Sublime

positive psychology movement, which has reoriented the study of psychological science away from its previous focus on malady and dysfunction and toward well-being and effective functioning. Under the leadership of the University of Pennsylvania’s Martin Seligman,

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

Often, we have to rid ourselves of older dominant narratives before we can be open to new ones—pushing to one side stories about the virtues of our nation, political system or economy that have become so embedded in our minds through constant repetition that we never question them

The transformation of the marriage of Freud and Marx, however, from shotgun status to one of genuine love was to take place at the hands of two men, one informally associated with the Frankfurt School, the other perhaps its most significant and influential activist intellectual:

Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, respectively. These two figures are

How do these generational traumas, and so many like them, impact the racial narrative we live in today? Might they have something to do with how we have become either desensitized or overly sensitive to racial harm? How might it help us understand the criminalization and mass incarceration of dark bodies in the United States and Australia?

“information processing” theories to explain everything from prejudice to friendship. Economists created “rational choice” models to explain why people do what they do. The social sciences were uniting under the idea that people are rational agents who set goals and pursue them intelligently by using the information and resources at their disposal.

Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather

They tend to have more confidence than conservatives do in the power of human reason to find rational solutions to problems. Following in the footsteps of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, they are motivated to keep rewriting the rules of society in order to keep improving it.