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Monthly Archives: January 2017

The Crabs are Biting

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by petersironwood in psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ethics, fishing, politics, story

IMG_0049

My dad led the design team for the electrical system of the original Goodyear Blimp. One summer, between the third and fourth grade, his work on airships called him away from Akron and we spent the summer in Tom’s River, New Jersey. After returning from Portugal, we had stuck close to Akron so was looking forward to a trip that took us hundreds of miles to the sea-side.  I could smell the ocean when we still an hour away from Tom’s River. Our small apartment in Tom’s River sat a mere two blocks from the public library, a library that contained the “Powers of Ten” book which takes the reader on a journey from the innermost workings of the atomic nucleus to the outermost regions of the galaxy.

While my dad worked at Lakehurst, my mom and I spent part of the day watching the “McCarthy Hearings.” I was too young to understand it thoroughly, but I could quickly discern that McCarthy was a liar. I had a harder time telling whether he was genuinely a very hating hateful person or whether he just appeared to be full of hate in order to popular with other hating people. Hating others has never come very naturally to me. I always felt connected to my family, my friends, other people and even other forms of life. So, hating, to me, has always consisted of nine parts self-loathing plus one part prideful ignorance. Don’t get the idea that I am a saint. I’m far from it and anger comes quite easily to me when I’m frustrated. My parents claimed that, as a toddler, frustration would propel me to run across the floor and smack my head down on the floor. By the time I was nine, I had developed less self-destructive ways to express anger. But whether McCarthy really was a tiny person filled with hate or simply a person who tried to impress those who really were haters in order to win their support, I couldn’t tell. I have no idea how “large” McCarthy was physically. I call him “tiny” because it seems essential in order to hate that you must pull in your sense of wonder and appreciation to the boundaries of your own physical skin. When people hate, something has happened to them and it shouldn’t happen to them because, after all, they are the center of the universe. Apparently, haters have never seen the book, Powers of Ten.

Probably so they could have some adult time, my parents also enrolled me in summer church school. I became friends with one of the kids in church school and he invited me onto his Cabin Cruiser. My parents met with his parents before accepting this and they ended up being invited too. A bright sunny day and off we sped onto the sparkling ocean! At some point, the kids, under the supervision of my new friend’s dad, went crab fishing. Although I had never gone crab fishing before, I understood the basic concept from several fishing trips with my Uncle Karl. Karl lived in a fancified log cabin on Comet Lake near Akron. Fishing consisted of going out into the lake on a row boat, putting a live worm onto a hook, putting a fishing pole over the side of the boat and then sitting quiet and still for hours on end. I think I may have caught one small fish in my three trips. It seemed frankly like a huge amount of boredom for a very small reward. So, when crab fishing was announced as the next activity on the Cabin Cruiser, I tried to steel myself for hours of boredom. I didn’t want to end up running across the deck and smacking my head in frustration.

The baiting was easier and instead of poles, we put out some lines with multiple baits. Over the side of the boat they went. That wasn’t so bad as pithing the worms. Now would come the endless hours of waiting for a nibble. Two or three minutes later, for no reason I could discern, we started pulling up the lines. They were filled with crabs! While the trout, bass, perch, and bluegill in Comet Lake were shy and crafty little critters who would try stealthily to nibble away the worm without getting barbed on the hook, the crabs of the Atlantic seemed to have no greater goal in life than to clamber into our boat as fast as possible. This fishing sped along more in synch with my natural rhythm. No need for head-banging here! Line after line went over the side and minutes later, back each one would come with a meal’s worth of crabs. Now this fishing was more like it!

After sunset scattered scarlet shards across the ocean, the kids went down below to sleep in the bunks. There were portholes in the bow and we could see through those portholes into an ever-darkening starry sky. We could hear the murmuring of the alcohol-plied adults above discussing whatever it was that adults discussed back then; perhaps the McCarthy Hearings; perhaps something about a popular movie or TV show. We kids below however had more serious things to discuss. Mainly, we discussed the fact that we could see stars that were (or at least had been) far, far away. We speculated whether, at this very moment, there might be a planet circling one of those distant stars. It seemed that if there were planets, they too might have oceans and Cabin Cruisers and kids. And those kids would also be looking up into the night sky seeing a faraway star — our sun! And, they might well be thinking, those alien kids, of how there might be a planet circling Sol and how on that planet could be kids looking up at the night sky at them…or at least at their sun. Of course, we might be years or even thousands of years “out of synch” which only added to the mystery.

These possible aliens might be like us in every way. More likely, they would be like us in some ways and unlike us in some ways. They might be wondering whether we would be friendly to them just as we wondered whether they would be friendly to us. And, probably, we concluded, a lot would depend on the particular alien you encountered. For some reason, that particular small group of kids didn’t talk much about “categories” of people. It seemed to me, and to my new-found friends, that everyone was quite different. We had learned in school that every snowflake was different. If something as simple as a snowflake is unique, how much more true that must be of people. And, it seemed completely and obviously true. My Aunt Emma and my Aunt Mary were completely different from each other as each was from my Grandmother Ada. Of course, people were all different. As I listened to the voice of the other kids, I could see that person’s face in my mind’s eye. Yes, we all had one nose, one mouth, and two eyes, but we were all really different. We sounded different. We looked different. We moved differently. We were from different states hundreds of miles apart. But we all were interested in whether there were aliens and what they would be like. Though we were somewhat mindful of the potential danger, we were much more excited about learning about them and from them than protecting ourselves from them. And we all understood that all the thoughts and feelings we were having about them were quite possibly mirrored by their thoughts and feelings about us even if separated by lightyears of space-time and by biological lineages.

None of our group of nine-year olds were such “scaredy cats” that we were terrified of the aliens and therefore filled with hate for them. It never occurred to any of us. I don’t think that’s just because we were all going to “church school.” It’s just more natural to assume that the kids on the faraway planet would be wondering about us in much the same way as we wondered about them regardless of the number of eyes and legs they might have. I think that in order for us to have hated or feared the aliens, an adult would have to come into our cramped quarters to tell us that all the aliens were the same; that they were all out to get us; that they should all be hated and destroyed. Maybe McCarthy would be good for that job. It’s honestly hard to believe any of us would have taken him seriously. But, I suppose, if we heard that hate day in and day out, complete with fake news features filled with fake facts and fake figures, we might eventually find ourselves in a state of hate and fear.

Of course, no such adult came down below decks to sell us that particular bogus bill of bads. Why would someone like McCarthy decide to make their fame and fortune by filling young minds and hearts with hate and fear? I still don’t know whether he was really so filled with hate and fear himself that he couldn’t help it. I did, years later, read a biography of Joe McCarthy and something his wife said made me very much think it was all fake and he didn’t actually believe any of it. That just makes it all the more disturbing. A hate-monger such as McCarthy, who does it all as an act to gain power, does not just hate communism and communists. He also hates the people he is hoodwinking. He totally disrespects them through his dishonesty and dissembling. Eventually, Joe McCarthy soon found himself completely discredited and disgraced but not before wantonly laying waste to the lives of many innocent individuals.

Of course, in the right circumstances, almost everyone lies on occasion. What most people do when they are caught in a lie is apologize and try to explain why they lied. What a McCarthy does, however, is quite different. Instead of apologizing, they simply shout the lie more and more loudly. On other occasions, they will deny ever having told the lie in the first place. The screaming gets louder and louder. When no-one believes their lies, they are left with the only recourse left to them: violence. War, incarceration, murder — all of these seem a nothing compared with the ego bruising hurt of admitting that they had been lying. In the meantime, Joe McCarthy did provide a summer’s worth of entertainment. It’s too bad it came with ruining innocent lives.

I wonder whether those far planets we hypothesized as revolving around those far suns in our night sky hold their own McCarthy-like beings. It seems hard to believe an entire species would survive if they were all McCarthy-like. Imagine a river full of piranha that attacked each other! The species wouldn’t long survive. Is there some utility to having a small proportion of the population of an otherwise intelligent species be McCarthy-like? I don’t really think so. At least I haven’t been able to come up with a scenario yet in which actual witch hunts are useful to the group as a whole.

A partly related phenomenon might be called “Cassandra-like” in which someone thinks they see a danger which no-one else does. But such a person is useful to the society as a whole only to the extent that they are willing to share their concern and work together with others to determine whether the danger is real, how to assess it, how to protect against it etc. On the other hand, if the person simply insists that there is a danger regardless of whether others see and just tries to prove it by screaming more loudly, that is not very helpful. If the “danger” is premised on something which is absurd on its face (e.g., because you were friends with a communist, that meant you must be communist as well; or, because some communists wanted to overthrow the US government, if you were a communist, that meant you were a traitor as well) then, it can’t lead to very effective action. A McCarthy-like person is completely unhelpful in locating and protecting against actual danger because their cognition is too damaged to be helpful in itself and their communication style is so warped that it actively interferes with the attempts of others to do actual problem solving.

In the years after the summer of McCarthyism, I worked with kids in many capacities. For instance, I worked as a child care worker and camp counselor. I can tell you that kids often engage in conversations about deep topics. They are concerned about their world and other worlds that might be. Kids care passionately to learn about the world. But despite their passion, they tend to be pretty careful about discriminating the bait from the hook. In my experience, they are more like the Comet Lake trout, perch, bass, and bluegill than the crabs off the New Jersey coast. However, if people of any age are desperate enough; if they are told the big lie often enough, many will stop acting like discerning vertebrate fish and just latch on to the first shiny thing that appears before them. Perhaps that is why the McCarthy’s of the world, if they had their way, would outlaw public libraries, gut public education, and discredit the independent press. They wouldn’t want the fish to be able to discriminate the bait from the hook. They are much too impatient for trout fishing. Throw a line over the side of the boat and make sure that people are so desperate that they clamp right onto the empty line. Who knows what exactly goes on in the mind of a crab? Perhaps they clamp on in hate. Perhaps they latch on in fear. Perhaps it is a little of both. But what we do know is that whatever motivates the crab to grab hold of that shiny line, it is always the crab itself, not its enemies, who ends up in the belly of the beast. One can still hope that this will be a good year.

—————

@John Thomas, 1/16/17

(The story above and many cousins like it are compiled now in a book available on Amazon: Tales from an American Childhood: Recollection and Revelation. I recount early experiences and then related them to contemporary issues and challenges in society.

https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable 

McCarthy in Wikipedia

Trumpism is a New Religion

09 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by petersironwood in apocalypse, health, Uncategorized

≈ 73 Comments

Tags

ethics, learning, politics, religion, Trump

(This blog post is a temporary departure from Schooled Haze and contemplations of AI/HCI).

finalpanel1

Trumpism is less a political offshoot of Republicanism than it is a new religion, at least for a substantial number of Trump supporters. I keep seeing posts from various liberal friends recounting nasty infantile things that Trump has done or said as though as to say, “Well, now! That is so completely outrageous, stupid, mean-spirited, vain, or evil that surely you Trump voters will now see how you were wrong.” No. That is never going to happen. I think the “mistake” is to think that Trump is a political leader when he is actually, for many, a religious leader. 

As Trump himself once famously bragged, he could shoot people in the middle of the street in broad daylight and his followers wouldn’t desert him. It doesn’t matter what he does. His value is taken as a given and everything else flows from that. You won’t convince people who are Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Muslim to change religions because you claim to have “facts” about how bad some particular religious figure is. It will simply mean they will discount your facts and their source.

Why and how could Trump become a religious figure? He seems offhand to be the complete antithesis of what most of the major religions espouse. Well, yes, but those religions I mentioned earlier arose in earlier times…much earlier. In the USA, 70% of the people claim to be Christians. But what really matters are people’s actions, not their claims. The evidence is all around us that for many people, the real religion of America is quite different from Christianity.

We have a TV culture and a popular culture and what many people really value (as measured by their actions) are things like money, greed, vanity, self-promotion, immediate gratification, superficiality, anti-intellectualism, self-righteousness, fame, and arrogance. We call people who hold high positions in a company “business leaders” regardless of whether they are or are not actual leaders. We have articles written about which colleges are “best” when the entire analysis is about the ROI of your tuition dollars. Social media are filled with “top ten” lists of ways to advance your career that take three minutes to read. We talk about someone’s “actual worth” when what we’re really talking about is their financial worth. We rank order tennis stars, golf stars, baseball stars, and basketball stars according to how much they earn. Where is the list according to their skill, elegance, mentorship, or how much they build team spirit? These things are still talked about on occasion but many people accept that the only “objective” measure of value is money.

We have transmogrified what are essentially cooperative activities like dancing, cooking, dating, and singing and made all of them into competitive contests on TV.  Many of us have accepted as “normal” that all a corporation is expected to do is make the most money possible. What used to be “beyond the pale” ethically is now treated as just taking care of the bottom line. A few random examples follow. It is “normal” business practice now to send snail mail that appears from the envelope to be a check or official government business when it is, in fact, nothing but advertising. E-mail and snail mail are labelled as “In response to your query” or “As you requested” when there is no such query or request. Drinks that consist of high fructose corn syrup and water with dyes (and quite possibly FDA-grandfathered addictive ingredients) are labelled as “Natural” and “Healthy.” Did you know that “Unscented” is the name of an actual fragrance? So if you buy cat litter or fabric softener that is “unscented” thinking that you are avoiding the nasty chemicals, you are simply buying stuff that is scented with a scent called “unscented.” Recently, Wells Fargo which you don’t typically think of as a “fly by night” outfit, was caught charging customers for setting up accounts that were never asked for. Minors cannot purchase cigarettes, alcohol, or marijuana. However, your ten year old can go into any grocery store and get “air fresheners.” These typically contain ingredients which include a known carcinogen, a chemical known to mess up your hormone balance, and a chemical which deadens your sense of smell. Essentially, an “air freshener” does nothing of the sort. It pollutes your air; it doesn’t “freshen” it whatsoever. Meanwhile, sports figures such as Lance Armstrong, who vigorously denied doing performance enhancing drugs apparently not only did them but threatened other athletes not to expose his drug use.

I do not want to overstate this. Most people most of the time are still honest, hard-working, and fair. The media gets paid by advertising dollars however and is therefore motivated to report only on the worst of human behavior. Very few will buy a newspaper whose headline reads, “2.5 million US Muslims worked peacefully today.” But if one goes on a shooting rampage, you can bet it will be a headline. Do you recall any headlines about Timothy McVeigh being a Christian?

Our elections and politicians are bought and paid for largely by a few multi-billionaires. A long term campaign to encourage people not to trust “intellectuals”, scientists, educators, and journalists has left people believing in fake news and social media instead. In some cases, even such blatantly obvious absurdities as “January 2017 Friday the 13th! — There will not be another Friday the 13th for 666 years!” are posted and reposted on Facebook. “Mars will never be closer to the earth!” (This with a picture that shows Mars the apparent size of the Moon). The only reason for such things is basically to serve as click bait. “Copy and Share if you are against the senseless killing of helpless kittens.”

That is the background against which we need to understand Trump and Trumpists. It doesn’t matter to Trumpists that he made more money by stiffing people. It doesn’t matter that he bragged about being able to grab women by their private parts. In fact, these are seen as plusses. He embodies the values and behaviors that symbolize a new “religion.” The problem with Christianity as a religion is that it (at least in many versions) champions the downtrodden, teaches humility, asks us to love our neighbor as ourselves, warns us not to judge lest we be judged, encourages us do to unto others as we would have them do unto us. That’s okay for a couple hours on Sunday. But it really doesn’t jibe with perceived success in the modern business world. Actually, you certainly could run a business and be successful that way. But being merely successful isn’t enough. If you want to be sure to be a billionaire despite having only mediocre talent, then the path of lying, cheating, and stiffing people seems more promising. The tension between what the Bible says is good and what society actually rewards is too much for many people to bear. As a result, some churches, ministers, and practitioners focus on little slivers of decontextualized Christianity such as homophobia or a prohibition about birth control. Some even promulgate the idea that if you are rich in worldly goods, it is proof that God is smiling on you. And these tactics kind of work a little bit. But it doesn’t work nearly so well for some people as embracing a new religion that celebrates the same values as our “civil” society.

How does this perspective on Trumpism help? First, it helps us understand that Trump supporters will not be shocked if he fills cabinet posts with second rate people who appear to be joining government to line their own pockets. This is expected behavior by adherents to the new religion. Trumpists may well discount evidence of this as being fabricated by liberal media or they simply think it is evidence they are “hard-headed business people” who will make government “more efficient and effective” like private enterprise. Well, I have interacted with government agencies. And, I have worked in some of the best companies in America. You know what? They are both “inefficient.” How is your Montgomery Ward stock doing these days? How about Enron? Borders? Companies go out of business all the time. They have no magic formula that makes them efficient and effective. The idea that government is “inefficient” and private enterprise is “efficient” is just nonsense invented by people who want to send more of your dollars to private enterprises in which they have a vested interest.

Second, seeing Trumpism as a religion explains the passionate fire of many Trump supporters. It also explains how they can rationalize hate crimes in their own minds. As the religious leader of Trumpism, Trump has given permission and even encouraged violence in his name.

Third, Trumpism as a new religion explains the shallowness of thought that pervades it. Most major religions have centuries of debate and discussion about how to interpret various passages in sacred writings etc. During many parts of the history of these religions, many of the smartest most thoughtful people ended up studying — even devoting their life — to these older religions. There hasn’t been time for that yet with Trumpism. Whatever Trump tweets is the on-going gospel to the Trumpists. Trumpists themselves do not typically call it a religion. They may think their extremism is patriotism. Others may think it is simply practical. In any case, the shallowness and sloganism of Trumpists is seen as a feature, not a bug.

Fourth, understanding that our society is so ripe for Trumpism suggests that simply voting out Trump or even having him impeached, while it might prevent or delay atomic war or dictatorship, is not the complete answer. Our entire society needs to become more patient, less greedy, more cooperative, less competitive in matters that don’t require competition, more accepting and less self-righteous. We need to celebrate the people of substance and ability in every field from bricklaying and carpentry to science and teaching. We need to stop celebrating people simply because they are in the news or have inherited a lot of wealth. Trump and Trumpism are symptoms of something much more pervasive. Trump may be the cancerous tumor in the body politic, but our immune system is badly compromised or that tumor would never have grown so fat and ugly. We must also understand that our body politic still contains many healthy cells! Don’t despair! Instead, repair! Be one of those healthy cells. Survive and thrive. Civilization hasn’t fallen yet. During 2017, we can collectively perform a Billion Acts of Compassion and Kindness. #BACK2017.

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