalk"forum in 2008.

http://www.booktalk.org/open-letter-to-chuck-oberst-t4210.html

To be fair to you I don't think too many of your antagonists know that you are in your late 70's, as I myself found out today.

Ditto what Fresco said. The primary reason is that you flood discussion boards with your op-eds while refusing to discuss. Though this may not be your intent, that is not far from spamming. On the site that Fresco linked to, you stated



I have previously stated my views on your willingness (or not) to respond to comments that others pose to you in your threads, so I won't rehash them. I'll just say here that it seems quite disingenuous of you to say that responders "seldom" respond to the topic in question. Often you are asked for examples, details, data, or anything else that might substantiate your claims. You can't ask for more direct responses than that, but it is usually at that point that you disappear from the thread.

I bring this up because you seem to think that your banning was a result of being a unique voice who dared to be different from the zombie masses. On more than one occasion you have compared yourself to Paul Revere. You may want this to be the reason, but it isn't, and I wonder if your Paul Revere complex is actually causing you to ignore the real problem.

This is offered in the spirit of genuine constructive criticism. If you find yourself banned from a site, it is not because the world is full of "young people" and stupid Americans who can never be shaken from our consumer-driven complacency. It is for reasons that are completely within your control to fix, and the day you start taking responsibility for your threads (i.e. back them up with substantive responses, examples, data, etc.) is the day you will be taken more seriously.

i'm going upstairs in a minute, so i'm going to be changing my altitude

Shapeless,

See your pm.

I did, and responded in kind. Thanks for the message, F.

Haha.
This was not on A2K, though? What site was it on?

PQ,

It was my summary here of data available to all googling "coberst".

“Man cannot evolve beyond his character”"Ernest Becker

Becker makes the point that the humanization process is one wherein the individual exchanges the natural organismic propensity for a mysterious symbolic dictation. The child in its very essential formative age is faced with denying that which ‘comes naturally’ for what are symbolic dictates that are far beyond its ability for comprehension. The child’s formation of character is dictated by its need to be somebody in the symbolic world.

The child continual loses battles that s/he cannot comprehend. John Dewey learned long ago that “the child continually loses battles he does not understand…we earn our early self-esteem not actively but in large part passively, by having our action blocked and re-oriented to the parents pleasure.”

In the very essential formative years the child develops character traits that in many cases remain with that individual for the rest of their life.

What is character? Character is the network of habits that permeate all the intentional acts of an individual.

I am not using the word habit in the way we often do, as a technical ability existing apart from our wishes. These habits are an intimate and fundamental part of our selves. They are representations of our will. They rule our will, working in a coordinated way they dominate our way of acting. These habits are the results of repeated, intelligently controlled, actions.

Habits also control the formation of ideas as well as physical actions. We cannot perform a correct action or a correct idea without having already formed correct habits. “Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction.” “The medium of habit filters all material that reaches our perception and thought.” “Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior is in reality the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness.” “Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will.”

Britannica specifies that attitude is “a predisposition to classify objects and events and to react to them with some degree of evaluative consistency.”

If I consult my inner self I cannot focus upon an attitude but can infer such an attitude based on behavior. If I wish to become conscious of my intuition I can through observation of behavior describe the attitude, which, in turn, allows me to ascertain the nature of my intuition.

When a mother tells her son “you must change your attitude”. The son cannot change the attitude directly but the son must change his intuition from which the inferred attitude emanates. This does become a bit convoluted but in essence when we wish to change an attitude we are saying that our intuition must be modified. We can modify intuition only through habit directed by our will.

“Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as character would exist. There would be simply a bundle, an untied bundle at that, of isolated acts. Character is the interpenetrating of habits. If each habit in an insulated compartment and operated without affecting or being affected by others, character would not exist. That is conduct would lack unity being only juxtaposition of disconnected reactions to separated situations. But since environments overlap, since situations are continuous and those remote from one another contain like elements, a continuous modification of habits by one another is constantly going on.”

My understanding of character and the quotations concerning the nature of character are taken from “Habits and Will” by John Dewey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8rhIw_9ucA

i suppose that solitude can bring you closer to yourself, with sessions of intropsection allowing people to stop just habitually doing what they do and really examine their own minds.

Incisive! Allowing for the pun to be intended.

Plenty of people are in favour of changing attitudes because talking about it makes them sound tolerant and magnanimous. But how many people are in favour of changing the circumstances in which attitudes are formed and exist.

The attitudes are conditioned by those circumstances. Emotionally.