philobusters

There is no resolution

2009-06-08T02:21:00.000-07:00

I have a friend that believes all men are self-centered mama’s boys. He uses this reasoning when rationalizing (explaining?) his own behavior in his romantic relationships. I argue that while he may fit this description, there are men who do not. I suggest that he could choose to be different, as other men choose. My friend thinks that I am only fooling myself. He claims that I doggedly pursue storybook romances that exist only in novels written by spinsters and Nicholas Sparks.

We, both he and I, are convinced the other lives in his or her personal bubble world. And each of us continues to try and drag the other into what we recognize as the real world.

He tells me that I am the man in the cave of Socrates, watching shadows on the wall and mistaking these shadows for real people. I tell him that he is incorrect and full of shadowy excuses for the harm that he causes real people. I suggest that perhaps it is I who live in the real world while he lives in a corrupt and chaotic nightmare of his own making. He laughs and says that there is nothing nightmarish about his life—at least not for him.

It’s an odd friendship, but one that I value. Whichever of us is right about men and women and romance and the real world, whatever that is, will never be known (or rather, acknowledged).

But at least the self-centered mama’s boy and I can co-exist despite our separate world-views. Plus, a nice benefit to our friendship is that neither of us will ever be too vulnerable or near-sighted when it comes to romance. Neither of us can get too comfortable with our world-view as the other is so adamantly out to destroy it. As they say in football, The best defense is a good offense.
If I sense a potential romantic partner refuses to assimilate to my bubble-world of romance, love, and all that schmaltzy stuff, I can deport him. The self-centered mama’s boy deports poor women from his egomaniacal bubble world all the time. “She must assimilate or I will devastate”, he explains. He works in public diplomacy.

Conversations with the mama’s boy always get me thinking. To substantiate his ideas about men and romance, the mama’s boy egocentric uses examples from his life. His experience as related by him, do indeed lead to a poor and painful view of the male half of the human species. Yet I also use my life experiences to validate my belief that he is not completely accurate. I use my life experiences and his examples to argue that he is simply trying to lessen his own guilt by sharing it with the rest of his male colleagues. “Take responsibility”, I tell him. “Don’t blame your gender”.

“You take responsibility,” he grins, “stop trying to change my gender. Take what you want and leave us alone. That’s all we want from you.”

He’d be funny if he hadn’t broken so many girls’ hearts. Oh, hell, they weren’t my hearts. He is funny. But I’ll jettison any boy who openly agrees with him from my Socratic cave of romance.

For both he and I, the argument is essentially nature versus nurture. I think people, men or women, are nurtured, not biologically programmed, when it comes to relationships (and really, in life, what else is there? Relationships are the lines with which we draw ourselves. Without them, we wouldn’t exist. Or rather, it wouldn’t matter if we existed. But anyways.)

I pontificate at him:
It is not in the inherent nature of any man or woman to be a self-centered mama’s boy. A person becomes a self-centered mama’s boy through observation and personal experience. Because he experienced a particular type of relationship so frequently, he began to believe that there were no other real options when it came to relationships. If you live in the forest, you learn to build your house with wood from the trees. If you live in a stone quarry, you build your house from stones. People can move from the forest to the stone quarry, but most people don’t. As many migrants as there are in the world, there are always more natives—unless there was an earthquake or a war or something.

I preach that people are built and not born. A smart person should therefore be willing to forgive individuals (including him or herself) for most weaknesses. But at the same time, a smart person should be less inclined to trust that a person is willing to overcome these perceived weaknesses. If people are produced by their past experiences, they are not entirely to blame or to be admired for their present behaviors. At the same time, they are probably not going to change, at least not anytime soon. Human error is an unavoidable social spin-off, one that can be treated but never completely cured.

My self-centered friend claims that my officious argument shows that I am both extremely gullible and very suspicious. He wonders that I have any friends at all, much less romantic relationships.

I tell him that he is not funny. I then return to my oft-repeated argument that society constructs the individual as well as what the individual expects from society. Then the individuals, already built by their society, go on re-building the same society that made them. And we wonder why we repeat our mistakes. We can’t help it; our community coerces us. It’s not our fault; it’s the fault of everybody around us, everybody else. And yet everybody else is, at least a little, our fault.

It’s the chicken and egg debate. It’s an argument that my friend and I have more for our own amusement than anything else. He’s not going to change his behavior and I’m not going to change my expectations. But it is a fun way to occupy my time when I should be studying or doing whatever it is people do to move ahead in this human race.

Legal can be a funny word

2009-03-05T01:19:00.000-08:00

There will always be competing systems made up of competing institutions. The trick is to provide the most popular, most accessible and most respected “default” system, which most local people prefer AS WELL AS can easily enter and easily use (and yes, inevitably abuse once in a while).

In certain places and at certain times, the default system is not the legal system.

The legal system in certain places is in fact so complicated, obtuse, and elitist, that not only the foreign but the local inmates—sorry, inhabitants, forgo system access and simply engage in and sustain non-legal systems. In places like these, inhabitants and interlocutors tend to pay more bribes than taxes.

Also, in certain times, the legal system withers away. For example, during revolutions or wars, individual survival usually supplants the more group-oriented idea of a system. When a situation is lawless, there’s no point in pretending to adhere to a legal system.

“Legal”, for most of us, reflects a local “real time” value. That’s part of why the foreigner is usually required to submit to the immediate local legal (or sometimes non-legal) system, rather than the other way round.

One could almost think of “Legal” like one thinks of a well-known brand name, such as Nike or Adidas.

A Nike t-shirt in a US sporting goods store can cost over 30 dollars while the same product can be purchased for less than a dollar in a bazaar in Southeast Asia.

“Legal” as determined by the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, is far more expensive than “legal” as determined by an underpaid policeman patrolling the highways of Northern Albania.

This doesn’t mean that “Legal” as a brand does not has concurrent local, regional, and international significance.

“Legal” reflects not necessarily the majority but rather those with the majority of power, at least for the moment. This makes the concept of the brand “legal” globally recognized and used, if not uniformly constructed or implemented.

Like I said. Legal is a funny word.

I always obey the law, but even I, at times, have trouble taking the word “legal” seriously.

At certain times. In certain places.

Carnivals and Carpenters

2009-02-23T02:09:00.000-08:00

I once had a teacher whose class reminded me of a traditional American carnival game.

Perhaps you have played the carnival game of which I write.

To play, you stand in front of a tall table in which there are several holes.

You grasp a huge fake hammer the size of a toddler’s head.

You are then instructed that, to earn points, you must hit any and all objects that pop out of the holes.

You sit there and wait for something to poke its head out of a hole and then you SLAM whatever it was back down into the darkness beneath the table. Each SLAM earns you points.

You are then rewarded with a cheap, Styrofoam stuffed toy made in China or Taiwan.

The joy comes not so much from the toy, which frequently disintegrates within weeks.

The joy comes from the game.

It’s very satisfying to BANG the be-jeezus (as my grandmother would say) out of something. The game’s is, in fact, ingenious, teaching the players about ambition, class hierarchy, breaking rules, and why not to challenge authority. Or perhaps the game is teaching us how to enforce authority. I don’t know. It’s fun.

My teacher treated his classroom like the table at the carnival.

His hammer was his overblown intellect and his command of random historical facts. Each time a student’s hand shot up, you could feel the teacher raising his own mental arm as he prepared to land a punishing blow on the head of the far less educated minor attempting to make his or her own puny point.

As a student, I was scared.

I don’t remember much about the subject that this teacher taught. I spent most of my time in class carefully crouched beneath the table, watching my braver classmates recover their balance after each knock on the head.

While I don’t remember what I was taught by this teacher, I admit that I learned a lot in his class. I learned that knowledge is power.

I learned that knowledge is power, but it can be a kind of one-way power, like a blow from a hammer. That is to say that the more I learn, the more irrelevant I can feel. I can read incessantly, absorbing the ideas and the facts presented in the literature.

However, the impact of the absorption is largely one way. I am like a nail, driven deeper and deeper into the woodwork of the world. But, like a nail, I am just holding together a framework already saturated by nails exactly like myself.

These other nails, my fellows, have absorbed the same information. Many of my fellow nails have forgotten half of what they were taught, probably in no small part as a result of the way in which the information was delivered. Now, we just rust in our respective holes where we can recall the spirit if not the substance of our education.

It’s all very depressing.

I want to have an impact. I want to swing the hammer. Rather than just be driven by the information, I want to take the facts and the ideas and make the information. I want to grasp the hammer and build my own structure.

I’ve discovered that I can do this on a small, insignificant basis in conversations, in writing, in discussions. However, the big impact eludes me. I haven’t the connections or the je ne sais pas required to make a big impact, the big SLAM.

Maybe that is a good thing. Revolutions are not always helpful, and the existing framework exists to support something.

However, I can’t help wondering what happens when we reach maximum capacity, when there are too many of us popping out of the holes at the same time, or when there are too many nails in the wood for the existing structure to stand.

What happens then? Is that when the structure collapses? Is that when everything that was built before disintegrates like a cheap carnival toy? If that is the case, how do we redistribute the hammers? Do they go to the first of us former nails to get there, the quickest, or the luckiest, or the wealthiest, or what?

I have friends who tell me to stop worrying. We have a professional carpenter, they say, who is watching out for that sort of thing. He’s the teacher, the guy wielding the huge inflated hammer.

But I’m inclined to think my friends may be a little overly-optimistic. I often think that we are living in a carnival more than a workshop.

But I could be wrong.

If so, I guess I should just sit back and wait for the hammer.

Surviving a recession at the community level

2009-01-27T02:37:00.000-08:00

The recession seems to result in two types of company behavior:

First, a company cuts costs by cutting employment. Recessions often see a ritual bloodletting of human resources. Companies automatically attempt to do more with fewer employees. Those employees that are not fired are frequently given larger workloads, reduced salaries, and longer hours.

Second, a company cuts hours per person, rather than the total number of employees. I’m biased, but I like this option best. It increases employee loyalty, fosters a sense of camaraderie among colleagues, and lets employees learn to do more with less both personally and professionally.

The additional personal time and lower paycheck implicit in the second option also allows employees to explore additional interests. Employees with the time and motivation to pursue individual interests can contribute to a company’s overall creativity. This contribution is also something than an employee is usually happy to do, considering how the company has opted to save rather than sacrifice.

A recession is a rough period in which to sustain business, but it is a period that can inspire corporate creativity. Businesses that are smart and attract and retain smart employees can sometimes thrive and evolve within a recession. Microsoft is famous for this, as is Macintosh and, in the 1990s, Toyota, a company that invented an entirely new and widely copied business model during difficult times.

The first option reminds me a bit of certain bacteria. These bacteria produce hardened shells or endospores to cover their bodies when an environment is not conducive to growth or reproduction. The shells shelter the bacteria during hard times, protecting the organisms from the difficult conditions. Once the harsh conditions of the environment subside, the endospore ruptures and the bacteria begin to grow again.

While bacteria have existed since the universe began to support life, they have not evolved much in the last few centuries. One has to wonder if, in our current hard times, we can’t learn a bit from nature rather than attempt to save ourselves from another man-made mess.

Rediscovering my philosophy and sense of humour...

2009-01-09T02:17:00.000-08:00

These are from the beautiful Georgette...Thanks for the smile!

WOMEN'S REVENGE
"Cash, check or charge?" I asked, after folding items the woman wished to purchase.
As she fumbled for her wallet, I noticed a remote control for a television set in her purse.
"So, do you always carry your TV remote?" I asked.
"No," she replied, "but my husband refused to come shopping with me,
and I figured this was the most evil thing I could do to him legally."

UNDERSTANDING WOMEN
(A MAN'S PERSPECTIVE)
I know I'm not going to understand women.
I'll never understand how you can take boiling hot wax,
pour it onto your upper thigh, rip the hair out by the root,
and still be afraid of a spider.

CIGARETTES AND TAMPONS
A man walks into a pharmacy and wanders up & down the aisles.
The sales girl notices him and asks him if she can help him.
He answers that he is looking for a box of tampons for his wife.
She directs him down the correct aisle.
A few minutes later, he deposits a huge bag of cotton balls and a ball of string on the counter.
She says, confused, " Sir, I thought you were looking for some tampons for your wife?
He answers, " You see, it's like this, yesterday, I sent my wife to the store
to get me a carton of cigarettes, and she came back with a tin of tobacco
and some rolling papers; cause it's sooo-ooo--oo-ooo much cheaper.
So, I figure if I have to roll my own .......... so does she.
(I figure this guy is the one on the milk carton!)

WOMAN'S PERFECT BREAKFAST
She's sitting at the table with her gourmet coffee.
Her son is on the cover of the Wheaties box.
Her daughter is on the cover of Business Week.
Her boyfriend is on the cover of Playgirl.
And her husband is on the back of the milk carton.

Keep reading-they get better!!!

WIFE VS. HUSBAND
A couple drove down a country road for several miles, not saying a word.
An earlier discussion had led to an argument and
neither of them wanted to concede their position.
As they passed a barnyard of mules, goats, and pigs,
the husband asked sarcastically, "Relatives of yours?"
"Yep," the wife replied, "in-laws."

WORDS
A husband read an article to his wife about how many words women use a day.
30,000 to a man's 15,000.
The wife replied, "The reason has to be because we have to repeat everything to men...
The husband then turned to his wife and asked, "What?"

CREATION
A man said to his wife one day, "I don't know how you can be
so stupid and so beautiful all at the same time.
"The wife responded, "Allow me to explain.
God made me beautiful so you would be attracted to me;
God made me stupid so I would be attracted to you!

WHO DOES WHAT
A man and his wife were having an argument about who
should brew the coffee each morning.
The wife said, "You should do it because you get up first,
and then we don't have to wait as long to get our coffee.
The husband said, "You are in charge of cooking around here and
you should do it, because that is your job, and I can just wait for my coffee."
Wife replies, "No, you should do it, and besides, it is in the Bible that the man should do the coffee."
Husband replies, "I can't believe that, show me."
So she fetched the Bible, and opened the New Testament and showed him at the top of several pages, that it indeed says . "HEBREWS"

The Silent Treatment
A man and his wife were having some problems at home
and were giving each other the silent treatment.
Suddenly, the man realized that the next day, he would need his wife to wake him
at 5:0 0 AM for an early morning business flight.
Not wanting to be the first to break the silence (and LOSE), he wrote on a piece of paper,
"Please wake me at 5:00 AM." He left it where he knew she would find it.
The next morning, the man woke up, only to discover it was 9:00 AM and he had missed his flight Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn't wakened him,
when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed.
The paper said, "It is 5:00 AM. Wake up."
Men are not equipped for these kinds of contests.

Man may have been created before woman, but there is always a rough draft before the masterpiece

Evaluating my version of equality

2008-07-21T03:02:00.000-07:00

When people in my experience argue for equality, they generally make their argument too broad. They don’t necessarily confuse equality with sameness. They instead treat equality the way that banks treat equity.

Equity is the value of a company. After a company calculates the consistent cost of company debts, resources, the cost of the employees, the mortgage, the telecom bill, etc., and determines its past and future profit, over time, the company is evaluated for an overall company value. This value becomes the company's equity, what the company is worth. Banks and external financial institutions “value” the equity of a company; companies, outside of creating this “value”, have limited say in what outside powers determine is the company’s “equity”.

Equality is sometimes given a similar treatment. After a person has understood the idea that they have more/less money than others, more/less food or water, more/less mental or social qualities, more/less human characteristics of various kinds, are they “equal” to everyone else in their society? Does society rate the individual’s “equity” as “the same” as all other individuals?

This question is frustrating and impossible to answer. It’s also not the point of equality in my opinion.

Equality, real equality, is when one individual considers, as best she can, how her behavior is going to impact another individual, given her knowledge of the other individual’s circumstances. This consideration, putting myself in the position of another person—not a hypothetical stereotype of a person, but a real individual that I know—is how I can best treat another individual as my equal.

Caveat: I know that I will never really know the world as another individual knows the world. I can’t. I will never be able to be any person other than myself; just as every other individual is, inevitably, limited to his or her personal experience. But before I act in such a way as to impact another person that I know, I can think about life as he or she might see it.

I can draw on my personal experience, my knowledge, what this and other individuals have told me about themselves and others, what I’ve read, watched on TV or seen in the news. I can take all this information and try, really try to consider how my behavior will affect this person.

Here’s where a little business savvy is helpful—time management. I can’t agonize for hours and days about how this person will be affected. I am limited, remember, and no amount of agonizing will detract from my limitations. I am only me. But I can do my best to make sure that I am thinking about how my behavior will impact this other individual.

Another caveat: Often we do consider others, but only in respect to how they impact us. What is the position of this person in my universe rather than how do they position me in their universe? This is natural; my life is about me, it is my life and my life is, essentially, the only real “property” that I will ever own in totality. My life is pure equity—my equity.

But if I believe in equality, and I do, then I must respect the equity of others. I must give the life of each other individual that I impact due consideration before I impact that individual. I may, after all, through my behavior impact the value that another individual places upon his or her life, his or her true equity. I must, as a person who values equality, recognize this possible impact and respect it.

In my experience, the best method for treating another individual with equality is to not consider how that individual assesses his or her own life (his or her equity). It is instead for me to assess the external factors, the debts and bills and outside payments owed by or owed to the individual. After assessing the value of these externalities, I can determine how I am able to best behave for the benefit of both. I’ve done my best assessment, the only real assessment that I can manage, of the external factors impacting us both. I’ve considered, as I constantly must, my own equity. I’ve been as “equal” as I can be.

So equality is treating a person the way that you would want to be treated if you were that person, given what you know about the person, the world in general, and yourself.

Do you know this story?

2008-06-26T23:27:00.001-07:00

A fortune-teller waits on a hillside overlooking a city. A traveler pauses to ask her “What kinds of people live in the city below?”
The fortune-teller replies, “What kind of people lived in the last city that you visited?”
“Bad people,” the traveler says darkly. “Horrible people.”
“You will find this city’s people to be the same.” The fortune-teller nods. The traveler sighs and moves on.
A second traveler approaches the fortune-teller moments later. “What kinds of people live in the city below?”
“What kind of people lived in the last city in which you visited?”
The second traveler smiles, “Good people. Kind people.”
The fortune-teller nods, “You will find this city’s people to be the same.”

It’s a cliché that we see what we want to see and that we perceive what personal experience has trained us to perceive. Science reinforces the cliché. Doctors investigating Alzheimer’s disease note that when a person is young, the mind collects a lot of new information quickly. This rapid recall capacity allows a child to learn to speak quickly and to pick up physical and mental skills at a faster rate than many adults.

However, as we grow, our brain develops patterns of learning, and we tend to learn new information in ways that are acceptable to our established patterns. This is why a person who grew up speaking English learns to store knowledge first in English rather than Arabic, or why a person trained in medicine will be more likely to remember a chemical reaction rather than a new poem or legal regulation. It’s not that people are less intelligent as adults than as children—it’s that we have more to remember and less space in which to remember it, plus we have more established experiences that reinforce specific facts better than others. (A powerful aid to memory is routine.) It’s easier to remember facts that “fit” into our already established mental storage space than to reconstruct that space from the ground up.

Bill Thompson suggests that these rules of perception and preconception are also found online. Online Search is essentially a means of finding out what we already know, or think we know or think we should know. He notes that this encourages a type of mental assimilation and discourages mental challenges—we slot the facts that we “learn” online into our existing beliefs and ideas. Rather than alter how we think, we simply add to what we think, reinforcing rather than reinterpreting.

Thompson is smart to see that our connections, or how we search for a topic, tend to carry as much weight as the content that we seek out. Like any language, the online world requires us to frame an inquiry and then build upon the answer that is at least implied in the original question. “Is there…?” “Yes/no, there is…”

More than language limits us when we begin any search in the off or online world. We are limited by the information that we can recognize or choose to access and accept. We intuitively seek out information that is compatible with what we already know, information that “makes sense”. We do this because the words and means of expression that we understand best are embedded in our method of research, in our routine.

It’s the common curse of any academic that s/he can only prove or disprove his or her idea. It is hoped that in doing so, new ideas may present themselves, encouraging a new direction of yes/no research. Even science is to a large extent a social enterprise, with certain questions or means of research remaining taboo until some entrepreneurial spirit decides to disregard social pressure and dig up a body to perform an autopsy or write a mathematical treatise that reorganizes the position of the celestial bodies.

What any individual can be surprised to discover is that, on occasion, perception, thought, and search can be completely remodeled. To do so is easier than expected—a new experience, a brand new context, or being asked rather than asking can change everything, or at least not “fit into” any existing preconceptions. It’s a task easily implemented by children out of necessity, but a task that is often avoided by adults out of fear, frustration, or mere inconvenience.

In one of my favorite children’s stories, Alice through the Looking Glass, I made a role model out of the narcissistic and Nietzschean White Queen after reading the following scene:

Alice, standing on the cusp of adulthood, sighs, "I can't believe that!"

"Can't you?" the queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

While I’m not an advocate of taking every idea presented as credible, there’s something to be said for exploring the potential of a new thought pattern, even if unconventional can be a bit inconvenient.

Communal and self delusions..

2008-06-10T21:44:00.000-07:00

According to some historians, after militarily subduing a society, the Inca would remove a number of the children from within a village to their own more established territories. The children were then raised as Inca by Inca before they were returned to their home territories as adults and Inca. This form of mass cultural genocide obliterated many of the cultures that existed prior to Inca rule. It also expanded the solidarity experienced by members of the Inca Empire.

The Inca used cultural hegemony as a means of unification. In controlling the past of the Empire’s individual citizens, old and new, the Inca controlled the present. They limited the memories of their newly conquered peoples to a history that they shared and interpreted.

Local histories and languages, perceived as potential barriers to the creation of the extended Inca community, were eliminated. Unity was enforced through uniformity of experience. Group memory was perpetuated through a historical hegemony and the limitation and manipulation of available media.

This is the greatest accomplishment of any single society—making its citizens complicit in its conception of community and culture. Individuals may disagree or resist the community’s leaders or customs, but even this opposition is defined in reference to the community. Each person needs a people in order to demonstrate what makes him or her unique as well as common. In pre-selecting the means of self-expression and communal comprehension, the Inca artificially constrained individual choice. They eliminated all opposition by not even mentioning it.

It’s a scary story, the rise of the Inca, especially interpreted (as all things must be) in light of our modern cultural hegemonies. Huge nations like the United States, and large corporations like Wal-Mart’s or Nike, package and sell their cultures to the globe. Their cultural ideas, morals, and beliefs are subtle suggestions in their movies, products, services, books, magazines and other media. One psychologist compared the options presented in our modern capitalist system to that of a parent permitting a child the choice of a red or blue T-shirt. The decision at first appears to be the child’s, but the control of the choice truly belongs to the parent (only a T-shirt, only in red or blue—no other color or clothing is made available and a decision “must” be made.)

This is both the scourge and the brilliance of capitalism or any hegemony really; create the illusion of choice for the individual consumer or citizen but control the context of the decision. Define the terms of all available social contracts.

There is not necessarily initial criminal intent in capitalism. No society or system can offer alternatives without adapting alternative choices that “make sense” within its own cultural context. One reason capitalism works so well is its adaptability. Capitalism is something that has to sell itself to people in order to perpetuate; people adopt capitalism and capitalism survives (to an extent) because capitalism makes itself understandable—capitalism “sells” itself.

The Inca faltered and failed as a hegemon in part due to indifference, the inbuilt Incan indifference to the at one time separate and distinct societies of its conquered peoples. Incan indifference to alternatives led a complete lack of concern or even recognition for different cultures, communities, or systems.

This is part of what permitted the Spanish conquistadors to blindside the Incan. The Inca were so completely unaware and unconcerned by external concepts of community or Empire that they never expected or even recognised the possible existence of alternative ways of being.

In the face of such hegemonic naïveté, the Spanish may well have been considered gods by the Incan social leaders; to a society so self-involved and unaware, the sudden appearance of a completely new community and social system can probably best be explained internally as some sort of divine intervention. If all that exists up to that point was internally manufactured or interpreted, anything external must be imposed by an outside force that is miraculously independent of the hitherto cultural hegemon.

The Inca were too successful in their hegemony; their self-absorption made them vulnerable. Hegemonies and empires inevitably collapse not always because they are resistant to change but often because they simply don’t see change coming. Such societies are guilty of the same complacency experienced by over-confident and thriving individuals; it is the blind complacency found in the self-delusion of the prima donna, innocently arrogant and perfect for her moment in the spotlight.

Nudge

2008-06-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

I’m reading Nudge, a book about how to improve individual choice through public policies that highlight beneficial choices. The idea is to improve society through “strongly suggesting” certain options in the daily choices made by individual citizens, especially in decisions concerning physical and financial health.

Individuals’ decisions about health and wealth are not limited to an impact on the individual. The health of one person influences the health of those around the person; studies suggest that even debt and obesity are viral and can spread throughout an infected society.

A person is influenced by choices made by friends, family, and one’s community. This is why we speak in terms of a “national obesity epidemic” in the United States. It’s also why the sub prime mortgage, while perhaps exacerbated by a few financially fallible individuals, is bringing down our global economy and causing concern throughout different societies at both international and domestic levels.

What to do? Nudge “strongly suggests” some future changes in our public presentation of individual options. The authors emphasise that no options are eliminated—only highlighted. They suggest highlighting decidedly healthier alternatives in individual decisions is the equivalent to putting the oranges at eye level and the chocolate on the top shelf. This makes the oranges an obvious choice. Choosing the chocolate requires conscious thought.

Since studies show that most people choose to go with the default option, the option “at eye level”, Nudge explains, why not make the default (the oranges) the obvious choice? This doesn’t prohibit or even obscure the chocolate. The chocolate is still there and still affordable, financially speaking. The choice of chocolate is just less noticeable in comparison with the oranges. The person has to think about the chocolate, while the oranges are…just there.

The authors use the US pension and investment plans as examples. I like how the book explains that in studying and understanding how a group of people construct their decisions can help the same group of people learn to re-construct their environment to improve decision-making with benefits for both the individual and society.

Nurture and Nature

2008-05-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

There is an argument over whether a person is born or made. Is it in our nature to be the individuals that we are, or were we nurtured and formed by our environment? Do we blame parents, or science, or do we blame society? Then there is the question of how much responsibility for who we are is in fact our responsibility, and how best to take control of that responsibility and choose the persons that we will be.

I want to rephrase this rather complicated argument into one of relationships.

Relationships are of paramount importance. Relationships give us the opportunity to act out who we are. How we act in a relationship depends upon a lot of factors. It depends upon the position of the individuals involved in the relationship—employee, employer, child, parent, partner, friend, and so on.

Relationships are also dependent upon timing, and cultural context, and even geography. Online, a relationship is different from a relationship in person, or over the phone. Relationships depend on culture and cultural expectations. Expectations between partners in a relationship in Mokpo, South Korea, are different than for partners in South Miami, Florida. Relationships shift according to time. A parent child relationship is an especially time-dependent relationship experienced by many people. Parents grow older and children more mature, and the relationships alter as knowledge and memory are gained and lost.

Nature tends to be pretty fixed prior to our explanations of it. Human genetics vary little. Science suggests that we are 90 percent identical in DNA to other primates; how different can we really be from other human beings? According to math or even one or two religious texts, every person shares a relative with every other person on the planet within 7 generations. So we’re not that different—at the very least we can all procreate with each other. If we’re that physically compatible, our real differences must be learned. And we learn these differences through relationships.

Imagine each individual is born with a deck of cards. The same 52 cards make up each deck. While the font or the packaging may vary, the basic capacity of each deck is identical. But each individual is taught to play their cards differently. Not only are some of us playing bridge while others learn poker or Go Fish or Flower Games (a Korean card game), each of us are playing in a different environment.

Some of us are playing at a table where it’s normal to play for high stakes and cash. Others are playing at a table where the point of the game is to have fun. Still others are at a table in front of a mirror, where cheating is so easy that it’s expected. Still others play in pairs or teams or have regularly scheduled bathroom or coffee breaks that they take together or separately. Others mix alcohol, food, music, or other accessories with the card game. Some of us use the cards as an excuse (infrequent or frequent) to incorporate these extras into our life, rather like college kids play cards just to get drunk or see other people drunk.

These card games are a good metaphor for our relationships. They symbolize where we learn how to relate to people. We learn how to act out our persons through our relationships or “games” with the other card players.

Those of us fortunate enough to travel to different tables and learn different games are given the opportunity to learn new ways to interact with others. One of the benefits of multiple relationships is the choice that comes with knowledge. We can begin to prefer certain relationships. Along with these preferred relationships, we choose certain ways of relating to people while dismissing other ways of relating to people. To return to the card game metaphor, rather than risk a paycheck in a risky poker game, we can opt to play a quiet game of Pinochle or find a table to ourselves to play some Solitaire.

We can then choose which relationships to have—which games to play—to a certain extent.

Based on our past experiences with others, we develop certain ideas about relationships. We begin to make assumptions about the nature of human beings.

All persons are victim to our assumptions, including ourselves. We begin to trust or fear certain relationships and thus certain people. We begin to act out these learned emotions in the relationships that resemble past experiences. Our ways of relating to people and individuals become more and more automatic and less of a learning experience. This saves us a lot of time—it is impossible to know all people and many, indeed the vast majority, of our relationships are short-term. The patterns we establish, our regular “hands” in the metaphorical card game, facilitate our daily interactions, allowing us to operate on social customs and trust those around us to understand our intentions without us needing to constantly explain or apologise.

Unfortunately, this can also lead to “institutional lock-in”. We start to expect others and ourselves to consistently follow established patterns of relating to others. Our relationships become pre-determined selections in a multiple choice test rather than personal decisions.

The bureaucracy of our patterns fast becomes the hypocrisy of human behaviour. We stop permitting people to change. Sometimes we stop looking for change altogether, dismissing the idea that change is in fact possible.

Lucky is the individual that never rules out the opportunity to continue to build relationships and construct new ways of relating to others.

Intelligent is the individual who learns to dismiss poor relationships and to pursue the relationships that allow him or her to act out the person s/he prefers to be.

Recognising this, we move from the nature versus nurture argument to a position where we are able to begin to take responsibility for the mix of experience and relationship parameters that have influenced personal definitions we have of ourselves. We can begin to use these relationships to define ourselves rather than simply let our relationships define us. We can end ways of relating to people that dissatisfy us, relations that make us feel false to the person that we would choose to be. We can continue and be grateful for the relationships that permit us to be the persons we like and wish to know further.

Our relationships are our most valuable aspect of our persons. They allow us to define our persons. In deciding the relationships that we choose to pursue, maintain, and continuously construct, we move from joining a random card game to creating our own community and making up our own rules and expectations.

Wink wink

2008-04-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted here and it will be a bit longer before I return. I'm in the midst of finishing up some business that will be over, for better or worse, at the end of this month. You see, I'm posing as an academic, and I have to say it's frustrating. More and more, I am besieged by the need to argue my points in discussions that, let's be honest, have not final answers.

Having grown up under the tutelage of several high-class ladies, I was always taught the best way to win any argument was to begin the conversation with the complete conviction that you and the other person already agree--there's just been some slight misunderstanding. Belief systems, I learned as a kid, are very organic, arising out of one’s context rather than one’s person-rather like a language or a dialect. People who lose arguments are the people that take their context with them rather than recognise the new context that surrounds them. A person can carry a true belief or a real fact from one context to the next.

This is, I'll admit, the sort of insidious reasoning that missionaries use in their spread religious fervor: Of course, I can't make the natives believe in my God—I'll just show the natives how our God is already there. And remember, missionaries for various religious (and economic and political) beliefs are some of the most successful salespeople on the planet. Not because they have an argument, but because they are simply exposing facts.

Thus when I’m accused of being neutral, or not having an argument, or not pursuing a clear consensus, I tend to treat it as an introduction into a good conversation—an opportunity for mutual reflection. It’s not that I don’t like to debate—I love a good argument, it makes a person work through exactly what s/he thinks and why. But arguing for the sake of domination, for the pure joy of winning, well, that makes no sense to me.

After all, if I explain myself correctly, you and I will already agree.

Coupling Constant

2008-02-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

There is a model of personal development that spans seven levels. I forget all but levels three and seven. At level three, a person has achieved outwardly successful social integration—decisions concerning right and wrong are based entirely upon the behavior of those around them. S/he does not do that which would earn social scorn specifically because it would earn social scorn. S/he does that which is socially acceptable because such behavior earns social acceptance and appreciation.

At level seven, a person learns to differentiate between unrelated events. That is, a person recognizes that the link in a chain of events is that person which experiences the events (that is, the only “chain” connecting the events is the person). As this is the case, the person learns to treat each encounter, and each individual and individual event which that person encounters, as a separate experience. In doing so, the person at the seventh level of personal development is able to understand that experiences are something that the person takes advantage of, not the other way around.

Despite my discussion of the “social system” in earlier entries, I think that this theory has a lot of merit. While one can’t control the “tide of events”, or history, or the social system that produced the current social practices, or your family, one can control how one perceives and what one does when presented with a particular experience. Control is limited-but also very central-to the individual experience.

In actual practice, this usually means withholding anger or judgment. When the receptionist is short-tempered, or the coffee spills, remember that this is one event and need not influence the experience of the next event.

Think of random atoms bumping into each other, and each atom is to an extent in control of the resulting reactions, but must work within the prescribed rules of science. And, luckily, the rules of science (the rules of society) are known to the individual.

Every movie, every book, and every prior event that goes into a person’s memory-implicitly or explicitly, as humans pick up a lot of data without realizing it-teaches the social rules of engagement to the person. That knowledge, once acquired, gives the person the capacity to take control of later experiences. In doing so, and in recognizing the education thus far acquired by one individual is not necessarily representative of the education acquired (that is, accepted, understood, and practiced) by another, one can learn to differentiate between events and persons. The seventh level of development is achieved when a person both has control and accepts that that control is limited. The tension between the relationship of control and its loss is, in many ways, the measure of an individual’s maturity—their level of development.

Art education is essential in advancing this level of development. In acquiring art education (music, literature, film, etc.), an individual learns perspective and possible rules for engagement with events and people. Art education broadens the range of responses available to an individual, and thus the individual’s personal sense of control. The more perspective a person can bring to an experience, the more the possibilities that are open to that individual in understanding and taking advantage (reacting to, learning from) an event or experience with another individual.

Anyways, I like the idea.

dialectics

2008-02-25T14:57:00.000-08:00

The behavior of individuals is largely made up of socially conditioned responses. It lacks utility, logic, and general civility to condemn both the person for a behavior or behavioral practice.

It lacks utility to do so for both the detractor (the person that condemns) and the individual that is the target of the detractor’s condemnation.

To target a person with condemnation is to reach an immediate impasse. For the person, while perhaps able to alter his or her character at some point, will most likely not engage in any proposed alteration should their person be outright condemned. Any attempt to do so would be obsolete—the person, in being condemned, has been marginalized and isolated from society and lacks the opportunity and permission to return to the society from which he or she has been ostracized. If you condemn my person, you erase me from your sphere of interaction.

Condemning the person evades any opportunity for engagement or change—if my person is offensive to you, there is nothing for me to do but remove myself as much as possible from any interaction with the detractor. If I am unacceptable; why should I pursue acceptance?

But to condemn a behavior, to condemn a socially conditioned response practiced by a person or a people, crates an argument—a dialogue.

To condemn a behavior is to engage the person that practices or enacts the behavior in a discussion (though whether the individual that enacts the behavior agrees to pursue the discussion is dependent upon the reaction of said person—an idea covered later).

However, with the initiation of such a discussion, such an engagement—through the condemnation of the practice and not the individual that practices—to engage an individual that practices an offensive behavior in a discussion regarding the contentious (pattern of) behavior opens a dialogue rather than shuts out a person.

Such discussions can lead to compromise, tolerance, even acceptance and understanding on the part of those willing to engage.

Constructing such discussions opens (but never promises satisfactory closure)—constructing such discussions at least opens a dialogue between the two persons or people that (should the person be condemned) might not otherwise occur.

Whereas condemning the person relegates a targeted individual to the position of an outcast, a marginalized and isolated person, condemning the behavior salvages the person and suggests that society has encouraged (and therefore, in the guise of the detractor, can discourage) incorrect or intolerable responses in an individual that can in fact alter this behavior, society and general interaction (that is, the opposite of condemnation) permitting.

(***** the opposite can apply also. An individual can condemn society for incorrect or intolerable behavior. However, an individual, like society or an individual detractor, would benefit more from the condemnation of the behavior as opposed to society. In this way the individual can engage with those that practice a behavior of which s/he disapproves.)

For those of us that want more specifics:

A study covered by the New Yorker demonstrates that kids lie because they learn to from adults. They see us lie (little white lies—that dress is lovely, he’s great at his job, I love her kids) and learn that certain lies are necessary in order to preserve the image of ourselves that other may have—and in order to give our persons a certain amount of privacy and safety. After all, these lies are not malicious but rather designed to safeguard rather than harm our relationships.

Anyways, kids watch this and then learn that lying can be legitimate. Okay, but when? Many parents construct situations in which their kids have to weigh “telling the truth” with “harming a relationship”—either with their parents or with their friends. Parents would do better, the study suggests, to recognize that certain facts (who told you that word? Was it your friend Jon?) compel a lie in order to save a relationship. Better to ask more general questions (Did you learn that word at school or from TV) and be honest yourself (Look, either way, that’s not an acceptable word) rather than fish for facts that you would use to condemn a person and thus a relationship.

2008-01-27T16:25:00.000-08:00

In a recent study of the IQ of children over the last few decades in the USA, it was discovered that children on average are, according to the test, smarter today than they were fifty or sixty years ago. But this is not necessarily because we have more information or better health care (although this may play some role). Researchers determined that this increase in average IQ is probably due to the fact that children today are as a whole taught to think in different ways than children fifty or sixty years ago.

Children taking the test today aren't smarter; they are just more prepared. Children today, in many parts of the developed world, are expected to think abstractly. Children are constantly exposed to the concept that there are alternative perspectives and that they can (at least pretend) to inhabit these perspectives--in video games, in stories, in news, in online media, in musical songs and styles, in movies, clothes, role-playing games. The various perspectives available to kids today are not limited in time or place or even means of expression.

This is not to diminish the roles of more concrete forms of education; contemplating the function of religion in the public life of a federal politician would have been an impractical past time in the life of a rural farmer in the American Southwest in the early 1700s. Such contemplation might be considered equally self-indulgent if not lacking in utility in a war-torn community in the Darfur region today. Certain forms of abstract contemplation might even be a cause for general derision in contexts such as Vanketesh's Chicago community. In such circumstances there are more immediate and useful skills to acquire, and the different perspectives learned, explored or expressed are perhaps not perspectives found in any Harvard psychologist's IQ test.

But in order to reach a point where we can understand the purposes of particular concrete skills or knowledge found in different people, we need the ability to abstractly consider circumstance and context. We need to be able to consider the contexts influencing others and ourselves and be able to explain what we understand to others and ourselves, a process that requires time and sustained interaction with different and diverse individuals and societies. We require the capacity and the desire to dialogue with other individuals experiencing our own context as well as those in different contexts.

This is not quite the self-awareness advocated in Nietzsche or The Power of Now, although both are valid components in the study of context. Richard Rorty, another American philosopher, wrote that all people should read as many books and see as many movies as possible. Rorty suggested that in accumulating the stories of others, even fictional characters, individuals accumulate perspectives. Thus, while one individual may never agree with nor truly understand another individual or society, he or she will at least be aware of alternative contexts and the myriad of ways in which people can interact with their contexts.

Circumstancial ignorance

2008-01-27T13:10:00.001-08:00

As an American, I must admit that overcoming circumstances is an incredibly American tradition.

Communist Cuba struggles with the need to stimulate the constant proletarian revolution. Bulletin boards remind citizens of the struggle that is, allegedly, going on all around them. In the USA, we have, among other signposts, Hollywood films to remind us that individual self-definition is constantly under assault from external circumstances.

Robert Reich explains the general circumstances of the US individual in four myths that make context a very iffy operation. There are the "mobs at the gate", (first myth) the assembled external forces that deprive individuals of their independence and personal perspective. These mobs promote various corrupt circumstances that trap the individual. As a result of these fears, American individuals are constantly at war--against the drug dealers, authority, the cops, the radical terrorists, etc., all of which (in popular culture) seek to cage us in defining circumstances that would rob us of our personal liberty. This first myth is combined with the "rot at the top", (second myth). Individuals are made aware of the inevitably corrupting official systems. We are taught to regard our leaders in law and commerce with great skepticism. Individuals in US society accuse the current administration of promoting fear, caging the individual as much as any drug dealer and inhibiting individual realisation.

So the US individual is taught to trust neither the official nor the unofficial context that seeks to define him or her. The truly triumphant individual (Reich’s third myth) is able to take control of his or her personal context. The most successful individual redefines society with the help of the benevolent community (fourth myth), made up of equally self-defined/self-defining individuals.

Escaping the context of such a contradictory set of cultural and social instructions is not by any means simple, nor even, I would argue, necessary. But the study of these defining contexts, the need for constant self-awareness and to be aware of the circumstances structuring the interactions of others is, I think, important. This is what is required in order to "overcome" context.

Consider Gang Leader for a Day, a recent book by the American sociologist Suhir Vanketesh. Vanketesh studied the Chicago underworld by living for seven years in the Chicago projects. He wrote about the lack of interaction between the official city of Chicago municipality and the Chicago project community that he came to know. The two structures co-existed and to a large extent recognised the interactions that governed the parallel community. Vanketesh, in his book, explores how this recognition is expressed and what this recognition and its expression mean to the community members that he interviews.

This is the form of awareness that alters context effectively; both for the individuals that choose to explain themselves and their social structures to Vanketesh and for the audience that can read his book. In writing or talking about personal context and reading or discussing the personal accounts of others, we achieve at least some recognition of how context can influence individual identity. In doing so, we overcome the ignorance of our circumstances.

The qualities of Context

2008-01-22T21:39:00.000-08:00

Context determines behaviour in that it structures our interactions. Context teaches us what to expect. Think of culture. In some cultures, people wait patiently in queus while in others, if you queu, you wait forever. Context in school or at work largely suggests if not determines how we dress, our language, and which words of that language are appropriate with whom. In business management classes, this is referred to as the company culture. In high school, we call it peer pressure (one of the products as well as a result of teen angst). This can be applied to local as well as national cultures. One of my favourite examples is when a Pakistani friend of mine commented on the US mindset. Prior to the present, most US citizens were (are?) not well versed in foreign politics. We are more apt to discuss local, more immediate politics, a fact that shames many US nationals living or working abroad. But my Pakistani friend had a different take on this. He said that in his country, people knew more about international politics because it was discussed more, frequently as a means of avoiding local politics. In Pakistan, he explained, discussing the local politics (which are outrageously corrupt) can get a person robbed, attacked, or worse. So the population has developed its foreign knowledge as a substitute, he contends, to discussing the internal and widespread immediate corruption.

He goes on to explain that having lived in a country where elections are never democratic (that is, democratic in the manner in which elections are expected to be in the USA), and in which policemen are generally bribed leads most of the people to expect this kind of behaviour in their federal and municipal operations. People may make the system, but individuals are the victims, as it were, of the system, or the victims of their circumstances. Not in that our circumstances victimize us, but simply in that by living as a single member of a larger whole, we are in fact subject to the machinations of that whole, a process put in place long before our arrival and in many ways a factor in our own personal production and expectations. The culture that we consume (the political system, the movies, the books, magazines, and newspapers we read, our education, our daily exposure to our society’s social interaction) may not determine who we are, but it does in a large part determine how we express who we are.
This is a fact that the Civil Rights Movements in the 60s both benefited from and with which it struggled. The idea of equality was born out of Constitutional knowledge and personal awareness and education, while the frustration with discrimination arose from personal experience and expectations born of continued social interactions.

Individuals are not naturally malicious. People yes maneuver for personal gain and benefit often, but not necessarily at the expense of others. This can be observed in many social interactions and personal relationships. It may be true that people are naturally selfish, but selfishness does not require maliciousness, and as people are social creatures we tend to try to maintain our social relations by avoiding straightforward and even (I would argue) sideways malice. (Of course, there are exceptions to this, but there are aberrations in almost any biological species.) We do not as a rule seek to judge ourselves based on the failure of all others in all things, though we may at times judge ourselves in comparison to the failure of another or a group of others—this is used, however, largely as a rationalization of success after the success occurs. It’s not generally a goal to be achieved at the initiation of an action (once again, there are exceptions. I am not going to be entirely Anne Frank about this. But even Hannah Arendt observed the Eichmann did not strike her as an evil individual, just stupid.)

There is a story about culture that is quite popular in Central America. The story goes like this: Outside a seafood restaurant, there are three lobster tanks. All the lobsters in the tanks know their eventual fate, and are seeking to avoid this early death. In the first tank, the lobsters are all trying to escape individually, and some do, jumping over the side of the tank and scuttling for the sea. Many do not, and simply leap helplessly against the glass.
In the second tank, the lobsters are working together. They line up and allow several to climb out on the backs of others. Some still remain in the tank, but many escape with the help of their fellows.
In the third tank, each time a lobster reaches the top of the tank, the other lobsters, envious of his or her success, pull that lobster back into the tank before it can achieve freedom.

I do not think this story is a fixed story (for what story is? We tell stories to suggest ideas that can be altered or to explain conditions that, because we can frame them in a story, can be changed. But this is another argument for later.) Most individuals have experienced the culture or context of each of the tanks of lobsters. And, whether we as individuals prefer one tank to another, because our actions are dictated by what we can do rather than what we want to do at times, we have participated in the culture of our tank, sometimes as a means of immediate survival.

This is not to say that we persons cannot rise above circumstance or overcome context. Many great leaders and millions of less well-known individuals are able to broaden their perspectives and overcome or alter their context or circumstances. Even here, however, the self-knowledge and capacity to do so is often a byproduct of social experience of cultural interactions. (Remember the Civil Rights Movement. Literacy, continued pressure, education, social obligation, a liberalization of universal trends, etc., all had something to do with the success—if one considers the Civil Rights Movement to have been largely successful, many might argue the true success has yet to be determined—if not the initiation of the Movement.)

How does one change one’s circumstances? I will discuss this in the next blog, but here’s the opener:
To change one’s circumstances requires, first and foremost, knowledge of one’s circumstance, their limitations (the idea that they can and perhaps should be different.)