The Politics Of Experience Summary

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John Smith Mr. Jones Sociology 212 3 May 2012 Disenchanted The Politics of Experience is collection of theories and ideas about experience, behavior, and sanity. The book is sometimes abstract, mostly controversial, and always bold and thought provoking. Dr. Laing goes to great lengths to prove that not only is the scientific method incapable of measuring the human experience, but our views on normalcy and order within society are both violent and destructive; that normalcy is in fact, insanity. In this world, we are groomed into beings that are increasingly led to believe in the material, or external world. Forsaken are thoughts of imagination, fantasy, and freedom. The human experience is constrained and limited by a society that…show more content…
Behavior being the objective displays of behavior that we can see and measure from the outside. What cannot be measured from the outside, but is vital to our understanding of human behavior, is the human experience. In the science of persons, behavior is a "function of experience". Alienation from experience is a result of society's attempts to normalize the human experience. Our intentions, feelings, and imaginations are stripped down and mystified to being products of our upbringing, no longer coming from within, but controlled from the outside. We are raised to believe that our behaviors are reactions to others behaviors, and that our environment dictates appropriate actions and punishes inappropriate ones. Suddenly, we are not experiencing life, we are merely reacting to others, and behaving accordingly. Some of these reactionary behaviors, called "Defense mechanisms", are destructive ways in which we attack the experience of oneself, or of another, in order to validate personal action and return to…show more content…
We cut others down to feel more advanced, but call it competition. We attack others' opinions by invalidating their experience as a inaccurate perversion of the "truth", but call it persuasion. We enslave our children in narrow bottlenecks to craft an adult in our own image, and call it love. We have to "mystify" our perverted societal structures in order to pass them on to our children because without thousands of years of regression toward alienation, the innocence of a child seems almost wrong in our eyes. They are born "wrong" and we have to indoctrinate them to a state of righteousness that fits our scheme. This brainwashing, restricting, and enslavement is mystified into a theme called
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