Heroes and Monsters: Dan Gardner Questions Sanity

 

"And choice requires awareness. The mentally ill man who strangles a woman because he believes she is a python attempting to swallow him is not aware of reality and cannot be said to have chosen to strangle the woman. He certainly is dangerous and he can be incarcerated until such time as he is restored to mental health. But as Western jurists have recognized since the time of Aristotle, he cannot justly be condemned and punished."

 

 

Dan Gardner has repeatedly gone further down the rabbit hole of society and his own soul more than most writers I know and is to be commended for that.  In this case, though, I think he needs to go down a bit further.

 

 

Choice, Gardner suggests, requires awareness.  The man strangling the woman he thinks is a python, to use Gardner's example, has not chosen to strangle the woman; he was choosing to strangle a python.  But that was a choice; it simply wasn't one made with a full appreciation of the context or content of the situation.  He could have chosen to walk away from the python, too, but something made him attack.  You might think that's quibbling with words; it's not.  Boiled down to its basic points, the hallucinating man perceived a threat, his body produced the right hormones to incite a fight-or-flight response and it was that emotional state that fueled his choice of reaction.

 

 

Take a completely different example: Darrell Krushelnicki is undeniably a hero for saving the lives of four children from a negligent driver.  The other driver/would-be commiter of manslaughter (because slamming into four kids you didn't see isn't a conscious act of murder) was apparently focused on his cell phone; Krushelnicki saw this and, in his own words, "could just tell it was a bad scenario that was going to take place."  His response was just a reaction to a perceived threat.  Surely, other people saw what was going on, but didn't act.  Why? 

 

 

Perhaps they felt that the driver saw what was happening and would stop of his own accord.  Perhaps they didn't register the consequences; they simply didn't put two and two of kids, driver and impact together; maybe they weren't aware of what could happen.  Or maybe, they saw the exact same scenario unfolding that Krushelnicki saw but didn't have the drive to intercede.  It's entirely possible they made a conscious choice not to act; Krushelnicki did and four young lives were saved as a result.

 

 

Krushelnicki perceived a threat and acted on it.  The exact same neurochemistry that drove him to respond to that crisis would have motivated Gardner's hypothetical python strangler to act on his perceived threat.  Humans are like any animal; we are designed to survive and reproduce, both activities that take a lot of energy.  As those are our two reasons for being, energy gets directed primarily to related activities; foraging, hunting, escaping, sex, rearing.  The other big energy expending activity - play - is training for the skills we'll need to survive, sustain and attract/retain mates in the future.  It's really a fluke of evolution and history that humans have done anything beyond these activities; there are even those folk out there who feel that's really all we should be dedicating ourselves to.

 

 

Now, let's take a look at Rob Ford.  Rob Ford received a good deal of negative attention for driving while reading, which is against the law in Ontario.  His answer to his detractors was that he was busy - too busy, apparently, to dedicate full attention to the road.  That's the same mental state our previous driver was in.  Ford has a history of proactively and aggressively engaging in defense of himself (after a pretty nasty insult), his family and his freedom of movement - all commendable activities on the surface of things and, devoid of context, all variants of the same thing that Krushelnicki did.  Yet Ford's been criticized for his actions.  Again, at the neurochemical level, what motivated Ford would have been the same hormonal triggers that incented Krushelnicki or Gardner's fictional strangler.

 

 

In case you think I'm playing partisan favourites, here, let's throw in Warren Kinsella.  Kinsella, a master political strategist (I've got his The War Room on my shelf next to a copy of Takuan Soho's The Unfettered Mind) tells his war room teams that their loathing of conservatives is a purifying force.  "Step on their necks," he advices; "don't lift your foot until the day after the election.  Hurt them."   What Kinsella is doing with that advice is riling his team up, getting their emotions (cortisol, testosterone, etc) flowing and inciting them to act and act decisively.   

 

 

Just as Krushelnicki did. 

 

 

Whereas Krushelnicki damaged his car, a tooth and the car of the other driver to save lives, what Kinsella is suggesting his team do is damage political opponents to essentially do the same thing - act in protection of something they feel matters.

 

 

Playing on emotions is nothing new in politics - every partisan speech, every fundraising letter and every missive employs, consciously or not, techniques of neuro-linguistic programming or NLP; tools of psychological manipulation designed to incite a desired emotional response that encourages action of some kind.  This is sales 101 - hit them where they'll feel it. 

 

 

The Nazis were masters at using these tools; they played into social unrest and got an entire nation to tacitly support genocide.  By the same token, there are organizations out there using public protests here in Canada as a tool to incite police-on-public violence as a tool to nurture civil unrest.  said they don't know what came over them, they just got caught up in the moment? 

 

 

We decry hooligans and shooters; we say that only monsters perpetrate genocide.  Yet there are genocides happening right now in the world, and we're doing nothing about it.  In our own country, we are absolutely aware that there are people living in unsafe conditions on reservations, in slums and on our streets, but we invest precious little of our resources or energy into doing anything about it.  We get righteously indignant when a little girl gets run over in China and nobody helps, but we do the exact same thing here, all the time.  Why?  Perhaps Adalbert Lallier summed it up nicely when he said "I pretended not to have seen, I pretended not to have heard because I didn't want to be responsible."

 

 

The reason that Gardner's column comes up today is because he reposted it in response to the post-election shooting in Montreal.  Social media has been all aflutter with queries as to the man's sanity; mental illness has been mentioned, as it was in the case of Anders Behring Breivik, perpatrator of the Norway massacre of 77 people, mostly teens.  Wisely, Gardner suggests that cooler heads must prevail that that any response must be based on awareness of what actually happened.  If you aren't conscious of content and context, you cannot hope to predict consequence.

 

 

We like to tell ourselves we're supremely rational creatures, in complete control of our thoughts and motivations.  It's the other guys, whoever disagrees with you, that are irrational, malleable, weak, whiners, monsters, dumb or plain sick.  When we say this, we're fooling ourselves.  The "I" we speak of is nothing more than the hard-wiring of our brain, the experiences we have and eons of evolutionary drives.  Our personalities are shaped by the size and activity of different parts of our brains and how we exercise them over the course of our lives.  Like our bodies, our thoughts can be shaped; they are, all the time, but mostly frequently that shaping is not being done directly by us.

 

 

Accepting this might be uncomfortable, but it's also empowering.  People with severe food allergies can manage their diet appropriately, when they're aware of their condition.  Asthmatics, epileptics, the vision or hearing impaired can use tools to function normally.  When you have a cold, you get why you're tired and know to rest; if you're drunk or angry, you can get (theoretically) why you might not want to make any major decisions or drive your car.  By the same token, you can peel back the rhetoric of the aggressive salesman or the vision-shilling politician to see how their words are designed to manipulate you and avoid falling into reactive traps.  You may even be able to recognize that the python is probably a woman or better yet, have the right tools (medicine, training) to avoid such threatening scenarios in the first place.

 

 

 

Until we become fully aware of the internal mechanics that shape our choices, the belief that we're in complete control of our options is a delusion.  When we accept that every thought we have is subconsciously shaped by factors that we cannot see or taste or touch, we can proactively adopt the tools and techniques that allow us manage the influence of those hormones and neurotransmitters to our mutual safety and advantage. 


Choose wisely, though, for once you know yourself, it's harder to close the door of broader awareness again.