Disvaluing of Motherhood in the Social Imagination...

What's happening to motherhood? Why are women less interested in becoming a mom?

In Psychology Matters, an April 2018 article titled, Escape from Motherhood, we have our questions answered. Let's look at that article here: 

 

    Motherhood. You don't have to be a psychologist to know that quality of mothering is crucial to every human. It can make or break children. The mother-relationship is a most important relationship in every human being's life. Her character, personality, and method of child rearing have more influence on a child than all other forces combined.

 

     "It's in this relationship that the child begins to develop security and trust - a good feeling about himself and a sense that the world is worth moving out into and exploring."

 

    Yet despite its basic, top-level importance, lots of mothers escape from mothering. The symptoms are all around us. It's a most disturbing deterioration of our time. We see it reflected today in growing numbers.

 

    Women not wanting children. Inability of mothers to communicate with their children. Unhappiness of the children. Growing teenage drug problem. Increase in youth suicides and runaways. Vandalism. Teen crime.

 

    I'm reminded of a 33-year-old mother who fled to another country to pursue an affair and a career. She left behind a 4-year old daughter and two teenage son and daughter.

 

    Prior to her retreat, she became an agent of an entertainment company. In her business, she worked with a director and actors and actresses with loosened restraints on sexual impulses.

 

    And so that's where her retreat from motherhood took root in fertile ground. Her degeneration of sexual morals and a new career philosophy made mothering a drag for her.

 

    Obviously, popular culture, media, and society play a role here. They exert great influence on women's attitudes toward the value of motherhood.

 

    Fidelity, maternity, and family values are curbed in favor of materialism, romanticism, and sexual "free love" alternate lifestyle.

 

     But these polluted cultural values and repressions - beside personal factors - have little to do with what is real. They're lies we tell ourselves. They damage mothers. They ruin lives.

 

    Good mothering then needs adequate psychological, emotional, and spiritual support to make it thrive. From God. From men. From family. From media. From culture and society.

 

Psychologist Dr. Eric Fromm writes,

 

    "The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent."

 

    Our next generations depend on healthy mothering. The survival of humankind and civilization hangs on it.

 

Why is motherhood considered unfavorable or being devalued in the social imagination?  All in all, its the age of technology that disenchants people in the place where they are; its truly a problem and has been a social pitfall for the social imagination and will be its ultimate ruin for everyone in it. Most of reality, as we know it will become unreal...sooner than later replaced with a new real but whose new real, that's anyone's guess... but it won't be human.

 

AUTHOR'S COMMENT: Speaking from my own experience, I did what that 33 yr. old mother did. Why? Not because being a mother was a drag for me. I loved it. However, the social pressures around me did not love that I loved being a mom. My own mother was severely critical, in fact... she told me to my face that I was wasting my life just being a mom. What a shame... 

Thank God, I am back in my children's life through my own desire to be their mom and not be what society wants me to be. If you are a mom, whether 100% stay at home, or a working mom, know that I support you completely. Keep doing your job and do your best regardless of what others around you think and say because ...our next generations depend on healthy mothering. The survival of humankind and civilization hangs on it.

 

 

https://www.psychologymatters.asia/article/466/escape-from-motherhood.html

What does it mean to be a Politcial Hack in the Social Imagination...

What does it mean to be political social imagination? According to an online definition, it means to be "a political person who is active in party political, or a person holding or seeking an elected office in government. Politicians propose, support, reject and create laws that govern the land and by an extension of its people. Broadly speaking, a politicians can be anyone who seeks to gain political power in a government." 

What is a political hack in the social imagination? According to Wikipedia, "Political hack", also called partisan hack, is a pejorative term describing a person who is more supporting to a particular party than what is ethically right. The term "hired gun" is often used in tandem to further describe the moral bankruptcy of the "hack". When a group of "political hacks" of a similar political affiliation get together, they are sometimes called a "political hack pack." When one side of a debate has more "political hacks" than the other, this is referred to as a "hack gap" and gives an advantage to the side with more "political hacks".

We must take note that this term, political hack, is a person that supports a particular party more than what is 'considered' (by who?) ethically right. In such context, we must also consider who or what is it to be ethically right?

Those are good questions. The given definitions above suggest that there is some Ai or all authoritative human guru over and above everyone who is clearly deciding what is ethically right.

Even so, one has to consider what or who is ethically right these days. I don't think its morally or ethically right to stand for abortion let alone have one no matter what the circumstances. 

According to online descriptions, both morality and ethics loosely have to do with distinguishing the difference between “good and bad” or “right and wrong.” 

Many people think of morality as something that's personal and normative, whereas ethics is the standards of “good and bad” distinguished by a certain community or social setting. 

Sounds logical but whose 'certain' community or which social setting are we talking about so that this term can be aptly applied... Mmm??? 

I have heard sweet, kind, decent old ladies tell me that they are either a republican or democrat and they swear by their own volition that they are ethically and even morally right because they know that they support the right party.

This world is a fallen world and the social imagination that we exist in must also be framed by such rhetoric. We do the best we can in this yet fallen world and believe me, most people think that they are. They just don't know that the road to hell is paved with their good intentions. 

So, if you think about it, you probably are a political hack of some kind or in one way or another... aren't you? I don't blame you; after all, its a fallen world. 

Given that truth, I suggest you get on board with the only truth! Join me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. A soldier refrains from entangling himself in civilian affairs, in order to please the one who enlisted him ~ 2 Timothy 2:3-4.

How we Remember Things in the Social Imagination and How/Why a Disappearing Middle Class Won't be Remembered...

    

    Many think of long-term memory as a permanent “bank” within the brain. Once a memory arrives there, the mind stores it completely and indefinitely. In truth, this is not the case. Although the long-term memory process allows information to remain in the brain for an extended period, nothing in the brain avoids risk. Information stored in long-term memory can stay in the brain for a short while (a day, a week) or last as long as a lifetime.

    When long-term memories form, the hippocampus retrieves information from the working memory and begins to change the brain’s physical neural wiring. These new connections between neurons and synapses stay as long as they remain in use ~ [https://lesley.edu/article/stages-of-memory].

In truth, this is not the case. Although the long-term memory process allows information to remain in the brain for an extended period, nothing in the brain avoids risk... For the sociologist, this is the most poignant aspect of memory. Why? Because, it exactly describes the social imagination. How?

Firstly, the social imagination is essentially a giant cloud where we share information. After all, if I haven't said it enough on this blog, the social imagination is the social reality. There is no other place to experience 'reality'. Even if raised by wolves, our reality would be socially constructed. 

Risk is something that the brain does not avoid. It cannot avoid. Sure, you think it does but that's a protective illusion or lack of engagement in it in the social imagination. Not only is the social imagination, the place where we all experience social reality (true for every culture/society), it thus necessarily houses the collective memory, a bank of necessary information that includes the risk aspect of existence ... in the social imagination. 

In the realm of the social imagination, your brain (an organic machine) has made instant quantified calculations of all information shared and experienced in the social imagination that it either determines to be a hindrance or encouragement when it comes to making a decision which is often a risk; all that data is kept in the collective memory bank. 

Risk is always calculated because of what is remembered in which there is stored previous calculations. The more memory we have accessible, the more we can engage risk evenly, the less chance of failure in the social imagination, the social reality. The only chance of failure really comes from a lack of social engagement among like minds or when there is brain damage or lack of social development. Children have this problem obviously as they are not mature in the experience of the wider social imagination. 

When an individual has more experiences in the social imagination and certainly in the wider version of it, risk is more easily ascertained, calculated and evenly shared as in dispersed. 

How does any of this discussion on risk in the social imagination lead up to another discussion on the disappearing middle class and how or why it won't be remembered in the social imagination? And, is that really a concern? Yes, because... risk is essentially built into the social imagination. Sharing risk creates a more stable social reality in the social imagination.

I chose to look at the middle class since because it is the most obvious illustration of shared risk taking that is in the hands of those who take it... not held back from them and neither allowed to overcome them. 

The middle class was/is certainly the most obvious catalyst for the growth of the American capitalist republic. To an extent, that same social imagination grew out of and or grew up in England, Canada, Australia and spread further into Europe proper after the Fall of Eagles - the Fall of Royal families/dynasties in Europe after WWI. 

The middle class is the entrepreneurial and or working populace en masse; which essentially makes it also foundational for a government to stand on a preamble that it is for the people and by the people. And, there you go... for the people and by the people. 

No top down social engineer be it a dictator or super quantum algorithm can allow that. How? Because of the risk factored in. Again, whether we are talking about a dictator or Ai presence, the risk of billions of people having such liberty is a risk that is not affordable to either one man or one machine. The global social reality is at hand and bigger is not better for everyone.

It won't be enough to cause the middle class to disappear... it must be forgotten in the sense as never recalled ever again. We have seen attempts at that in Europe and including far eastern Europe and Asia which though limited amounts of it may exist there, its been kept from growing. 

Why would that have to happen? In an ever escalating technological social reality, such people, the middle class, in their social imagination are no longer necessary.  They essentially becoming useless eaters.

The risk factor of having them around won't be part of the new numbers. A limited populace will be found but only among the extraordinary populace or those who consider it their moral right to restructure the social reality in the wider social imagination; thereby reducing risk. 

Indeed, the brain does NOT avoid risk, human existence, its continuity, sustainability in view of global warming and overpopulation, will be the goal. Thus, risk in the eyes of elites will be the key in the restructuring of social status in the wider social reality of the wider social imagination. Isn't that the agenda today? Yes, it is. 

The new restructuring will be voluntary at first using propaganda images and useful rhetoric that describe the risk at hand (the risk of humanity's continuity) and will be aimed at the middle class (a huge group) and not excluding those even lower than the middle class. 

Such an agenda seeks to steal, kill and destroy the rights of the middle class, i.e. to own property, to buy and sell and to eat... their very existence in the social imagination in jeopardy. Why? Essentially, it will be and is now deemed necessary in order to reestablish the social order in which only extraordinary people exist; because is a strange way that will appear to be the best practice to reduce global risk. 

Largely, those 'extraordinary' people are those who have power and money. They are Not the middle class nor the underdogs or the quick rise to stardom sport extraordinaire or the latest movie stars... Make no mistake, the 'extraordinary' are nefarious - wicked.

They are the power elite that C.Wright Mills wrote about in the mid 1950s; and, they will make sure you won't remember the middle class because it is a risk for them and you will believe its a risk for you too in the social imagination. But, if you can't remember that risk, there will be no risk to avoid. Remember, the brain does not avoid risk. How? It remembers it in the social imagination; the collective memory bank. Eliminate that memory and voila.

*You will own nothing and like it... Klaus Schwab! Remember that...