From The Mind's Eye: Implications for mental health workers.

The implications of "the vertabrate eye analogy" for mental health workers include, that what is being communicated to the client must always be monitored and kept close to awareness. The older clients are, the more preconceived ideas about the world they tend to start their day with. The more secure these beliefs are (widely or strongly associated in neuronal memory), the broader is their influence throughout the person's perception, memory, thinking, feeling and potential behavior. The more entrenched a tendency for negative perception of life events is, the longer it will take to change. Be patient, but not patronizing. Counselors should always monitor client rapport, too. Once a good working rapport is established, it is not sufficient to assume that it will continue without change, particularly as that final session approaches.

During all relationships, psychotherapeutic or otherwise, there is a phenomenon called flashover which can occur at any point. Flashover is characterized by a sudden and widespread change of feeling or opinion about something or someone. It can be either a positive or negative flash. In therapy, positive flashover can signal a sweeping change, usually brought about by a culmination effect of insight or experience. However, negative flashover - if it occurs in the therapeutic alliance - can cause the client to stop cooperating, or even come to hate you. An example of flashover between intimates is when one is apologizing, but then says something else, or says it in such a way that the listener immediately doubts the sincerity and becomes angry with the other.

 

From The Franco-American War: The Menace of Marketing.

What's going on here may be that the culture is changing in unforeseen ways. Perhaps what helped people get ahead economically in the past is now working for a smaller and smaller percentage of our population today. If that is so, then I would assume other values are changing, too. ("New values" are continually expected from our younger people and immigrants). If the American Dream is in fact unobtainable (or is at least estimated to be unobtainable), then the conventional paths to that oasis quickly start to become suspect.

Young adults may start thinking: "Why should I get a college degree? The costs are phenomenal, the number of fellow graduates is stifling, the availability of (non-minimum wage) jobs is getting tighter and tighter, and the financial rewards for the average honest guy are laughable (in comparison to the amount of wealth that's out there)." And some might just conclude: "Only a chump would play this game..."

Some believe a menacing figure amidst all of this is the emergence of a heartless form of capitalism. Devoid of soul and fueled by advertising, marketing and commercialization, it operates with the express purpose of making certain groups of people rich -- by cultivating and feeding off of a faceless reservoir of money (represented by the masses, euphemistically called "consumers").

It may be difficult to change the basic system, since everything is so ingrained in our culture -- in "the literature of freedom and dignity", to use B.F. Skinner's words (Skinner , 1971).