I am reminded of Aristotle's position again on this kind of thing. Not
to promote indifference but a healthy reaction, practiced. Also
Epicticus is one who might promote indifference as a form of happiness
but also of an ability to concentrate without expectation
"frustration."
Aristotle's Golden Mean: doctrine that right action lies in the middle
position between the extremes of excess and deficit.
"There are, then, three kinds of disposition- towards excess, towards
deficiency and the virtuous mean. Each is, in a sense opposed to the
others, as when the brave man seems rash to the coward, and cowardly
to the rash man. But the mean is not necessarily the middle, for
rashness is nearer to courage than is cowardice."
"It is not easy to be good, as it is no easy task to find the middle.
Even finding the middle of a circle takes skill."
"Anyone can get angry, or be generous, but to do so to the right
person, to the right extent, at the right time with the right motive
in the right way is not easy. It is best to aim at the mean by
avoiding the vice which most contrary to it, and guard against the
vices to which we are more inclined. Especially, we must guard against
pleasure, because pleasure cannot be judged impartially."
-- Aristotle
www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/aristotle.htm
The Golden Mean: For every emotion, every desire or appetite, every
behavioral disposition, there is a corresponding moral virtue, as well
as moral vices. Virtues and vices are states of character. According
to Aristotle, emotions and desires have purposes with respect to the
whole person, but they fulfill these purposes only if they are felt at
the right time, in the right way, to the right degree. How you are
conditioned to feel and respond to life situations is your character.
This "right amount" of an emotion or desire is said to be the mean
between the extremes of excess and deficiency. Thus, for every feeling
you have, you can be virtuous (if your character is such that you feel
it in the appropriate way), or you can exhibit the vice of excess (too
much of the feeling) or the vice of deficiency (too little). For
example, with respect to anger there is the vice of short-temperedness
(excess), the vice of insensibility (deficiency) and the virtue of
even-temperedness. There is also a golden mean with respect to the
disposition to perform certain kinds of actions. For example, the
generous person has the virtue of being disposed to give away money in
a fitting way (neither too much or too little). Our rational soul,
when it is operating effectively, can tell through experience what is
fitting--but until our feeling and dispositions are aligned with what
reason dictates, we are not excellently rational.
http://philosophy.okstate.edu/reitan/OverviewofAristotle.htm
Aristotle's Golden Mean
http://faculty.db.erau.edu/schliepr/ethics/aristotle.html
Aristotle's Golden Mean of Midlife
http://www.bestyears.com/aristotlemean.html
"What disturbs people's minds are not events but their judgements on
events..."
"Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but
wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a
tranquil flow of life..."
"Men are not worried by things, but by their ideas about things. When
we meet difficulties, become anxious or troubled, let us not blame
others, but rather ourselves, that is: our idea about things ... Some
things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are up to
us, our impulses, desires, aversions, in-short whatever is our doing.
Our bodies are not up to us, nor our possessions, our reputations, or
our public offices, or that is, whatever is not of our own doing..."
--Epictetus (Roman Slave)
http://www.google.com/search?q=epictetus
...almost all human emotions and behaviours are the result of what
people think, assume or believe (about themselves, other people, and
the world in general). It is what people believe about situations they
face - not the situations themselves - that determines how they feel
and behave.
A useful way to illustrate the role of cognition is by using Ellis'
'ABC' model. In this framework 'A' represents an actual event or
experience, and the person's 'inferences' or interpretations as to
what is happening. 'B' represents the 'evaluative' beliefs that follow
from these inferences. 'C' repre-sents the emotions and behaviours
that follow from those evaluative beliefs.
A1. Activating event - what happened:
Told that I have lung cancer and might not live more than 9 months.
A2. Inferences about what happened:
I can or cannot be happy during those 9 months.
B. Beliefs about A:
I believe that I will be happy or not based upon automatic thinking
and habits that might or might not be truthful interpretations.
C. Reaction:
Emotions: From depressed to happy, depending upon how much I stoically
control my own thought process and inadvertently my emotional moods
and arousal states.
Behaviours: displaying the emotions I chose.
Therefore I am alone completely responsible for my reaction to getting
this disease.
http://www.rational.org.nz/prof/docs/Intro-CBT.pdf
Frustration and Aggression.
As we have seen, aggression can be prompted by any unpleasant or
aversive situation, such as anger, pain, excessive high temperatures,
and the like. Of all these aversive situations, the major instigator
of aggression is frustration. Imagine the following situation: You
must drive across town for an important job interview. On your way to
the parking lot, you realize you are a bit late for your appointment,
so you break into a fast trot. When you find your car you notice, to
your dismay, that you have a flat tire. "Okay, I'll be twenty minutes
late; that's not too bad," you say as you take the jack and lug wrench
out of the trunk. After much tugging and hauling, you remove the old
tire, put on the spare tire, tighten the lugs--and, lo and behold, the
spare tire also is flat! Seething with frustration, you trudge back to
your dorm and enter your room. Your roommate sees you standing there,
resume in hand, sweaty, dirty, and rumpled. Immediately sizing up the
situation, he asks humorously, "How did the interview go?" Shouldn't
he be prepared to duck?
If an individual is thwarted on the way to a goal, the resulting
frustration will increase the probability of an aggressive response.
This does not mean frustration always leads to aggression or that
frustration is the only cause of aggression. There are other factors
that will determine whether or not a frustrated individual will aggress
--and there are other causes of aggression.
A clear picture of frustration-aggression relationships emerges from a
classic experiment by Roger Barker, Tamara Dembo, and Kurt Lewin.
These psychologists frustrated young children by showing them a
roomful of very attractive toys, which were then kept out of reach.
The children stood outside a wire screen looking at the toys, hoping
to play with them--even expecting to play with them--but were unable to
reach them. After a painfully long wait, the children were finally
allowed to play with the toys. In this experiment, a separate group of
children were allowed to play with the toys directly without first
being frustrated. This second group of children played joyfully with
the toys. But the frustrated group, when finally given access to the
toys, were extremely destructive. They tended to smash the toys, throw
them against the wall, step on them, and so forth. Thus, frustration
can lead to aggression.
Several factors can accentuate this frustration. Suppose you were
about to bite into a thick, juicy hamburger, and somebody snatched it
away. This would be more likely to frustrate you--and lead to an
aggressive response--than if someone stopped you on your way to
McDonald's. An analogue of this situation was demonstrated in a field
study by Mary Harris. She had students cut in front of people waiting
in line for tickets, outside of restaurants, or to check out of a
grocery store; sometimes they cut in front of the 2nd person in line,
other times in front of the 12th person. As we would expect, the
responses of the people standing behind the intruder were much more
aggressive when the student cut into the second place in line.
Frustration is increased when a goal is near and your progress toward
it is interrupted. When the interruption is unexpected or when it
seems illegitimate, the frustration is increased still further, as an
experiment by James Kulik and Roger Brown points out. Subjects were
told they could earn money by telephoning for donations to charity and
obtaining pledges. Some of them were led to expect a high rate of
contributions, being informed that previous calls had been successful
almost two-thirds of the time; others were led to expect far less
success. When the potential donor refused to contribute, as all of
them did (the subjects were actually calling confederates of the
experimenters), the callers with the high expectations exhibited more
aggression, speaking more harshly and slamming down the phone with
more force. The experimenters also varied the reasons the confederates
gave for refusing to contribute, sometimes making them sound
legitimate ("I can't afford to contribute") and sometimes having them
sound arbitrary and illegitimate ("Charities are a waste of time and a
ripoff"). The subjects who heard refusals that seemed unjustified
displayed more aggression.
In sum, as these experiments demonstrate, frustration is most
pronounced when the goal is becoming palpable and drawing within
reach, when expectations are high, and when the goal is blocked
unjustifiably. These factors help to point out the important
distinction between frustration and deprivation. Children who simply
don't have toys do not necessarily aggress. Rather, as the earlier
experiment indicates, it was those children who had every reason to
expect to play with the toys who experienced frustration when that
expectancy was thwarted; this thwarting was what caused the children
to behave destructively. In accord with this distinction, the
psychiatrist Jerome Frank has pointed out that, in the 1960s, two of
the most serious riots by U.S. blacks in history did not take place in
the geographical areas of greatest poverty; rather, they took place in
Watts and Detroit, where things were not nearly so bad for blacks as
they were in some other sections of the country. The point is, things
were bad relative to what "Whitey" had. Revolutions usually are not
started by people whose faces are in the mud. They are most frequently
started by people who have recently lifted their faces out of the mud,
looked around, and noticed that other people are doing better than
they are and that the system is treating them unfairly. Thus,
frustration is not the result of simple deprivation; it is the result
of relative deprivation. Suppose, after graduating from high school, I
choose not to pursue a higher education and you choose to be educated;
10 years later, if you have a better job than I do, I may be unhappy
with my job but I will not experience frustration; I made a free
choice, and this is the reasonable consequences of my choice. But if
we've both been educated, and you have a white-collar job and I
(because I'm black, or a Chicano, or a woman) am handed a broom, I
will feel frustrated; or, if you find it easy to get an education, but
because I grew up in an impoverished ghetto an education is denied me,
I will also feel frustrated. This frustration will be exacerbated
every time I turn on the television and see all those beautiful houses
white people live in, and all those lovely appliances for sale to
other people, and all that gracious living and leisure I cannot share.
When you consider all the economic and social frustrations faced by
members of underpriv-iledged minority groups in this affluent society,
it is surprising that there are so few riots. As Alexis de Tocqueville
wrote more than 150 years ago, "Evils which are patiently endured when
they seem inevitable, become intolerable once the idea of escape from
them is suggested."
As long as there is hope that is unsatisfied, there will be
frustrations that can result in aggression. Aggression can be reduced
by satisfying that hope, or it can be minimized by eliminating it.
Hopeless people are apathetic people. The Ugandans, when they were
under the tyrannical, repressive, and wantonly violent dictatorship of
Idi Amin, dared not dream of improving conditions or rebelling against
Amin's rule. The South African blacks, and to some extent the blacks
in the United States, did not revolt as long as they were prevented
from hoping for anything better. Clearly, eliminating people's hope is
an undesirable means of reducing aggression. The saving grace of our
nation is that--theoretically, at least--this is a land of promise. We
teach our children, explicitly and implicitly, to hope, to expect, and
to work to improve their lives. But unless this hope stands a
reasonable chance of being fulfilled, turmoil will be inevitable.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
