First, sorry for the long post.
It seems to me that Killivek is read up on most of the current literature regarding the history of psychology and the concept of "disorder." I think y"all are being way too harsh because you assume he is taking all of his stuff from pop psychology or whatever.
Killivek is basically summarizing the critiques of culture, psychology, discipline, and "the normal" that have been going on since at least the 1970s. If you haven"t read about Bourdieu"s theory of practice (habitus), Foucault"s concepts about discipline and punish and the asylum, or Fanon"s thoughts on racial/social neuroses, I can see why you would be confused.
Everything Killivek has said thus far is backed up by half a century of social science. He is not just telling you an opinion he randomly thought up one day. That said, I think he is a bit too harsh in calling people robots. I suspect either he hasn"t read Bakhtin, or did and disagreed.
Basically, Bakhtin argued that our life is a novel and we all author ourselves. The world we are born into has a structure to it, and we learn to organize and understand our lives according to the structures that are given to us. However, this does not mean people are mindless drones, because they often play around with the structures and create new genres.
BUT, if you think reading a self help book is teaching you something REAL about the world and human nature, then Killivek"s criticism is meant for you, and deserved.
That article about the mice was good and bad. It"s good because it suggests the multi-generational effects of violence, and bad because it relies on an antiquated model of evolution and biology, the whole concept of winners and losers. Let me put it this way, most of the babies of every mammal species on earth are being taken care of by a father (if one is present) that is biologically not their own. This fact alone flips who the winner is, and the loser. Females, however, appear to always win. But what is winning, anyway? In evolution, you win if you pass on your genes. But the paradox of evolution is that none of the organisms going through it are even aware they are participating in an evolutionary process. How can you be a winner or a loser if you don"t even know that a game exists, and that you are playing?
To see the world, and everything about it, in terms of winning and losing, has more to do about your cultural beliefs about how the world works than it does about how the world actually might work. Humans have taken their knowledge of evolution, turned it into a game, and now a bunch of different people want to write rule books to teach others how to construct themselves as winners and not losers.
This whole "nice guys finish last" seems to be advice originally meant for cut throat capitalists, and then oddly conflated into the realm of personal relationships and building lasting commitments. Speaking of conflation, the author of that article conflates dependency with "being bad." His relationship advice is to not give the partner what he or she is looking for right away in order to keep them coming back for more (this we call stringing him or her along), and for what? In order to delay discovering the reality that maybe the two of you shouldn"t be together? Relationships are never universal, they are always contingent, and any universalizing attempt to make a "how to" guide will fall flat on its face. There are several overarching rules that everyone should follow though: don"t abuse your partner, don"t abuse yourself, don"t let either of you be abused. Maybe nice people are more likely to be victimized because they are so open and honest... is the solution to construct a world of liars and thieves?
That is what Killivek means when he mentions the pathology of normalcy, that you are constructing a self (authoring yourself as it were) in a way which is not authentic, due to the fact that you turn yourself into a commodity in constant need of repair (jumping from broken relationship to broken relationship), hoping to reel in a buyer. In this hope to be purchased, you must constantly monitor everything about yourself in order to be a more competitive commodity in the marketplace of relationships. Self reflection is a great thing, and everyone should do it, but when you are obsessing about yourself, every day all day, this is a disorder, a neurosis. He is saying that the new normal of relationships is a neurotic self obsession with finding the perfect relationship.
I agree with the words I"ve put in his mouth to some extent. I"ve seen quite a few people actually create some really nice relationships working with the rubric above. They are all young however, and I do wonder how long they"ll last, but I don"t have the right to judge.
