One advance

This 1950 episode of Hollywood Byline is in my bedtime OTR playlist. It happened to be playing when I woke up after a much-needed heavy sleep.

The guest in this episode was Celeste Holm, and the discussion at the moment of waking was postwar economics in Hollywood.

In the sleep/wake transition state, I thought it was a discussion among the Ankler folks, who often handle the subject of post”virus” economics in Hollywood. The economic situation is identical, and even the group of voices is identical. During the war”virus”, people were restricted in daily activities but had lots of loose money, so a lot of crappy movies got made. In postwar”virus” adjustment, studios were learning fast that they had to raise their quality back to prewar”virus” standards.

Another part of the discussion was markedly different. Holm asked the columnists how they judged the basic personality types of actors. Their answers were full of standard Freudian crap, which was the ONLY way to discuss personality in 1950. Exhibitionism, infantilism, inferiority complex, superiority complex, compensation.

This is ONE area where modernity has advanced. Modern pop psych has abandoned Freud and started observing PEOPLE instead of theories.

Actors act because they’re designed to act. They don’t act because they’re “compensating for infantilism”.

Introverts avoid people because people make us tired. We don’t avoid people because we’re “compensating for an inferiority complex”.

Bullies attack people because they enjoy attacking people. Bullies don’t attack people to “compensate for insecurity”.

The crucial variable is life vs non-life. Freud assumes people are non-living identical rocks, behaving differently because they’re in a different part of the rockpile. The modern view starts with an assumption that people are social lifeforms with GENES that differ at birth, assigning us different roles in the hive. The extremely modern view of Wokedom has dropped back to the Freud/Locke/Robespierre assumption of identical passive particles moved and shaped by gravity and wind.