Bibliographic record
Abstract
We live in violent times; most theorists agree that the violent act is an evil act, albeit sometimes a necessary evil. My work involves the connection between the concepts of existential freedom conceived by Jean Paul Sartre and the violence that haunts American society. The increasing prevalence of such evil acts forces us to consider the question of liberty in societies where individuals believe themselves to be fully free. I argue that the feeling of powerlessness inherent in postmodern society may well be so threatening that only the most extreme action can overcome the feeling of objectification. When the identity of self as subject depends on the ability to purchase ‘things’, what happens to the freedom so integral to man’s existence? What is created by the system is a new form of slavery—slaves of the market. I am studying narrative representations of violence, particularly those that feature psychopaths as central characters (e.g. American Psycho). Such texts highlight the connection between violence and consumerism. It is interesting to note that such novels frequently revolve around the New York Stock market. Noted expert, Dr. Robert Hare half-jokingly claims that, had he not been able to study psychopathy in the penal system, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice (Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us). Some sociologists believe that psychopathic behaviour is the only sane response to a sick society. My work explores this idea through the light of literature, philosophy and psychiatry. Consumerism is the essence of societal pathology, a system which ‘activates and intensifies in this society a primary aggressiveness to a degree, I think, hitherto unknown in history’ (Marcuse, Liberation from the Affluent Society).
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".