Lost Horizon.

17 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, psychology, story, Uncategorized

Tags

Business, celerity, history, innovation, life, politics, stories

One of my favorite movies as a young child was Lost Horizon. I believe I happened across this movie quite by accident (but then, maybe it was no accident after all). In any case, for those who haven’t seen it, the basic plot is that an Englishman, Robert Conway, ends up, seemingly by accident, in a semi-magical city high in the Himalayas, “Shangri-La.” It turns out that he was actually brought there intentionally to be the new head of Shangri-La. However, he heads back to England and later decides that was an error and nearly dies of exposure on the icy slopes of the mountains trying to scrabble his way back to Shangri-La. The plot echoes the idea of a lost Eden. In the Biblical account of Eden, humans lived a kind of carefree existence before defying God and thereby incurring his wrath which cursed all humanity to have pain bearing children, having to work, etc. There are many stories and myths of an earlier time or a magical place where life is much longer, more fulfilling, less filled with strife and disease, and generally speaking, better in every way than where we are now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Horizon_(1937_film)

I believe that there really is a “Lost Horizon” in much of modern civilization and that horizon is a longer time horizon. In the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that people used to have a tolerance for much longer and more nuanced debate about about public issues than we do now. For example, the famous “Lincoln-Douglas Debates” about slavery lasted all day! Now, we try to compress dialogue, discussion and debate into a sound bite or a 140 character tweet.

I never had the pleasure of climbing “real” mountains when I was a youngster. I never even saw the rockies till my early twenties. However, my neighborhood did have a large empty field. And in the middle of that field was a small hill. Because the land around was mainly flat, even this small hill provided a panoramic view of woods, fields, and nearby houses. Whenever I faced some particularly weighty decision facing me, I instinctively walked about a half mile to this hilltop. I went there, surveyed everything I could, and thought about the problem at hand. This seemed the most natural thing in the world and whether true or not, it certainly gave me the impression that I could think about the problem more holistically than if I simply sat in a chair or walked through a forest crowded with trees. On that small hill, the silence from human voices was broken only by the noise of distant traffic, the wind in the grass, and the trills of bob-whites. Sometimes, I would whistle to them for advice. Their “answers” always seemed timeless and untinged by hurry.

In 2003, I was invited to give a keynote talk at a conference in Madeira about my work on a socio-technical Pattern Language (some of which, not so coincidentally, encouraged a broader look over time and space). My wife and I decided to make a vacation out of it with our nephews, Mark and Ryan. On the way to Funchal, we visited Oxford University and a professor friend in cognitive psychology, Peter McLeod. We played “lawn bowling” (the English version of Bocci) at Oxford. While we did our best to out-bowl Peter, he pointed out to us a grove of gigantic Oaks. He said that they had been planted hundreds of years earlier and some of them would be culled soon for renovating one of the buildings. This, he claimed, was no accidental windfall. These oaks had been planted specifically for that purpose centuries earlier.

https://www.slideshare.net/John_C_Thomas/toward-a-sociotechnical-pattern-language

It wasn’t just Oxford, however, that had been planned with the future in mind. Medieval cathedrals often took a quarter century or a half century to complete. Notre Dam and Lincoln Cathedrals took about a century while the Cologne cathedral took 600 years! Meanwhile, here in the 21st Century, the US Congress seems powerless to pass legislation to repair our crumbling dams, highways, and bridges.

http://natgeotv.com/ca/ancient-megastructures/q-and-a

The US has an opioid addiction problem. In addition, there is an obesity epidemic. There are many reasons for these, but at least part of the problem with any kind of addiction is that people are unable, unwilling, or unpracticed at behaving in what is their own long term interests and instead doing what feels good in the short term. While one might imagine that the advent of widespread literacy, electronic communication and access to a huge amount of humanity’s knowledge via the Internet would encourage people to take a longer view of life and happiness, instead, many people seem more short-sighted than ever.

Think how we cherish the word “instant.” We have “instant coffee”, “instant pudding”, “instant messaging.” We have “speed dialing,” “speed dating,” and just plain “speed.” Software companies feel the need to release new versions and “subversions” at a breakneck pace that necessarily sacrifices sufficient testing. While people often used to invest in a company’s stock and keep it until they retired decades later, now people invest in a portfolio of ever-changing stocks and a CEO who doesn’t deliver quarter over quarter improvements may soon find themselves out of a job. Many people, in fact, do “day trading” to try to make money. Imagine investing and then uninvesting a few moments later in companies whose products and services change over month or years.

While parents encourage their kids to get good grades now so that they can have a good career later in life, the parents themselves often vote on their short term interests. Politicians cannot solve budget deficits or the over-reliance on fossil fuels. Large number of people who would feel demeaned to be or to be called a heroin addict, will nonetheless buy the SUV, throw the recycling and trash together, and generally accept the rhetoric that denies global climate change and its impacts. Together, our obsession with speed has sometimes been called, the “Cult of Celerity.”

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/26391

Why does a society that has more material wealth and seems to require less of a “hand to mouth” existence, instead, seem ever more focused on the near term and less on the long term? I suppose one possibility is that it is a symptom of a transitional period in humanity’s evolution from a collection of individuals with strong ties to a small number of people to a world-wide interconnection in which individuals become more like “parts” in a giant machine and the “processing” of information that each person does becomes more and more fragmentary.

In teaching Intro Psych, I constructed an exercise for the students in which the class as a whole solved a simple problem. But each individual person had a slip of paper with simple instructions. For example, one student’s instructions might say, “Take a piece of paper from the person on your left. If the paper they hand you has a cross on it, pass it to your right. If it has a circle on it, pass it to the person ahead of you.” No individual person could possibly understand what they collectively were doing.

Indeed, this aligns precisely with “Taylorism” that shaped so much of the so-called “Industrial Revolution.” Some one person or small group of people designs an assembly line. They understand the overall process. But a person actually working on the assembly line may only know that they see a series of widgets passing by and for each widget, they are supposed to turn a screw. They are not supposed to worry about how their job fits into the overall picture. Indeed, they were not encouraged to take a broad view or a long view of their work. Many such jobs have been replaced by robots.

too brief an article which claims Taylorism “ended” in the 1930’s!

An alternative to ever-increasing atomization and automation of work is instead to structure small teams of people to design and build cars. They can do this, incidentally, with a view toward overall energy costs of manufacturing, distribution, and driving rather than just reducing the emissions of the vehicles after construction.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/06/the-future-of-car-making-small-teams-using-fewer-materials.html

Even when people are part of a deconstructed process, it can still be worthwhile for them to “see the bigger picture.” Knowing how your job fits into a larger picture provides motivational advantages and knowledge advantages. As a common folk story goes, two travelers are passing by a wall where two folks are laboring. Each laborer selects rather large rocks in a nearby field; carries them to a wall and places them carefully then using cement to fill in tiny cracks. Objectively, these two workers appear to have the same job. However, one of the two was happily going about their work humming and smiling while the other slumped their shoulders and sported a grim visage; could be heard ever muttering beneath his breath. Curious, one of the travelers asked the Glum one, “What are you doing here, my good fellow?”

“Oh, what a pain! I’m building a wall, of course.”

Then, the traveler approached the cheery builder and asked, “What are you doing here, if I may ask?”

“Oh, what a joy! I’m helping to create a marvelous cathedral, of course!”

IBM’s Think magazine once contained an interesting example of the cognitive benefits of seeing the big picture. People who worked on the Endicott, NY assembly lines were given a few hours of training to see how their job fit into the overall picture. At one point, one of the mask inspectors jumped up and yelled, “Oh, no! I’ve been doing it wrong all these years!” It turned out that they had not wanted to “throw out” a mask that “only” had a few errors because they knew a lot of time and effort had gone into making the mask. They thought it prudent to pass masks as “okay” unless there were a lot of errors. Of course, each mask was used to make many thousands of chips, so it was vitally important not to pass a mask if there were even the slightest error. But until this training program, no-one had really made this clear.

At IBM, I managed a research project for several years on the business uses of stories and storytelling. One of the “knowledge management” consultants I worked with, Dave Snowden, told a story of the Thames Water Company. At that time, when people in this part of the UK had trouble with their water or sewer, they called up a help line and the people who staffed the help lines (almost all women) were to follow a script and dispatch engineers (nearly all men) to go and fix the problems. Of course, as is customary, they were measured on how many calls they could handle in an hour. Most of the help personnel were young, but one middle aged lady took about two and a half times as long to dispatch engineers. She was about to be fired for being so slow, when some enlightened individual decided to look a little more deeply. It turned out that, indeed, she was slower. However, it turned out that her husband was one of the engineers who fixed problems. Because of the knowledge she gained from talking over their jobs together as well as her long experience, she actually solved many problems on the phone herself. In fact, while the average service rep sent an engineer out into the field on about one out of every ten calls, this woman sent an engineer out only one out of a thousand calls. By taking slightly longer on the phone, she was actually saving the company a lot of money! Chances are excellent that he probably did a much better job as an engineer for having conversations with a dispatcher as well.

It seems as though more widespread public education and literacy would allow people to undertake their jobs as well as their political and personal decisions with a longer time horizon and a broader view of what the impact of their behaviors are on others. Beyond that, it seems to me that many of the problems of today require longer and broader views in order to take appropriate action. In fact, it seems the evolutionary advantage to early (and contemporary) humans does not lie in our sharper teeth or stronger jaws; it does not lie in our sharper vision or hearing; it does not rely on our superior strength or speed. Our only advantages are to be able to cooperate and communicate over a longer period of time and space. Yet, here we seem to be — focusing on smaller pieces of complex problems, over-simplifying both the problem and the solution, and insisting on instant answers and speedy resolutions.

Rather than pay a dollar more in taxes to build mass transit to help stem global climate change, we would rather wait for a hurricane and spend ten dollars more in taxes or thousands more to repair things. Rather than pay a penny more in taxes and find a cure for cancer, we would rather pay a hundred thousand in medical expenses. Rather than pay to repair a bridge, we’d rather wait till it collapses with scores of people on it. Rather than wait three years for a new software release with minimal bugs, we would rather wait three months and get the newest with a mosquito horde of bugs. Rather than take the time to fully understand a problem before trying to solve it, we’d rather categorize it quickly and apply a solution that might or might not be appropriate or better yet, “hand it off” to someone else. Rather than take the time to enjoy what we are doing at the moment, we’d rather jump ahead to the next moment.

Maybe “Shangri-La” is not a magical village hidden deep in the Himalayas. Maybe Eden is not something humankind “lost” but something we are yet to build. Together. Slowly. Over time. Maybe finding or rediscovering Paradise is not so much a question of scrambling up frozen mountainsides as simply taking a deep breath, a break, a pause in the action in order to see things from a more global perspective. Even a small hill can help you collect your thoughts and see the broader picture. It might be quiet there and you can hear, not the voices of bosses, managers, advertising and overlords urging you to buy more, get more, work more but instead you can hear the clear call of birdsong reminding you that Eden may only be a few deep breaths away.

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Much lost!

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

family, history, learning, life, loss, marketing, politics, rationality

Why do we feel so devastated after losing someone we love when we generally felt pretty good before we ever met them? That person lives in us; at least a mental model does and that includes what they looked like, how they talked, their habits, their mannerisms, their smell, what they liked and disliked, specific interactions and conversations, shared memories. It’s really little wonder people believe in ghosts. I often dream about my grandparents, for example, decades after they died.

Their life is gone and that is a huge sadness but there is also an impact on you and me. We will have to do things differently, say things differently, recall things that they used to recall. In some cases, of course, it means we may now have sole responsibility for raising children or running a business.

Here’s another strange case. People pretty much exactly like us physically used to live, mate, reproduce, bring up kids, find food, find shelter, find water, avoid enemies, make friends, grow old, share stories, and eventually die. But they did all that without cellphones. They did that without television. They did that without oil or wheels or electricity. They did not miss these conveniences because, for them, they were not even conceptions. But if all those things are taken away from us, we would feel deprived.

Let’s get more specific. The video games of today are fantastic. But, let’s rewind recent history. I thought the original adventure game was completely awesome. We would type in two word commands and the 80 character by 40 line display would flash up green word descriptions of places and events. The descriptions were well-written and there were clever puzzles to be solved. But how many gamers of today would be able to enjoy the original Adventure game as we did in the 1980’s? Maybe all of them? But probably not.

Every time I go to youtube, they ask whether I want an “ad-free” experience which I can “try” for free! Of course, after having the ad-free experience, going back will be relatively difficult whereas right now, I don’t even notice them. I totally get why people eventually become unable to “hear” the other side of a political argument. Instead, they simply tune it out. Indeed, it is often the same approach and probably often the same people who end up trying to “sell” a political candidate as those trying to “sell” a new brand of deodorant. There is much that needs to be fixed about our current political system. But if we replace it with corporate rule, I think we will miss the “good old days” very much indeed.

Do you recall the oddly delicious pain of a loose tooth? To wiggle that tooth caused pain. At least that’s the way I remember it. Yet, I loved to cause myself that hurt. It didn’t hurt much. And, I could control the pain pretty precisely by how hard I pushed with my tongue. Of course, I knew that eventually the tooth would come out and be replaced by a newer stronger tooth. I also knew that placing my tooth under the pillow would cause my parents to supply cash; typically, a dime. That was not an inconsiderable sum. Yet, neither better teeth nor financial gain provided my main motivation for wiggling my tooth. Simply having a small pain that I could control seemed a wonderful thing.

In fact, once the tooth eventually fell out and the newer, bigger, stronger tooth began to grow in, I missed the old, weak, loose tooth, not because of the tooth, per se, but because I had lost that controllable pain. The desire to have something is rather strange, particularly because it is both fundamental to the “rational man” of classical economics and at the same time, extremely irrational.

People who lived a hundred years ago did not desire iPhones, television, or central air conditioning. They might have thought, e.g., “I am frigging frying – need a cooler breeze.” But they wouldn’t exactly desire air conditioning. Later, some people actually could afford air conditioning and others could not. The “could not’s” would feel the lack of air conditioning much more than their ancestors. There is one group of people who would feel the sting even more: those who had air conditioning and subsequently lost it.

In fact, once we have something for awhile, we not only feel the loss of that thing intently; we feel we deserve whatever it is we lost. After all, it is ours! (Even if we just stole that very same thing from someone else a few weeks ago!).

It isn’t just things and people that people feel a loss for. They feel a loss for places, situations, abilities, and even abstractions such as progress toward a goal. And that brings me to my dissertation.

I gave people a fairly simple river-crossing problem. The problem begins with three hobbits and three orcs on one side of the river. There is a small boat that can hold one or two creatures. The goal is to figure out how to get all six creatures to the other side of the river. They can’t swim, or wade, or leap, or build a bridge. The only way is to use the boat. At least one creature must be in the boat at all times. The orcs can never outnumber the hobbits on either side of the river. If that happens, the orcs will gang up and eat the hobbits. It’s a little tricky, but it is possible to get all six critters from one side of the river to the other by ferrying it back and forth.

Some people were first given “half” of the problem; that is to say, they were given a starting position that was half-way through the entire solution. After they solved that, they were given the whole problem. Many of them wanted to give up the problem as impossible, precisely at the spot from which they had just solved the half-problem no more than 20 minutes earlier. Apparently, the position was psychologically different if they were plunked into the spot as opposed to getting to that same spot through their efforts. People who started the problem from the beginning felt as though they had been making “progress” toward the goal. At one point, they had to appear to move away from the goal. It may have seemed to them, in other words, as though they were losing the progress that they had already made. On the other hand, when they started at that same mid-way point, they didn’t feel any “loss” and had an easy time solving the problem from that point forward.

This effect is related to a major deviation people have from acting in accordance with the economic fantasy of the “rational person” when it comes to decision making. Consider investments in stocks. Let’s say that at one point, you buy 100 shares of IBM stock at $50/share and at another point, I buy 100 shares at $150/share. Now, the current price is $100/share. You and I have the same exact information about IBM, the tech industry, the economy and so on. Rationally, we should make the same decision (leaving aside tax consequences and whether we need the money desperately). People do not typically view these situations as similar. If you bought the stock at $50/share, you feel as though selling it at $100/share is a great deal. You’ll make a cool $5000! Sounds great. On the other hand, what would you counsel me to do? You might well say that I should definitely not sell right now because I would lose $5000. Actually, the stock certificates have no memory. They have no idea what either of us paid for them and are worth identical amounts.

I will not try to “prove” this to you. For now, it’s enough to realize that people feel quite different about the two situations. People are very motivated to avoid a loss. Indeed, even the pain of a wiggling tooth can be something not to lose. In Lord Byron’s poem about the Prisoner of Chillon, the long-time prisoner is finally set free, but feels the loss of the prison.

The longish poem ends with these lines.

“My very chains and I grew friends,

So much a long communion tends

To make us what we are:—even I

Regained my freedom with a sigh.”

Returning veterans, despite the dangerous and uncomfortable conditions they’ve been in, often feel as though they have lost something vital when returning to civilian life; e.g., a clarity of what is important, a clear mission, and being part of something bigger than themselves. In fact, the sense of loss can be so overwhelming that more US veterans have committed suicide after returning from duty in the middle east than have been killed in combat.

When people lose a limb, whether through war, an industrial accident or in some other way, they often have “phantom limb” feelings. They can feel sensation and even pain in the limb that is no longer there. Is this similar to what happens when we lose a loved one and then see them in a crowded room? Our mental models of what is true about the world, about others, and even about ourselves are always in danger of being out of touch with what is really happening now. As your kids grow up, your mental model of their capability is always behind the times because it is based on your past experience with them. People who are dangerously thin can still be concerned about being overweight. People no longer capable of driving safely because of their vision or memory may resist the suggestion to stop driving because of a lifetime of experience driving safely. To a computer program, loss and gain may appear symmetrical but they don’t appear that way to a person.

My three older kids are a year apart in age. When they were young, there was one large shared toy box in the family room. On more than one occasion, one of the kids dug through a random pile Lincoln logs, Lego pieces, tinker toys, monopoly money and pulled out, say, a tiny, green, broken toy car. The car, so far as I could determine, had no QRC code, embedded electronics, or wireless connection. Yet, within seconds, one of the other kids would appear from the other end of the house where they had been doing homework or reading and — Voila! — they would appear and announce: “Hey, that’s my car. I’ve been looking for that! Where did you find it? Anyway, give it here.” Seriously? They hadn’t seen the car for two years, perhaps. They had completely “gotten over” the loss. Now, however, they were reminded of their loss as well as presented with an opportunity to recover that loss. You might think they would be much more inclined to share this toy than they would a new toy. You might think that if you didn’t have multiple kids of your own, that is. No. This “prodigal toy” was welcomed back with open arms and more than a little suspicion and hostility toward the sibling that discovered it.

Another controversial and related phenomenon is the notion of constructed memories or confabulations. Here is a simple example from the psych lab. You give a person the following list of words to recall:

Peach, Pear, Brandy, Tree, Plum, Orange, Pie, Book, Seed, Dish, Grove, Orchard, Plate, Cinnamon, Zest, Peel, Cobbler, Supple, Couple, Farm, Sample, Computer.

No, a few hours later, you ask them to recall the list. Almost everyone will remember part of the list. A few people might recall all of them. But more people typically recall “Apple” than any of the items actually on the list! Of course, advertisers are not unaware of this phenomenon and neither are political consultants. They can easily get you to imagine that the candidate said something when they actually did not say it. But the words chosen got you to think it and recall it. But wait. It gets even better. The inclusion of “Apple” in your memory is based on associations that are widely shared in the mental structure of most American native speakers of English. The same technique can be used to arouse words, thoughts, and images selectively in specific segments of the population.

Consider the following list:

Sharapova, Halep, Muguruza, Federer, Del Potro, Mcenroe, Navratilova, King, Evert, Keys, Vandeweghe, Tilden, Laver, Andersen, Radwanska, Gore, Nader, Roddick, Connors, Borg, Ulna, Radius, Radium.

If I listen to that list and try to recall it a few hours later, I am very likely to include “Nadal” in the list. If you’ve never watched or followed professional tennis, you’re very unlikely to include “Nadal.” For you, the list is pretty random and has little association with “Rafa Nadal.” But for me, these are all strongly associated.

Ponder that for a moment. Advertisers and political consultants can send an implicit message that only “works” for certain groups of people. When it comes to political consultants, one of their favorites is to convince you that you have in fact, lost something which you never had. Because it is something you come to believe you lost, you want it quite dearly.

A case in point is the mythical perfect America of the past. If you have been reading this blog before, you know that I love many of the things that actually used to be true in America. For instance, when I used to pull into a “Service Station”, I actually got service! Someone came and cleaned the window and checked the oil as well as pumped the gas. Now, when I pull into a “Gas Station” that does not happen. That really is a loss although if we did have that service today, gas might be $10 a gallon instead of $3. And, there are many other things that are gone that really did exist. But many people have also been convinced that there were a lot of things that they have lost, even those things that never actually existed.

The Founding Fathers, for example, were not all Protestants. And, even among those who were Protestant, they did not all agree on the same Biblical interpretations. And, I am extremely confident that very few of the Founding Fathers interpreted the Bible in precisely the way that your particular minister does. There was never a time when workers didn’t complain, had no unions, and yet were treated fairly. There was never a time when every politician was above corruption. There was never a time when children were never molested, or when the press did not sensationalize, or when everyone “got along.” That is not an America that has since been lost. That is an America that never existed.

Legends of a “lost land”, Atlantis, Eden, Shangri-La, and the “noble savage” are not unique to modern America, of course. Many politicians in many eras and many different lands have tried to gain power by making people feel that they have “lost” something that never actually existed! It’s a pretty cool trick when you think about it. If done with artistry and tact, and especially if done with billions of dollars of advertising, they can not only make you think you heard the word “apple”; they can make you remember the taste of an imaginary apple!

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Poems of Loss

You Fool!

15 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, psychology, story, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

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advertising, Business, ethics, family, life, magic, marketing, politics, stories

snowfall

Make no mistake. You have an *amazing* brain! Whether you flunked out of high school or aced every test at Princeton, your brain has astounding and amazing capabilities! Perceiving things in space, watching a soccer match, engaging in small talk, navigating your way to the front door without tripping over the cats…it doesn’t matter. You and your brain are doing amazing things all the time! In fact, one of the beneficial side-effects of doing research in “Artificial Intelligence” is that it makes you realize how flipping amazing the human brain is. Everyone is creative. Everyone learns, adapts, solves problems and so on. You have a good brain.

However. Make no mistake. You (and me and everyone else) are prone to many kinds of illusions and delusions. I cannot recount them all in one blog post, or even in one thick psychology textbook. At one point, soon after joining IBM, I wrote a speculative research report entitled, “Cognitive psychology from the standpoint of wilderness survival.” (IBM Research Report, RC-6647. Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation). The thesis of that report was that some of the many illusions and delusions we are prone to are because we evolved for over 4 billion years in a series of “natural” environments and now we live in a very “artificial” one. For example, people have a lot of trouble with the concept of true randomness. Suppose you have a “fair” coin and you flip the coin five times and it comes up heads every time. Now, you go and flip it again. What are the chances that it comes up heads this time? The answer is that it is still equally likely to be heads or tails. The coin has no “memory” and no “desire to be fair.” It has no ability to “go on a hot streak.” If it really is a fair coin toss, the probability of each toss remains the same. Here’s another related problem. You throw a coin a hundred times. What are the chances of getting 50 head and 50 tails? Perhaps surprising to many, this will happen only about 8% of the time. The chances of getting fairly close to a fifty-fifty split is fairly high, but the chance of getting exactly a fifty-fifty split is fairly low. I speculated in the aforementioned article that one reason these types of problems are difficult for people is that in nature, true randomness is rare, at least at the scale that we typically care about. Mountains are not “randomly” strewn across the planet. Blackberry bushes are not randomly distributed. Bison are not randomly distributed. Good flint for making axes or arrowheads is not randomly distributed. Fresh water is not randomly distributed. Nearly everything is “clustered.” If you find a mountain, you are likely to find other mountains nearby. If you find a blackberry, other blackberries are likely to be close by. If you find a bison, others are likely to be close by. And so on. The same goes for most events we care about. Is it raining? Chances are much greater it will be raining in five minutes than not. Is it extremely hot out? Chances are it will also be extremely hot in five minutes. “Things we care about” are very likely to be clustered in space and in time. So, when we present people with problems that presuppose true randomness, yes, human brains have trouble with it.

iPhoneDownloadJan152013 955

Well, at least humans are the “smartest” species on the planet, right? Not so fast. We are the only species in serious danger of making the planet uninhabitable for our own species. That doesn’t strike me as particularly brilliant. Leaving that aside, consider this very simple problem. There are three levers. If you press the left-most lever you get something good 1/3 of the time on a random basis. If you press the middle lever or the right most lever, you never get something good. If you want to get as much good stuff as you can, your best bet is to press the leftmost lever every single time. And, so you will…eventually. But you know who is better at this problem than you are? A kid. Yes, a two-year old will very quickly press only the left most lever. You know who else will beat you at this problem? A monkey, a dog, a cat, a bird, and a fish. All of them will focus on pressing the left-most lever all the time and will do so fairly quickly. You and me? Not so much. No, we are too “smart” for that! We will think that there must be some “system” for getting something good every time. So we think, “Let’s see. If I press the left one the number of letters in my grandmother’s maiden name and then press the middle one six times and then the right one once and then the left one with the successive digits of pi….” Yeah. We tend to assume that there must be some really complicated rule and that we are smart enough to figure it out. And, in fact, in life there often are some complicated rules. But it won’t work for you in this experiment. And, it won’t make you rich in Vegas. People have palaces because of gamblers in Vegas. But it isn’t the gamblers who get rich. It’s the people who sucker in the gamblers. They are the only ones who profit consistently. Once upon a time, you could win by counting cards, so they added more cards. And when people could still count cards, they made it illegal. And, they watch on cameras to make sure you don’t. And, if you did come up with a fool-proof system based on the phases of the moon and the number of letters in the title of the pop chart-topper, they wouldn’t let you play any more! (If you’re lucky). See, they want to make money. They are not in the business of making you rich. They are in the business to make themselves rich. And, they rely on these illusions and delusions we have about probability to do it.

Consider a lottery game. Let’s say there are 75 numbers and you are to pick five. If all five of your numbers come up, you win! So, you pick 5, 22, 37, 68 and 75. The winning numbers are: “5, 22, 45, 60 and 75” and you think, “Damn! I was so close! I had three of the five numbers!” Yeah. How close were you? If I somehow told you ahead of time what three of the numbers were and you only had to guess the remaining two, you would have a 72×71 divided by 2 chance of winning: one chance in 2556. In other words, when you had “three out of five” numbers correct, you were not close at all. People are also good at finding “patterns.” The problem is that finding a “pattern” after the fact, doesn’t really “prove” anything because there are pretty much an unlimited number of patterns to be found. You might think, in the example above, “Oh, man! I was so close! My third number was just 8 less than the winning 45 and my fourth number was also just off by 8 from the winning number!” But suppose the winning numbers had instead been: “5, 22, 44, 60, and 75.” Then, you might think, “Oh, man, I was so close! My third number was 7 off and my next number missed by 8. Damned! Next time, I’ll get two lottery cards and add 7 to my third number and 8 to my fourth number.”

Seeing patterns isn’t just limited to numbers, of course. When people look up at clouds, trees, rocks, marble, inkblots, they often see faces, animals, etc. Our brains are great at finding patterns. And, often we see patterns that aren’t even there. In the wilderness environment, however, what are the relative costs? If we look up in the sky and see a horse head that isn’t really there, what harm is done? You “know” it isn’t really a horse. If you look in the bushes and see a bear and the bear isn’t really there, it might cost you an unnecessary spear throw, but if you fail to see a bear that really is there, you could get eaten. It’s not surprising that we tend to “see” patterns even when they aren’t really there. This generally works well. However, since other people are well aware that people tend to see patterns that aren’t really there, they can use that information to “fool you” into thinking there’s a pattern when there isn’t.

In the case of the wealthy casino operators, they are perfectly happy to get rich off your tendency to imagine that you can find a pattern in random events. But casino operators aren’t the only ones. People who make a percentage on all your stock trades are essentially doing the same thing; they are hoping you will trade a lot based on some imagined pattern. The casino owner and the stockbroker are involved in legal business practices but both take advantage of human illusions and delusions. The real experts on human illusions and delusions, however, are the experts in marketing and advertising.

Their actual job is to get you to spend your hard-earned money on things you don’t want, don’t need, and in many cases are actually harmful to you and your family. True enough, for example, humans did evolve in situations where salt, sugar, and fat were hard to find. But in many (but by no means all) parts of the world now, over-eating is more of a problem than starvation and malnutrition. Most people “know” that too much sugar and too many calories are detrimental to health. Yet, the people who put together commercials are able to convince you to spend money on a kid’s cereal that is not at all good for them. A short visual vignette, for instance, may imply that your kid will love you if you provide this cereal. To assuage your guilt, they may also “fortify” the cereal with some vitamin that the kids are actually very unlikely to be deficient in if they have a natural diet. In other cases, commercials are designed to convince you that a product will make you “cool” or “desirable” or “smart.” Some commercials go further and convince you that you have a problem you didn’t even know you had! “Do you suffer from crenelated elbow skin? When your arms hang down at your sides, you may not see the ugly ridges and valleys of your crenelated elbow skin, but your your friends do. And, let’s face it, that cute junior executive will not be asking you out after all, once he sees the giant crevices of your unsightly flapping elbow skin. Sad, but not incurable! The good news is that now, there is “SMOOTHAWAY” the wonderful new patented elbow cream that dissolves extra flaps of extra elbow skin! Not available in stores, you can order from our toll-free number where our operators are standing by to take your order. If you order in the next five seconds, we will give you two tubes of SMOOTHAWAY, each a $150 value (says who?) for the low, low price of $49.95 plus shipping and handling.”

I have already mentioned in previous posts that there seems to be almost no accountability any more in advertising. “Unscented” cat litter is actually scented — with a scent whose trade name is “Unscented.” “Air Fresheners” do not actually “freshen” the air at all. The contain three ingredients know to cause cancer, mess with your hormone balance, and destroy your sense of smell. “All natural fruit drink” might contain almost nothing that is natural and as little as five per cent fruit juice. There is also the common tactic advertisers of product X use of making you believe that the competitors to product X are really bad for you.” “Our apples are guaranteed gluten free!” “Be confident! Keep your child safe! Our disposable diapers are not made from radioactive wastes.” (Of course, none of them actually are…but it does make you wonder).

Magic shows also “work” because the magician plays on all your illusions and delusions. One of the most persistent illusions is that we “see” everything before us in color and detail. This is completely untrue! You actually see, at any one time, a very small part of the visual field in front of you in color and in detail. Your brain remembers a lot of color and detail as you scan around the scene. But if something changes, you might or might not see it depending on where your attention and your eyes are currently focused.

I remember my Uncle Karl, who landed with the Allies at Omaha Beach, doing “card tricks” for me when I was about five or six. He would take an ordinary deck of cards and show me the four Jacks. He very carefully put the four Jacks into four seemingly random spots in the middle of the deck and then told me an elaborate story about the four Jacks, who were all friends, and their shenanigans. Amazingly, somehow these four Jacks ended up together at the end on the top of the deck. It was utterly impossible, yet Uncle Karl managed it. I don’t recall enough of the details of the trick now to describe how it was actually done but I’m sure you’ve seen similar card tricks. Maybe Karl used real magic. While he was involved in jogging up the beach in Normandy, a point came where suddenly everyone around him disappeared, blown to bit. Only he survived and moved forward from that group of bloody corpses. He didn’t tell me a lot about his experiences in WWII fighting the Nazis except that, toward the end of the war, the German “troops” that they faced consisted largely of boys aged 11-13. That’s the kind of thing an egomaniacal dictator ends up doing to save his delusions of power.

Some magic tricks depend on “sleight of hand.” Others primarily depend on subtle mathematical relationships so that the outcome is guaranteed. One of my favorite tricks is to “force” a card on someone. This one depends on people’s long established habits. If someone hands you something, you take it. It is so ingrained, that you don’t even know you’re doing it, particularly, if I am saying something that requires or entrains your attention. So, I fan out the cards face down, mainly holding them with my thumbs. I ask you to pick a card. Since you are looking down at the cards, you cannot see that underneath the fanned cards, my right middle finger is on the card I want to “force” on you. As I fan the cards back and forth, I move the whole stack as well as the relations slightly. You have some trouble picking a card because of the motion. At last, when the time is right, and your own finger is about to choose a card near the one I want you to pick, I change the angle slightly and flick the desired card into your hand. You believe you’ve made a free choice, but you really haven’t. I keep making it hard to take a card until you are nearly picking the one I want and then I “promote” that card, just a little.

Now, this little trick does not always work. And, it wouldn’t be prudent to try it more than once on someone. (If done repeatedly, most people will eventually catch on that they are being manipulated). If someone does stubbornly take a different card, you simply move to a different trick. But if they do take your card, oh, my that is a breathtaking moment. Imagine this. You know what card they have already. They think that they have chosen a card at random and you do not yet have any idea what it is. So, now you are free to do anything at all! The sky (and your imagination) are the limit. You can have them shred the card, burn the card, eat the card, put in an envelope and send it Certified Mail to White House. It doesn’t matter. You already know it’s the Four of Clubs. You can open a book at random and pretend to pick a word at random. It has four letters. Now you start turning over cards for “vibrations” and then you turn over a club, you keep going but then, say, “Wait!” and go back to it. “Yes, Yes” you say, “there is something here. Clubs. Definitely the four of clubs.”

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One favorite variant on this trick is to have the person put the card back in the deck and have another person shuffle and cut the cards. Now you take the deck and start turning over the cards so they are face up. Once you find the “targeted card”, say the Four of Clubs, you turn over a few more and then say, “OK. I’ll bet you $20 that the next card I turn over is your card.” 95% of the time they will take this bet since you have already turned over their card. You shake on the bet and then rifle through the cards already turned over till you find the Four of Clubs. Now you turn it over. And collect the $20. I don’t actually take people’s money, by the way. And the reason I don’t think it’s fair is that I knew something that they didn’t and I intentionally misled them in several ways. I’m tricking them into taking a “bet” which is for me a sure thing (although they also think it’s a sure thing for them because they’ve already seen me turn their card over). I’ve turned over most likely around 25 cards and each time, I’ve turned it from back to front. I’ve already turned their card over from back to front, so naturally they think my next act is to turn the next card in sequence over from back to front as well. But I don’t. Instead, I turn over their card from front to back. So, our oral contract actually meant one thing to the audience member and something else entirely to me. However, the words that I actually said were consistent with both interpretations. So, in a written contract, I could have collected on this bet. But I still don’t think it would be fair to do so.

Make no mistake. Don’t be fooled. Just because I wouldn’t take your $20 doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of others who would. Oh, yes! They would be happy to take your money by making you believe one thing was going to happen while in fact something else entirely happened. If you notice, even professional magicians have the audience pay for the show. They don’t bet them for money or possessions that they are going to keep because they too think it’s unfair. I think that most people would consider actually taking the money unfair under the circumstances above. What do you think?

I am convinced that there are at least a small percentage of people who not only think it fair to take money under these circumstances; they think it is smart. In fact, they would think I’m being ridiculous for not taking the money. Of course, it need not stop with one bet. A person can parlay one bet into much more because of another little aspect of the human psyche “cognitive dissonance.”

trapped bee

Basically, the idea is that you don’t like it when two apparently contradictory statements are in your head. For example, let’s say you lost the bet above. You think: “Wow. What a sucker I am. I just lost $20!” But, at the same time, you have a concept about yourself which is: “I’m pretty damned clever. I am hard to fool. I am careful with my money. I am a winner!” So, now I offer you a chance to make your money back — and then some. What are you going to do? Well, you might want to reduce that “cognitive dissonance” and think something along these lines. “Hah. I can beat this guy at his own game. I’m smarter than he is. I’ll come out on top in the end and walk away richer.” But you see — no, you aren’t. You might actually be smarter in general, but I know the game. I am setting the rules. This is not some “fair” contest of wits or will. It’s a “game” that I invented. For my benefit.

So “cognitive dissonance” is a kind of potential multiplier on every other illusion and delusion that humans fall prey to. We all make mistakes of perception, judgement, inference, and so on. We all see bears in the clouds. But what if someone points out to you that there is no bear in the clouds? How do you react? Do you say, “Oh, okay, thanks for pointing that out.” Or, do you say, “Oh, yeah?! Well, I see a bear there so there’s a bear there.” If you have that defensive reaction, people will tend to avoid you and if they do run across you, they have no interest in giving you honest feedback. Over time, you will come to have another delusion: “That you are much more often right than anyone else you know.” Why? Because you contradict a lot of other people but they hardly ever contradict you.” You attribute this to your being right, but it’s actually only because you’re much more of a dick than most people when it comes to being confronted with the truth.

Before there were mass e-mails with variations on the “Nigeria scam”, people sent out actual snail mail with essentially the same ruse. I received one such letter in the mail in the 1980’s. At the time, I had not actually heard of this scam. Luckily, I did not reply. It sounded too good to be true, so I figured it probably was. Such scams offer a huge reward if only you will put a little cash up front. Of course, if you do put a little cash up front, you will be asked for more — either more cash or more information or both. The more you “put into” this scam, the more you are willing to risk further in order to get the reward. The mechanism at work here may be similar to what happens to people who go along with abusive relationships as well. “I’ve already invested all this time and energy and pain. Maybe this time, he (or she) really will change and stop (drinking/beating me/lying/being unfaithful, etc.).

Although I did not fall for the Nigerian riches scam, I have had my share of being fooled. Not only was my Uncle Karl’s magic beyond my ken. Most stage magic still astounds me even though I know the general principles that are at work. It still seems that they are doing the “impossible.” The closer I am to the trick, the more amazing it becomes. For instance, at our high school senior prom, we had a stage magician. I was one of four “volunteers” who held a rope around a box that held (or at least thought I held) the magician’s scantily clad female assistant. This was done on the gym floor at Ellet High School. Unlike a stage, I knew quite well that there were no “trap doors” here. All at once the assistant was gone. She literally disappeared right in front of my eyes from a box no more than six feet away. In a magic show, it’s all for fun, but the same principles of playing on your expectations and illusions can be used against you.

As I’ve mentioned before, my older cousin took great delight in manipulating me to my detriment. Among other things, he once “tricked me” into ranting about the failings of our grandfather. He found a moment when I was slightly ticked off at grandpa. Then he took me aside and told me all sorts of bullshit about grandpa. Most of it was just made up, but some of it had some truth to it. Grandpa was skinny. He was old. He was strict. He didn’t like to be interrupted when classical music or opera was playing. But my cousin ranted and raved about this and how unfair Grandpa was and so on. Of course, I wanted to be like my older and bigger cousin. At some point not long after, all of us were together along with the whole family and my cousin said something that triggered one of those aroused dislikes I now had for my grandfather. My mouth began to spout almost exactly what my cousin had just said. Everyone was horrified, especially my cousin. When I called him on it, he simply denied it and said I was just trying to shift the blame for such an unfair and outrageous display against the man we all loved, Grandpa. What a frigging fool I was! Hopefully, you have never been tricked into being mean-spirited to someone who deserved your respect.

Here’s an illusion of a quite different sort. For the first decade I worked at IBM Research, my commute through the beautiful woods and reservoirs of northern Westchester took me through a steel truss bridge. My Datsun at that time only had an AM radio. So, every time I went through the metal bridge, the bridge prevented receiving a strong signal and the volume for “Imus in he Morning” faded. The sound would diminish remarkably upon entering the bridge and then, on the other side, it would return to normal. One day, after work, I “treated myself” to a decent stereo system that included an FM radio as well as a cassette tape player. This was great because now I could listen to “Books on Tape” during my commute. So, the next day, I was driving to work, when all at once, the volume of the tape I was listening to went way up! Then, a few seconds later, the sound went back down to normal. It flashed through my mind that there must be a loose wire from the new installation so that when I went over the bump at the beginning of the bridge…wait a second! I’m so used to the sound going down when I enter the bridge and up when I exit it, that when I had a sound source of constant volume, it sounded as though it was changing!

Technology, of course, can itself be another source of illusions. One rainy Saturday afternoon in my sixth year, the four main adults in my life were in the living room watching TV. (Now, it is important to your understanding of what follows to know that when I am talking about our “TV” of 1951, it is nothing like the TV you have today. Apart from the fact that there were only three channels, and that it was only black and white, the resolution was far less than what you have today. In addition, the image flickered noticeably. Content-wise, it was all rated G. In fact, even most of the things that are G today would not have been allowed on commercial television. Sex was portrayed on TV by implication, not demonstration. And, the implications were carefully aimed to be above the level of an innocent (no Internet) child so that sometimes there were really two shows going on at once; one for children and a slightly edgier version for adults. There was no way that nudity would be presented on TV!)

Anyway, I was in my room and I didn’t hear anything but quiet music coming from the living room of our tiny one floor bungalow. The adults were hardly talking. It sounded boring. But eventually, it also bored me to play with my toys all alone. So, at some point, I wondered out to see what they were watching that enforced such quiet among the normally chatty adults. As I turned the corner into the living room, my mouth literally fell open — for there right in front of me on the TV screen were men and women dancing naked! I like to call a spade a spade so I remarked in amazement, “Mom! Dad! They’re dancing *naked*!” My mom, dad, and grandfather all immediately over-talked each other telling me the same story: “Oh, they’re not naked; they’re wearing their tights!” “Oh,” I replied sagely and went back to my bedroom, whereupon I immediately stripped completely and then re-entered the living room stark naked, dancing in joyful imitation of the professional dancers leaping and twisting on TV. Well, okay, maybe not precisely as they did, but as close as I could manage. As you might imagine, the four adults erupted in unison. “John!! You’re dancing naked!” “No,” I calmly replied, “I’m wearing my tights.” And, I folded my naked arms over my naked chest in triumph and nodded my chin down in a note of finality.

My brilliant answer did not go over well.

But at least the day was no longer boring.

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What if…?

21 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, health, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

competition, creativity, culture, family, life, politics, stories

This is a kind of print medium, backed-up electronically. So, it will still be here in a few minutes, hours, and days. Here’s my suggestion. Read through once while your inner “Yeah-but”-ite chorus is otherwise occupied. You know the “Yeah-but”-ites. We all do. “Yeah but, You can’t possibly afford that.” “Yeah but, you aren’t smart enough to do that.” “Yeah but, no-one would be that kind.” “Yeah but, yeah but, yeah but.” Give the Yeah-but chorus a TV show to watch, knock em out with whiskey — whatever it takes. Read the following once and see where the train of thought takes you. I have been thinking about this in terms of “America” because that’s where I happen to have been born and where I live now. But I suspect you can read what is below and substitute the name of your own country wherever it says “America.” If you do that, can you see these suppositions as equally applicable to your own?

You can always go back and rip my suppositions to shreds when you go through it a second time. In fact, knock yourself out. Read it fifty times and find fifty things wrong every time. First, read it once though, without doing that. Just flow along with the story. I realize it’s a story. I’m not trying to steal your pocketbook or convince you of tax reform or against it or any of that. It’s simply a “what-if” train of thought. I don’t know exactly where it will lead and neither will you, although the “Yeah-but”-ite chorus would insist after line one, that they knew exactly what I am going to say and why it would never work. By the way, if you do go back and read it a second time and find some better alternative, unstated assumption, another line of speculation, etc., I really would like to know. Anyway, here goes…

What if…

The vast majority of Americans actually wanted pretty much the same things for the country?

What if…

The vast majority of Americans wanted the basics for everyone and a few luxuries and a better life for their kids?

What if…

There actually is enough wealth for everyone to have the basics and a few luxuries and build a better life for their kids?

What if…

That were true regardless of political party, religion, region of the country, education level, gender, race, generation, or occupation?

What if…

Agreements and Cooperation actually occur across every boundary in this country far far more often than acts of crime, or even nastiness?

What if…

Acts of crime or violence or scandal are reported far, far more often than the much more numerous cooperative actions?

What if…

Media have discovered that they make a lot more money if they report on sensational rather than inspirational or informational content.

What if…

The politicians, in order to gather our contributions, tend to exaggerate the negative attributes of their opponents and minimize their own while meanwhile exaggerating their own positive qualities and down-playing those of their opponents.

What if…

There were a vast number of improvements that could be made that everyone would agree on?

riverrushing

What if…

Our roads, bridges, and schools could be repaired and rebuilt?

What if…

We discovered that whether buildings and bridges stood or fell depended on physics and not on the political persuasions of the architects?

What if…

We made education a higher priority and spent more money on it than on cosmetics?

What if…

We worked together to improve health in the country by encouraging everyone, male and female, young and old, to exercise more, eat healthier meals, and spend more time interacting with each other than watching TV?

What if…

We forced politicians to do what was best for their constituents rather than what was best for their wealthiest donors (when those are in conflict — they are not always in conflict)?

What if…

We focused on working together to accomplish what we agree on while we have a full and open debate on those things we don’t agree on?

What if…

We took it upon ourselves every day to give each other the benefit of the doubt?

What if…

The next time we are stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, instead of weaving frantically in and out to “save” a few seconds, we kept up as smooth and steady a pace as possible while minimizing lane changes, accelerations, and breaking?

What if…

When we disagree about ends or means, we first recount what we have in common and how we want to deal with disagreements rather than rushing to resolve things once and for all immediately.

What if…

We thought that life itself was a pretty cool gift to be enjoyed and that many human activities such as gardening, dancing, reading, making love, making music, teaching, participating in sports, walking, eating — that they are all pleasurable in and of themselves and not means to some other end like making more money?

What if…

It were possible for people to get together in neighborhoods, cities, states, nations, and world-wide to find, formulate, and solve problems even without governments?

What if…

We saw every human being to be an individual with their own desires, talents, ideas, issues, that to them were just as important as our own are to us?

What if…

The successes, failures, short-comings and talents of each individual were partly based on luck and individual effort, but were also largely based on the actions of their parents, grandparents, neighbors, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, strangers, teachers, doctors, Founding Fathers, explorers, scientists, artists, writers, bakers, truck drivers, fire fighters, police officers, farmers…?

What if…

A major way to reduce abortions would be to educate women better and to give them economic opportunity, and if they did get pregnant without wanting to, they had a much wider variety of choices than: 1. carry to term and give them up for adoption and never see them again or 2. carry to term and then struggle to make ends meat while trying to take care of a a kid on their own or 3. abortion?

What if…

Everyone promised to take care of every child born and make sure any mother who wanted to had the economic, social, and educational resources to give that child an opportunity for a full happy life with the mother being as involved as she wanted to be?

What if…

People viewed jury duty as a civic responsibility rather than something idiotic to be avoided so they can concentrate on more important things?

What if…

People cared as much for the looks of their neighborhood and yard as much as they cared for the appearance of their clothes and hair?

What if…

Every American realized that people from other countries had just as much pride and hope for their own country as we do for ours?

What if…

People who made millions of dollars despite not producing any tangible work product or useful service were not viewed as some higher form of life, but as a kind of parasite on society?

What if…

In other words, actually providing direct value by building, discovering, cooking, growing, teaching, for instance, were viewed as much more valuable than redistributing money that was created by primary work.

What if…

We all realized that we are someplace we’ve never been before and no-one knows for sure what the path forward is, but that whatever the correct path is, it cannot be based on mutual fear and hate but must be based on love and trust?

What if…

Realizing that, we collectively tried to determine how to follow or build paths of love and trust and found ways to overcome hate and fear?

What if…

We used our choices of media to watch and products to buy, not just on how much momentary pleasure they gave us, but also on how they were impacting the world and its people?

What if…

By working together we can build a better world for everyone?

hubble3

What if…

By respecting everyone, we can come to a better appreciation for the complexity that we live in?

What if…

Things are just a means to ends while life is an end in itself?

What if…

People came to see that everyone on earth is closely related?

What if…

People saw life on earth as something precious and worth saving and that that was even more important even than getting a new pair of sneakers?

What if…?

earthfromspace

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Pies on Offer: Rhubarb & Mincemeat

20 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

competition, creativity, ethics, life, politics, sports, stories

So, here we all are, somewhere on earth, each of us is unique; a product of our evolutionary, cultural, and personal histories. I am convinced that the vast majority of us are trying to do their best regardless of country, party, religion, race, or background. And, before launching into a discussion of anything else, it is worth at least a few moments of reflection on the fact that we have changed our world tremendously even in the space of my personal lifetime. I was born in 1945, the year the atomic bomb first devastated human lives. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seventy two more years have passed and we have not had an atomic war. Of course, there is no guarantee that we won’t ever have one but we have survived decades when we might have wreaked this kind of heartless havoc on each other. And, we haven’t.

Another thing that impresses me is that we regularly communicate and cooperate with people across the world. Countries share ideas, products, services, and people. True enough, war persists. Yet, generally, people today enjoy the lowest death rate by violence at any time in our history. (Of course, if you or a loved one is a casualty, there is little comfort in knowing that “in general” people aren’t killed as much by violence as they used to be). But the general decrease is fairly remarkable when you consider a few vital accompanying changes. First, we have far deadlier weapons than ever before. Don’t get me wrong, if you smash someone’s skull with a large rock they are every bit as “dead” as if you drop a bomb on them or poison them. But, today we can kill a great many people at a very great distance. And whereas the strongest and healthiest and best-trained knights may have had a much better chance of survival than weaker or less able cousins, today it does not matter how well-trained you are or how much you can bench press. You will not survive in close proximity to an all-out attack whether by atomic weapons, chemical weapons, or biological ones. Second, we have far more people on earth than we ever have before. More people have been born since I was born than were born from the beginning of history until my birth. We evolved to be hunter-gatherers. We lived in small tribes. Now, we have 7 billion people on this planet.

Imagine that there is only one large pie and four people all must satiate their appetites from that one pie. They might discuss things a bit. Maybe one person would claim to be famished while another does not really care that much for pie but would like to taste it. I would not foresee much trouble with four people. Would you?

Now, imagine that instead of four people, you had four hundred people and they only had one pie to stem their hunger. Wouldn’t you expect a much louder level of argument if not actual fighting to break out? Now, imagine that instead of four hundred people, there were 40,000 people and the only thing to eat was that one pie? Of course, there is a good chance for violence. However, it might also be possible that they would realize one pie split 40,000 ways is not much improvement over nothing. Why fight? It might be better to do a lottery and have the winner lay claim to the whole pie. If they liked, they could share with their friends and family. This may not be great, but it is probably still better than having everyone fight for the pie. Or, people might decide that they will have a contest based on what they value most. If they value physical strength more than any other human attribute, they might have a shot put contest or a wrestling match. The winner of the contest would get the whole pie and would be free to wolf it down themselves or share as they see fit.

Suppose that everyone agreed to a wrestling contest and as the semi-finalists entered the ring, many were shocked at the discrepancy between their apparent physical abilities. Odysseus, let’s call him, sported legs like tree trunks, arms thick with banded muscles. Despite his giant proportions, he walked like a lion displaying a quick, easy grace. By contrast, Cassius, say, appears a bit on the thin side. His gait impresses the crowd as someone who might stumble or fall frequently. How can they both be one match away from champion?

Here’s how. Cassius isn’t using his strength at all. He’s using poison. As in ancient Greece, contestants wear gloves and Cassius, for each of his previous matches, has put a nearly undetectable ointment on the outside of his gloves. He touches his opponent, and they begin to get weary; they nearly fall asleep. But before they are so clearly drugged that foul play would be obvious, Cassius headlocks his disabled and wobbly opponent. The crowd mainly attributes his success to having, despite appearances, a terrifically effective headlock. Why do they do this? They are prone to give Cassius the benefit of the doubt. They do not assume or presume that when someone is successful despite a rather obvious lack of relevant talent, that every one of his previous matches was due to nastiness and breaking the rules.

Now at last, it has become clear. Cassius has succeeded only by some foul means even though the precise nature of that means is not yet clear. The crowd grows restless. Cassius was supposed to embody what the crowd agreed was the most important, best defining characteristic of their hero: physical strength. Instead, Cassius does embody a trait — treachery — a willingness to say one thing and do another; a willingness to break any and all rules in order to win the entire pie for himself to then further dole out as he wishes.

It would be wrong to say that treachery is never a good trait and it would be equally incorrect to say that immense physical strength is always a good thing. For example, what if you appear to agree to be a spy for space aliens but meanwhile tipped off the humans and thus saved humanity from certain annihilation? It seems to me that an ability to be that “treacherous” would be good. On the other side, imagine two people get extremely frustrated trying to level a door. The weaker one pounds the side of his fist on the door twice to vent their frustration then goes back to leveling the door. The stronger one, however, whams the door with his fist hard enough to break the door and embed his hand into the splintered wood. He becomes trapped there and bleeds out through his shredded brachial artery.

However…

It needs to be noted that everyone agreed that the they wanted their hero to be the one with the most physical strength, not the one most willing and able to be treacherous. Odysseus played the agreed upon game and stood poised to win. Cassius on the other hand, did not argue with the crowd and try to convince them that treachery trumped strength and therefore they should have a treachery contest. No. Cassius pretended to agree to play the game of “who is stronger than whom” but what he really played was the treachery game all along. In a way, this is not all that surprising because that is the game he is best at. Cassius isn’t so deluded as to think that he is better at actual wrestling than Odysseus.

The thing that I find surprising about this scenario is that people didn’t catch on much sooner that Cassius was not winning his matches through ability but through treachery. As I said, I believe one reason for this is simply that most people are willing to give others the benefit of the doubt. Second, while many might have admired Odysseus, others may have been secretly resentful. They realized that they could never be as agile, as strong, as skilled as Odysseus. On the other hand, when they looked at Cassius, they might think, “Hey. Here’s a regular guy like me. If he can win the pie, it’ll be almost as good as if I get the pie! Anyway, he promised to distribute ten of these pies to everyone if he wins, so maybe, just maybe, I won’t think about other possible ways he could have ousted bigger, stronger, faster opponents.” Of course, once more and more people come to recognize the fundamental treachery of Cassius, the ones who knew the longest become more and more vested not to admit that they knew all along. They keep on cheering for Cassius: “Look at those biceps! No wonder he beat all those others! Killer headlock! Go Cassius!” Others in the crowd look at the biceps of Cassius and what they see is pretty damned ordinary arms; if anything, a bit on the puny side. There is nothing to their eyes, that trumpets: “Look out! Killer headlock!”

So, here we find a divided crowd. Those people who believe ability is most important believe basically this: “This is insane. Has the rest of the crowd gone blind? How can they speak of the ability of Cassius as being the cause of his success. It’s poison and we will prove it. And people guilty of treachery will be punished.”

The Cassiusists, on the other hand, believe: “…that treachery wins the day and, in fact, that it is a kind of wily intelligence. The human race didn’t get where it is because of strength. We aren’t anywhere near the strongest. But we may well be the wiliest. We set traps for other animals. We learn their habits and hunt them down. We bait hooks for fish. We domesticate other animals for our purpose. All of it hinges on a kind of treachery. As they say, hunting is the only sporting event where only one side knows it’s playing. Anyway, there’s always been treachery in politics, hasn’t there? It’s smart to win any way you can.”

Yes, I agree it is smart to win any way you can. Under the following two conditions:

What counts as “you” winning is only what happens to the protoplasm inside your skin. This attitude is off by orders of magnitude. As discussed in an earlier blog post, most of you is outside the boundaries of your own skin. Most of what is in the interest of Cassius is not within the boundaries of his own skin but in everyone else in the entire crowd and therefore how his actions impact them, is on the whole, hugely more important than the impact on himself, even from the standpoint of self-interest.
One note does not make a symphony. The pie splitting contests are not a one-time deal. People play over and over and over again. If you use treachery, you encourage treachery in others. Yes, if everyone else is trusting, you will gain a lot in the very short term. But in the long term, you will be punished right back. And your descendants will live in world that much more ruled by treachery than ability. It’s actually a long-term lose for everyone, including those who are “best” at treachery and that is true regardless of whether you are “found out.”

Meanwhile, of course, what is even more important is what is not happening to the extent it could while people argue about how the pie should be split and who should get to decide. Diseases are not being cured to the extent and rapidity to which they could. People are not getting the education to the extent they could. Better international cooperation and mutual respect is not being accomplished. Better roads are not being built. Crumbling bridges are not being repaired. Scientific discoveries are not expanding our knowledge of the universe as quickly as they could. Affordable healthcare and wellness are not improving in the country.

What this all amounts to is that we are not creating more pies. We are too busy fighting about who should be awarded the pie we have. This is the other reason why treachery is not a reasonable value for a society to hold dear, let alone primary. Treachery leads to treachery. And, although it is true that those in power can do a lot of dictating, no matter how heavy-handed a reign of terror becomes, it is always subject to overthrow and revolution. And, during such a struggle, we are essentially fighting over who gets how much of the pie and — oh, by the way — killing each other in the process. We are not during tyranny or revolution making all that many pies. That’s why, to me, it is antithetical to the whole idea of any society whatsoever; any form of cooperation; to reward treachery.

There is room for legitimate debate about which qualities are most important for someone who gets to decide who gets how much pie. If that same person also gets to decide how much energy we put into making which additional pies, this adds another set of important qualifications. If splitting pies is the hero’s only job, being fair-minded, open-minded, generous, would seem to be good qualities. If the hero also had a large role in determining how many and what kinds of new pies to create, then, being vastly knowledgeable and intelligent would be vital; being able to communicate across disciplines and interests in order to make difficult tradeoffs would be important. In the best case scenario, this person would take in good ideas from all angles and help produce even better ones on output.

The only scenario that makes sense for me to have a treacherous leader would be to imagine that we live in a completely treacherous world internationally and in that sense, there is a “fixed pie” model of the world economy. What France gains, I necessarily lose and vice versa. This is, by the way, an insanely incorrect model of the world. It is far more cooperative than competitive. Of course, this is not to say that countries do not sometimes compete for Olympic venues or airline contracts. But this is overwhelmingly accomplished without treachery by staying within agreed upon rules of the game. People don’t always agree with every specific rule; they may try to change them, but for now, everyone’s agreed to play by them.

Yes, under the incorrect scenario of a treacherous world, having a treacherous leader would make some sense, but only provided treacherousness was “maxed out” because otherwise it is still in someone’s best interest not to be treacherous. Of course, the other critical proviso is that we would have to completely trust that the person would be treacherous to other countries but honest and above-board with its own crowd or citizens. A Medieval king or queen may have been able to pull this off. I submit it’s impossible today except for a few dictatorships where news from the outside world is heavily censored. When people have access to the internet and social media, for example, you cannot say one thing to one nation or group or crowd and a completely different thing to a different crowd or nation or reporter. So, it seems completely paradoxical to have a leader who is maximally “treacherous” to be of any long-term value. You couldn’t trust him on a long-term basis and neither could any other nation. Once trust is completely gone, it takes a long time to win it back. As a strategy, treachery seems a really out-dated one. If you really love treachery, I can see why you would want to cut back on education, quash any dissenting views and so on. Without that, you couldn’t get it to work against your own citizens more than once or twice. But if you prevent people from ever finding out, it will take longer. It won’t take forever. But it will take awhile. And meanwhile, treachery metastasizes throughout the land. I like to think the immune system of the crowd is sufficiently strong to treat the tumor successfully or isolating it from the rest of the body. These are the best ways.

(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).

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Claude, the Radio Operator

28 Sunday May 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, family, management, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

communication, dinosaurs, diversity, family, learning, politics, soldiers, stories

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When I was about seven, I got my first bronzed dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. I earned bribe money for being good about getting my butt stabbed by penicillin shots. In any case, I discovered these dinosaurs on the last page of my grandpa’s The Natural History Magazine. They looked really cool! The designers had chosen to make the T-Rex’s forearms look more robust than would have been a perfectly scale model with those teeny hands. The T-Rex was great! It was solid and cold and heavy because it was metal. There is something about metal or wood or stone that resonates with me much more deeply than plastic ever could. (Sorry, plastic. I know you are a cool invention and really inexpensive and very malleable and all of that. But, you just don’t touch my soul like wood, metal, and stone do.) When I moved the T-Rex, my muscles felt it. Perhaps this is one reason that I still have much of my dinosaur collection 65 years later. (How many of your plastic toys do you still have from 65 years ago?) I didn’t think so. But they are out there somewhere, along with my own forgotten plastic toys, polluting the world for centuries to come.

Bronze, as you have seen many times in your life, does not look worse when it oxidizes as iron does when it rusts. Instead, Bronze turns a beautiful powdery light green with the slightest hint of blue. So, T-Rex looked beautiful as well. So, you might well think that the next time I had enough cash for one of these statues (1$ for the small size and 2$ for the large size) I would get another T-Rex. No, I got a Dimetrodon and a Stegosaurus. Later I got a Trachodon and a Brontosaurus. Anyway, what was fun about this diverse cast of characters is how different they were from each other and the richness with which they interacted. There’s no way it would have been as much fun if it were one army of T-Rex’s against another. (Poor brontosaurus’s tail fell off many times but my dad is no longer here to solder it back and anyway, the tail got lost in the last move).

Similarly, a few years later, when I owned toy soldiers, I enjoyed having ones with different properties; that is, mainly different weapons. Liking the variety must have been true for other kids as well because the sets that I could buy were always mixed. My favorite type of soldier were hollow lead ones. They were well enough hand-painted that you could see their faces, although not so well that you could determine whether they were fighting out of hate, out of fear, loyalty, patriotism, duty, because it’s a job, or for some private demon. I especially liked the bazooka men. I think I owned four of them. Of course, this weapon takes a while to reload and there probably aren’t a huge number of rounds. On the other hand, there were machine gunners, riflemen (more of them than anyone else), and a couple of officers who were pointing a pistol. There were also a couple of dudes sitting on the ground with a *serious* machine gun tucked between their spread-eagled legs. There were also a couple of hand grenade throwers. Another soldier had a rifle with a bayonet raised up above his head. This made arranging them for a pitched “battle” all that much more interesting. Although they had very different weapons, all of them had obvious lethal capabilities. All but one. There was one poor guy with no weapon whatever. His job was communications. His only visible “weapon” was a rather large boxy radio set. I suppose in a pinch, he could whack someone in the face with it. Even if that didn’t kill them, it would for sure put a crimp in their dinner plans.

It was difficult for me to decide which one of these soldiers I would “be.” I liked the bazooka man a lot. The rifleman looked cool. By the way, there were three versions. One type of rifleman lay on the ground with legs spread and the rifle stabilized by his elbows on the ground. Another type of rifleman sat on the ground and put the rifle across his upright knees for support. The third type, and my favorite, was the proudly standing rifleman. Thinking about it from an adult perspective, he’s probably the guy who was voted by his platoon: “most likely to die quickly.” But I didn’t think about that then. Sometimes, I thought it would be cool to be the officer pointing the pistol. Obviously, in most ways, it wasn’t as devastating a weapon as a rifle. Although conceivably in very close quarters, he might outmaneuver a rifleman. But there was one guy that I definitely did not want to be.

You guessed it. I never wanted to be the guy on the radio. Let’s call him “Claude.” Claude didn’t get to actually fight! And, it seemed to me at that point that I could stay alive no matter what obstacles and enemies were thrown at me — if only I were an excellent enough rifleman (or bazooka man, or pistol-wielding officer). On the other hand, it seemed as though “anybody” could do Claude’s communications job and would do it equally well. Furthermore, it seemed any enemy could just walk right up and shoot this dude Claude before he knew what hit him and way before he transforms his awkward radio set into a lethal weapon. Of course, Jason Bourne could do it, but I don’t think Claude had that kind of training. And, anyway, the first movie didn’t come out until 2002 and this was the early 1950’s. Treadstone didn’t exist back then. (BTW, this is not “my” Claude but it’s the closest image I could find.)

Claude

As I mentioned, these hand-painted lead soldiers were my favorites but I owned three other types. One were extremely detailed and beautiful lead soldiers. These suckers were expensive and, as I quickly discovered, not very durable in real “battles.” When you smashed them into each other, the horses tended to break, or what was more typical and worse, not break but bend into an uncomfortable and unrealistic position. At that point, I would very carefully ease the broken leg into position, Angstrom by Angstrom… Snap!! It would break off in my hands. That was worse. I felt as though I had personally snapped that beautiful white horse’s leg in half. It always seemed as though I could ease it back into position and I almost succeeded each time. Then, SNAP. Suddenly I am holding a three legged horse in one hand and a piece of horse leg in the other. My favorite of these collections were the “Coldstream Guards” with their white and bright red uniforms with splashes of gold. It is sad, I can tell you, to be an eight year-old general and not be able to put your most beautiful soldiers into battle. But, beautiful as they were, they were fragile. I did manage to break a few of the hollow leaden ones as well, but I had to work at it.

Then, there were unpainted plastic soldiers. They came in a kind of gray-green suggestive of olive drab. Let’s call it “off-olive drab” like the olive from that bottle of garlic clove filled green olives that you accidentally left at the very back of the fridge for five years. Then, when you finally discovered, it, the olives looked as toxic as rain forest frogs; but far from a beautiful bright warning color, these were so drably off-olive that you almost didn’t see them. But, as for the soldiers, it wasn’t just their uniforms that were off-olive drab. All of them, including the little flat plastic stands, their expressionless faces, and their normal-sized (well, normal scaled I should say) hands exuded that same toxicity of colorlessness. Their one giant advantage was that they were far cheaper than the painted leaden ones. And, whereas the fancy ones were fragile and the leaden ones were rugged but breakable, these all-plastic soldiers could not be broken. For some reason, I do know that they can be cut with an ordinary steak knife provided you have enough patience and are smart enough after you’re caught the first time “ruining” the steak knives, to make sure the second time you experiment when you’re alone. The plastic ones can also be melted. However, melting them had the side-effect of greatly disturbing my parents because of the toxic fumes that permeated our house. (I think we will have to leave for another time the question of why I wanted to know these things). One great thing about these plastic soldiers was that they were to the same scale as the metal ones. So, they could all participate in the same battles without stretching the credibility till it snaps like a rubber band and stings the soul of make-believe.

Ah, but there was as well a fourth type of soldier. These were insanely cheap plastic soldiers! A hundred soldiers for a dollar! I ordered two sets so I would have an amazing two hundred soldiers along with the probably 75 I already had. And then they arrived. Yay! Imagine! My army would now rival those of Caesar, Hannibal, Grant, Patton!

My first clue that something must be terribly wrong was the size of the shipping box — unbelievably small for 200 soldiers. I opened the boxes and then got to the actual soldiers. They were in 2 point font. They were approximately the size of one of the feet of my other soldiers. And, these soldiers gave a whole new depth of meaning to the expression, “cheap plastic.” These soldiers were fabricated out of some material that was like what plastic uses when it doesn’t bring out the good stuff for company. And, “fragile” doesn’t quite do justice to the care with which these teeny slats of plastic needed to be handled. Oh, by the way, speaking of “slats,” did I mention that they were two dimensional? Did I mention that not only couldn’t you discern the motivations of the solider from their face, you couldn’t discern whether they even had faces. These soldiers were not of molded plastic; they were basically stamped. In fact, each solider had to be detached from a long plastic rod by twisting.

How could I have possibly known I would waste my two dollars? The picture that accompanied the advertisement for these soldiers depicted something other than their product. The picture showed something every bit as detailed and colorful and three dimensional as the hollow leaden soldiers. These same comic books also advertised “sea monkeys.” In the picture, there are “families” of little human-looking aquatic monkeys. You can tell what mood they are in and how the various family members interact. Well, I thought this was fantastic! But I didn’t totally believe it was possible either so I asked my grandpa whether they were real. He said they were just brine shrimp. I also saw that there was a teeny asterisk in the corner of the picture, half hiding in the seaweed that some of the “sea monkeys” were harvesting for the family meal. Then, in almost unreadably tiny type, the asterisk was explained, “visual depiction may not precisely duplicate visual characteristics of crustacean provided” or some equally incomprehensible legalese gibberish that very few 8 year olds are going to comprehend (in the more recent version shown here, I don’t even see that cryptic warning).

SeaMonkeys

Apparently, we live in a society where that’s okay. I think part of the reason it’s okay is that we live in a very differentiated society. If you think about the single artist, craftsman, or chef, they are much more about substance than puffery. You don’t typically expect someone who makes something to be dishonest about what it was they did. However, hiring a advertising expert brings into play a different set of factors. The advertising person cannot make a better painting, or chair or soufflé. Their expertise and their “product” is in making people buy the substantive product. If they can lie, exaggerate, or mislead and get away with it, so long as sales go up, that is a win for the advertiser. Needless to say, they would never describe what they do as a lie. Because, after all, who would advertise a “lie” as being a “lie”? Then, you might not want to buy one. They have a whole raft of explanations as to why what they are doing is really in everyone’s interest. They’ve rehearsed it and perfected it and —- since this is what they expert in — they will probably have you agreeing with them. I’m not sure it is just fine and dandy, especially when it’s combined with a low quality product such as brine shrimp or “toy soldiers” that are too small to be used or played with as toy soldiers. In these cases, the actual product is nothing like what they “depicting” it as.

It gets a bit murkier when their are unstated but implied benefits. BMW actually does make a fine car. However, you are not going to be driving it long if you drive it the way it is portrayed on commercials. Similarly, a car is not going to be very often the snappifying head-turner among young people seeking a mate that the advertisers would have you believe. It isn’t merely that advertising tends to have us spend money on products and services that aren’t really filling our needs, although that is problematic. We spend a huge amount of money on junk food, cosmetics, and so on — and more than on medical research. But in addition to that, doesn’t it seem to undermine the meaning of truth in all human discourse? Or, is it okay to lie if you are an advertiser because they are doing it for money? In other words, it’s okay to lie if you are benefiting yourself, perhaps because you are undoubtedly benefiting your client even more?

We are more and more and more connected electronically. This is good news. And this is bad news too. One thing, though is certain. The potential impact of a lie is tremendous and much much more than it was in the past. In distant times, a lie had only local impact. Now, a lie could literally destroy the world. So, to me, the balance point of when it’s “okay to lie” is way different than it was 20,000 years ago.

I believe there is a way for people to provide value to each other honestly and still have a thriving economy. In any case, even if we never reach that point and advertisers continue to oversell products, can we at least try to be vigilant not to let that attitude toward the truth permeate every other aspect of life? A large complex and highly differentiated society can only exist in an atmosphere of trust. You must trust that the drivers of the other cars on the road are not trying to kill you. You must trust that the food you buy is not poison. You must trust that the policeman is there to protect you. If that trust breaks down, there is no longer a society. So intentionally lying in order to make a buck (or a point) is really a push toward utter chaos and anarchy. Obviously, no single push will bring us there, but we must be extremely careful. Why? Because lack of trust is contagious (as is trust). A slight imbalance between trust and mistrust could become a vicious cycle. Information is the resolution of uncertainty, not the multiplication of uncertainty.

A communication network of people becomes more valuable as the number of people increases. A network of, say, 350,000,000 people is much more valuable than 10 relatively homogeneous networks of 35,000,000 each. And, to take this to the extreme, it’s much more valuable than 350,000,000 networks of one person each, no matter how smart or strong that one person is or how many treasure-troves of weapons they have. We need to work together whatever differences exist. That’s why it’s important that we all keep communicating. That’s why it’s important that we try to be as truthful as possible. That’s why I now think that Claude, the radioman, may be the most skilled and crucial solider of all.

Find it on: my Amazon author page

City Mouse and Country Mouse

04 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

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architecture, culture, ethics, politics, psychology

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In our childhood, many of us heard the fable of the city mouse and country mouse. Briefly, the city mouse invites his cousin, country mouse, to visit him in the city. At first, the country mouse is quite impressed with the array of food available in the city mouse’s home. Then, the house cat comes with sharp claws and long pointed teeth and nearly rips them both apart. In the end, the country mouse scampers back and shouts back to his city cousin something to the effect that he’s happy to have his bread crumbs in peace rather than risking life and limb in the city. The exact words, I don’t recall, but they have probably suffered in the translation from Aesop’s ancient Greek to modern English and even more severely in the translation from mousespeak to human speech. Most likely, the original sounded something like this: “Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.”

Aesop Fable of the Mice

No doubt there are advantages and disadvantages for a mouse to live in the city or the country. Both places have sources of food and both have predators. But what about human beings? Here too, there are advantages and disadvantages of living in a large city versus living in the country or a small town. While human beings undoubtedly have many behaviors that are influenced by “instinct”, people are also capable of learning. Moreover, because we humans can talk and write and are fundamentally social beings, not only do urban and rural environments result in different kinds of individual skills, in a fairly short time, they also result in different cultures. These differences are not arbitrary but are adaptations to characteristics of the two environments.

In cities (and especially coastal cities), people typically come in contact with a huge variety of people. Many metropolitan areas feature different cuisines, attractions, races, religions, sexual preferences, and so on. Take the matter of cuisine. It is easy in New York City, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Washington DC, Seattle, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, or San Diego to find restaurants that serve excellent Italian, French, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Vegetarian, Vegan, Ethiopian, Jewish or Indian food. I happen to love them all! But if someone hates any of these options, it is also easy to avoid that option. You don’t care for Indian food? No problem. Don’t go. Suppose however, you are with a group of friends and everyone else wants to go for sushi which you happen to hate. The vast majority of urban Japanese restaurants in the USA offer other options that are “close to” traditional American cuisine. So, you can go to a Japanese restaurant with your friends and order steak teriyaki while they all eat raw fish.

But let’s just suppose that for whatever reason, you are so appalled by raw fish that you get sick watching someone else eating it. Well, you simply don’t watch. Now, the thing about living in a big city is that you don’t have to create this solution on your own. That’s what everyone does. If they see something they don’t like, they look away. They learn not to dwell on it. It’s very crowded in a city. If you walk around or take public transportation being “offended” or “put off” by anyone who speaks differently, dresses differently, eats differently, worships differently, looks different, etc. you are going to quickly become completely stressed out and become one completely unhappy camper. People in large cities learn to be polite and focus their energy on the places and people that give them joy. It takes time to find friends but eventually you find people who share fundamental interests and values. They might be next door, but more likely, they are are a subway ride or long walk away. There are literally more than a million people in any large city that you never get to know. Because there are so many choices, plenty of opportunities arise to do what you like and many people who will join you. You might love tennis, roller skating, and art museums. You might never step foot in the science museum or the public library or the parks. It’s all fine. The culture of the city is tolerance for everyone. Yet, people find those they relate to from a huge pool. If you come from, say, China, and you want to stick with other Chinese people, you can easily do that. You can survive in New York City or San Francisco without having to experience Mexican food or even without learning much English. On the other hand, if you want to become assimilated into more “mainstream” American culture and eat pizza every day and listen to jazz and dress like an American Indian — hey, you’re welcome to do that too. Because everyone passes by people that are so different every day, almost everyone learns tolerance. In essence, you see, there is not “one” New York City or Los Angeles, there are thousands! People essentially live in their own version of these cities and become close only with a small group of like-minded people. Of course, your “tennis friends” might be different from your “roller skating friends” which might be a slightly different group than your “art museum friends.” But even putting all your friends together, the people you know are only 1/10,000 or 1/100,000 of the people in the city.

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There is a down side. You may never get to know your next door neighbors. You and they may simply have very different tastes and interests. Besides that, there is a lot of turnover in a city. Often, there doesn’t seem to be much point in becoming friends simply because you live next door partly because they (or you) are quite likely to move away in a month. There is a worse down side as well. At the extreme, the distance that people create mentally to accommodate the extremely close physical proximity and the culture of leaving others alone also makes it possible for someone to be stabbed on the street without anyone helping. This phenomenon has been studied and called “bystander behavior.” People are actually much more likely to help if they are the only witness than if they are one of 100. Each of the 100 looks around and sees that none of the other 99 are doing anything and so conclude, all evidence to the contrary, that nothing much is happening or else the other 99 people would be helping. In any case, the “culture” that arises in cities is typically quite tolerant of differences, somewhat distant from the vast majority of your fellow citizens but certainly allows for close friendships based on any combination of a hundred different factors. Because large cities develop a culture of tolerance for other types of people, that fact becomes known and attracts still more diversity which in turn encourages more tolerance and diversity.

There is another important aspect of living in a large city. It is crowded and complex. You constantly have to “trust” people you don’t know who drive the taxis, deliver the food, come to fix your cable, police the streets and so on. These are typically not people you know. In fact, for the most part, you won’t even see them again. But it is impractical not to trust all these strangers. Most of the time, the trust works out though on rare occasions, it backfires.

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The experience of living in a small rural town is completely different. There are not 400 different restaurants to choose from. There might be three. Possibly one of the three is ethnic, but it is far less likely. A Korean restaurant in New York City can be quite profitable if only .01% of the NYC population goes there regularly. That won’t work in Woburn MA or Bend OR though, let alone in a town of 5000. A small town in America may well have a baseball diamond and a public library. But they are unlikely to have a holography museum or a laser tag facility. The sheer small number of people living in a small town means, in essence, that the citizens must agree on what types of restaurants are available, what recreational facilities are available, what clothing stores are in town and so on. In addition, everyone in town is likely to run into everyone else again and again. Rather than learning to avoid and look away and ignore things you don’t personally care for, people in small towns instead lean in. They want to know what exactly is going on with everyone else in town. Everyone soon knows who the town drunk is and who is having an affair with whom. People in small towns do not typically think, “It’s none of my business” but that’s exactly what they think in large cities.

For these reasons, people in small towns are less likely to learn the skill of looking away. If they personally hate sushi and end up visiting a relative in a big city and then end up in a Japanese restaurant, they are both fascinated and disgusted by watching their cousin eat sushi. They could theoretically just look away, but that is not a very well learned skill for most. For these reasons, the culture of the small town also evolves to be different. People who thrive on diversity and believe strongly in tolerance feel as though they don’t belong and they also feel deprived of interesting possibilities so most end up moving away. Of course, that makes the town even more homogeneous. The small town ends up being much more “tight knit” than a random group of 5000 people in a large city. It seems much less likely people would fail to help someone being stabbed on the street (though I haven’t actually tried that experiment).

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In a small town, since people know almost everyone they interact with, they don’t really have to trust strangers all that much. If someone new delivers the mail, the small town person is likely to ask whether they just moved in town, where they live and so on. This would be considered quite rude and even weird in a big city. People in a small town probe to know people in their small town. They tune in not out. They are much more likely to choose friends partly on the basis of location rather than vocation. Because of this cluster of factors, people in one small town are more likely to stay in that small town. It is probably much more “disruptive” to move from Woburn MA to Bend OR than to move from New York City to Los Angeles. Of course, either move means you will have to learn where things are, get a new driver’s license, make new friends etc., but the “culture” of cities is becoming similar all across America and indeed, all across the world. Two small towns can have quite different cultures.

People from large cities are likely to feel quite different on a number of issues compared with people from small towns. People in large cities have been trained and acculturated to simply look away and ignore things and people that they don’t like and to focus on what they do like. Conversely, people in small towns have learned to depend on everyone and so want everyone to agree on a much larger range of issues. There are enough resources in a large city to have scores of museums and hundreds of restaurants and scores of clothing stores. People don’t need to agree on taste. But in a small town, that’s not true. There is much greater pressure to agree on what the “right” museum is for the town, what the “right” kind of food is to serve at the handful of restaurants and what the “right” kind of clothing might be.

People in a small town are likely to know the police that they come in contact with. If a police officer in a small town arrests someone or even shoots them, people in a small town are much more likely to know both the police officer and the person arrested. Provided the police officer is known as a generally fair-minded person, the people in the small town are much more likely to be sympathetic. In addition, they may well known that the person arrested (or even shot) is and has been a “bad guy” the whole time he’s been in town.

In a large city, by contrast, people who read or hear about someone making an arrest or very unlikely to know personally either the policeman or the suspect. They probably still have a presumption that the police probably acted correctly. However, their reactions are much more likely to vary from person to person that what you would find in a small town.

Needless to say, cities do differ from each other in terms of culture and so do small towns. For example, Murray Hill, New Jersey is not a huge city (population around 3500). However, many of the people there were from Bell Labs, a large famous research institute long part of AT&T but now part of Nokia. That particular small area includes residents from many countries, liberal and very well funded schools, and so on. Small towns that grow up around trade centers, farming communities, research centers and universities, or coal mining undoubtedly have very different typical “cultures.” Similarly, a large city like New York that has people from all over the world is quite different than one of the Chinese cities around large-scale manufacturing facilities (e.g., Guangzhou or Shenzhen. Nonetheless, as a general rule, living in a small town versus a large city tends to produce different skill sets and a different outlook and culture.

What can small town cultures and big city cultures learn from each other? How can these cultures tolerate each other? Is there a way to have the advantages of both? If humanity keeps exponentially increasing population, will there even be any “small towns” left in 100 or 500 years? To me, city culture and small town/rural culture mirror many of the distinctions made by Jane Jacobs in “Systems of Survival.” I recommend this as an interesting (and short) read.

Systems of Survival

author page on Amazon

Big Zig Zag Canyon

20 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

America, ecology, hiking, Mt. Hood, politics

Big Zig Zag Canyon

mthood

Ever since I can remember, I have enjoyed hiking. Where I grew up, in Northeastern Ohio, woods, fields, streams and hills provided the typical backdrop. I still cannot deny that every new vista, every turn of the path provides a coursing-through-your-body pleasure…unless of course, the path becomes actually dangerous rather than simply breathtaking. People differ a lot on where that boundary lies between thrilling and insanely stupid. Personally, I find that I get plenty of “adrenaline rushes” simply from being a driver or pedestrian or cyclist. Walking across a fallen log 50 feet above a ravine has never been my idea of a good time. I would, of course, try it if necessary but I wouldn’t enjoy it. On the other hand, speaking in public has always seemed pleasurable although it is definitely nerve-wracking. In any case, it has always seemed to me that there are millions of interesting, beautiful, unique paths, in just America’s own 50 states, that have very little intrinsic danger. All of them are worth pursuing.

I never saw “real” mountains till I visited the West Coast. I hiked a few times on Mt. Ranier with my brothers-in-law. When some of them attended college at Reed in Portland, we decided to take a hike on Mt. Hood in order to take advantage of the clear day. The odd thing about climbing a mounting, at least in the Pacific NW is that often your view of the mountain becomes more and more obscured as you come closer to the parking lot where you begin your journey. By the time you park, you actually possess zero sensory evidence that you are anywhere near a mountain and have to believe it must be there somewhere because of your general orientation in space and because of your belief in social cooperation in providing actual rather than false trails, accurate maps, compasses that more or less work, etc.

Imagine instead that we lived in a society where it was more common to make false trails than real ones; a society where it was more common to publish false maps than real ones; a society where compasses were all digital — and regularly hacked. Would you still bother to try to climb a mountain for pleasure? At the very least, you would build a completely different strategy.

For our actual hike, however, we lived in a society wherein we could generally trust people. We had a map and headed out for what we estimated to be a hike to get us back to the car right before dark. We were not attempting the summit, but it certainly appeared to be a serious hike. We were basically doing a kind of helical partial circumference trek. The scenery began as spruce and pine gradually giving way to more scrub and less forest. Occasionally, we were rewarded with glimpses of the summit. A fair amount of the hike soon consisted of taking zig zag paths up and down small canyons. As we continued these became larger. And larger. And larger. Now our elevation map indeed warned us of “Little Zig Zag Canyon” and “Big Zig Zag Canyon” but we weren’t precisely sure where we were.

As we encountered ever larger canyons, we kept revising our idea about where we were. As we finished one canyon, we would always say, “Well, that must have been Big Zig Zag Canyon, so we must be *here* on the map.” At one point, after just deciding that we had conquered Big Zig Zag Canyon, we emerged from a grove of hemlock to a gaping maw of the mountain. It completely dwarfed anything we had seen before. Obviously, the much lesser giant we had already conquered was only “Little Zig Zag Canyon” and we were only now facing “Big Zig Zag Canyon.” It probably took at least an hour to descend and re-ascend. As those of you who have ever climbed on a mountain know, changing elevation is much like traveling in time. As we descended, the cold frozen ground of winter gave way to the first signs of spring. As we continued our descent, weeds and flowers abound and trees bud and leaf. At the bottom of the ravine, it felt like a summer day. And, again, on the way up, there was the feeling of time travel compression. We were climbing through weeks of season change in minutes. At last we reached the top of the trail and looked back at this canyon which would have been much better named “Gargantuan Zig Zag Canyon”! One last look and we turned back to the path into another forests. At the entrance to the forest, I noticed there was a small wooden sign oriented toward people leaving the forest and entering the canyon. Curious, I ventured forth and looked back to read: “Little Zig Zag Canyon.” What!!?? That enormous chasm in the earth was little Zig Zag Canyon?

Up to this point, our hike had been vigorous but not dangerous. However, now a small and subtle danger did present itself. We might be lucky to make it back to the car by dark. We had not bought provisions for an over-night stay. Hiking in the dark is dangerous. And, it gets really cold at night. So, now the question was, could we still cross the next canyon and still get back by dark? We decided we could. We did make it back before dark, but barely. Clearly, “Big” Zig Zag Canyon was a name chosen in a paroxysm of understatement while “Little” Zig Zag Canyon was just a bald-faced lie.

Like it or not, we journey now on spaceship earth. We are traveling together with everyone else on the planet. Neither a single person on the planet nor all of us collectively have a guaranteed comprehensive well thought out plan for how to avoid any one of a number of ecological disasters. Throughout the planet, there are numerous religions and cultures. Getting along with each other is critical, even if many countries did not have nuclear weapons, which we do. To enhance the adrenaline rush, these various countries and cultures and religions are associated with many different languages and stories about how we got to where we are today. Everyone, in other words, has a different map. There are no posted signs. And no-one owns a compass.

I could say, “Fasten Your Seat Belts Folks. We are in for turbulence.” I could say that to bend the spaceship metaphor. But if we think of ourselves as passengers on a plane that someone else, perhaps even someone competent, is piloting, I believe that stance pretty much guarantees that humanity’s day’s are numbered. No, I think a vigorous and potentially dangerous hike is more in order. Sometimes, it will feel as though you are going backwards in time and sometimes forward at lightning speed. Everywhere along the path, you will have to watch your step, even as you take the time to appreciate the beauty still surrounding you. And just when you think you have conquered the biggest challenge we have ever faced, a still larger challenge will appear.

I am hopeful.

panorama of Big Zig Zag Canyon

Tales from an American Childhood

Author Page on Amazon

website of stories, poems

The Crabs are Biting

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by petersironwood in psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ethics, fishing, politics, story

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

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

≈ 76 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.

petersironwood

~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

Tag Archives: politics

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