Family: Those old clothes you hang onto in case you need to move, build a deck, or paint. 11 hours ago
Hypocrite: One wise enough to know that sayings like, ‘A man is only as good as his word,’ are exactly the kind of bullshit that pays. 1 day ago
Contradiction: The tendency of Not-A to forget that A is, like, so yesterday. 2 days ago
Formalism: What machinery looks like from the pretty, pretty inside. 3 days ago
Sports: The simulation of mortal struggle for the stimulation of actual heartbreak. 4 days ago
-o-
R. Scott Bakker is my favorite writer. Ursula K. LeGuin is my second. I suggest you look up a way to get ahold of The Darkness That Comes Before, his first book. His series is worth the read. For my money he is the best writer in the english language today.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman cites the difficulty we have distinguishing experience from memory as the reason why we retrospectively underrate our suffering in a variety of contexts. Given the same painful medical procedure, one would expect an individual suffering for twenty minutes to report a far greater amount than an individual suffering for half that time or less. Such is not the case. As it turns out duration has “no effect whatsoever on the ratings of total pain” (380). Retrospective assessments, rather, seem determined by the average of the pain’s peak and its coda.
Absent intellectual effort, the default is to remove the band-aid slowly.
Far from being academic, this ‘duration neglect,’ as Kahneman calls it, places the therapist in something of a bind. What should the physician’s goal be? The reduction of the pain actually experienced, or the reduction of the pain remembered. Kahneman provocatively frames the problem as a question of choosing between selves, the ‘experiencing self’ that actually suffers the pain and the ‘remembering self’ that walks out of the clinic. Which ‘self’ should the therapist serve? Kahneman sides with the latter. “Memories,” he writes, “are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self” (381). As he continues:
“Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.” 381
There’s many, many ways to parse this fascinating passage, but what I’m most interested in is the brand of tyranny Kahneman invokes here. The use is metaphoric, of course, referring to some kind of ‘power’ that remembering possesses over experience. But this ‘power over’ isn’t positive: the ‘remembering self’ is no ‘tyrant’ in the interpersonal or political sense. We aren’t talking about a power that one agent holds over another, but rather the way facts belonging to one capacity, experiencing, regularly find themselves at the mercy of another, remembering.
Insofar as the metaphor obtains at all, you could say the power involved is the power of selection.