The Psychology of Terror, American Exceptionalism, and the Greek God Pan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study strives to contribute to a better understanding of contemporary anxieties in American culture by applying meanings derived from mythology to panic inducing cultural phenomena. It asks if the Greek god Pan and his retinue ofnymphs metaphorically exemplify an archetypal core within an American cultural anxiety complex. The principal technical device used is Jung’s method of amplification, rendering cultural material at a more psychologically substantial level.This hermeneutic research views primary sources for and commentaries on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the American reactions that followed. A faulty belief in American exceptionalism is examined for its contribution to thereactions by the American government and its citizens. Some consequences of American exceptionalism, as seen in reactions to 9/11, are clarified through a correlation with a metaphoric reading of Pan, the Greek nature god. Pan’s compulsion into life is considered to be a symbolic expression of an archetype that was once alive in the bold spirit of America, but has rusted into paralysis due to a lack of initiative towards contemporary problems. It was as if the government of the Unites States, starting at the top, had decided that the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, meant that law, custom and decency had all been suspended sine die. (Hodgson, 2009, p. 127) History …is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken. (Joyce, 1961, p. 34)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".