Description

In his most recent book, Democracy and Self-Organization: The Change of Which Barack Obama Speaks, Dr. Robert Aziz draws on his depth understanding of human psychology and culture to provide us with unprecedented insight into the dynamics of meaning underlying Barack Obama’s politics of change. Conclusions reached about our current cultural crisis of meaning in his previous work The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung (2007) form the basis of this incisive analysis. In Democracy and Self-Organization: The Change of Which Barack Obama Speaks, carefully and systematically, directly and substantively connecting the profound leadership initiatives of President John F. Kennedy and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his thesis, Dr. Aziz convincingly situates the change of which Barack Obama speaks within the context of the now urgent demands of democratic culture’s unfolding destiny.

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about the author

Robert Aziz Ph.D. is a psychoanalytical therapist in private practice, an executive mentor within the North American business sector, and has lectured on the psychology of the unconscious at two Canadian universities. He is a Clinical Member of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists and a Full Member of the Canadian Psychological Association. Dr. Aziz was one of five subject experts invited by The Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education (Tokyo) to contribute a chapter to their commemorative publication Asian and Jungian Views of Ethics (1999). He is the author of C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (1990) and The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung (2007), both academic publications of SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

• Introduction

1. False Absolutes and Ideals
2. False Absolutes and Ideologies
3. A Human Being, First and Foremost

• Notes
• Bibliography

Excerpts

"Much as individuals have destinies, countries and even cultures do as well. Now such destinies should not be conceived of as preordained or fixed paths. Rather, they exist as developmental potentials which life at its depths invariably calls us toward, while ultimately making it a matter of our ethical fortitude as to whether we will embrace or abandon them." (p. 1)

"To believe in democracy is to have unconditional faith in the consciousness and self-organizing capabilities of people." (p. 4)

"The change of which Barack Obama speaks is no easy target because it is not so much about this or that specific idea or solution, but rather, about the how we are to get to this or that specific idea or solution. The change of which Barack Obama speaks is above all else about process." (p. 9)

"It makes sense that those who will speak most forcefully to the problems presented by such false absolutes will be individuals of moral fortitude who have come to know, through their own life experiences and the life experiences of others they have observed firsthand, what it means to live on the wrong side of a collectively held ideal." (p. 18)

"How can self-organizing process support our transformation if all that we present to it are self-deceptions, false absolutes and false certainties—if all that we present to it are highly idealized and altogether false representations of our individual or collective goodness?" (p. 23)

"Regardless of its military capability, regardless of its economic power, it is incumbent on a democratic nation never to succumb to the falsity and hubris that an imposed fixed-form ideological "solution" is equivalent to a truly ethical solution reached by way of process and sincere deliberation. The consciousness with which a nation holds the power in its possession is not only one of the most important measures of democratic culture, but no less of that nation's ethicality." (p. 44-5)

"A world in which human beings categorize themselves or categorize others, first and foremost, in terms of false absolutes pertaining to race, ethnicity, age, disability, gender, religious belief or lack thereof, sexual orientation, social and economic status; a world in which people without just cause are deemed "good guys" or "bad guys," patriotic or unpatriotic; a world in which other nations are conceived of as absolutely good or absolutely evil is a dehumanizing world indeed." (p. 64)