Who Cares Who John Galt Is?

 

If you came up in the 80's it was al about 'getting mine.'  Greed was good, and conspicuous consumption was de rigueur; not for this generation.  Be it simply a reaction against the previous generation or the reality of the Great Recession and its impact on their employment opportunities, Millennials talk more about making a difference than they do about making the dough.

 

I know a lot of sectoral elites - captains of industry, punditry and politics - that think this approach is bass-ackwards.  They think millenials are messed up in their priorities and simply don't get/refuse to accept how the world works.

 

Which is kinda funny, because all those folk who came of age in the 60s had the same mindset, once.

 

The truth is the world works the way the people who run it do.  The people who run the world are successful only in as much as they are able to manipulate the masses.  It's hard to do that, successfully, when there is a going demographic that you simply don't understand.

 

Maybe the Millennials "don't get" the way the world works.  They will, however, be shaping how it works tomorrow.  It's not the first time such a shift has happened.

 

If the people wielding power and wealth want to check out and retire to wealthy estates somewhere warm, now's the time to do it.  The shifting demands of the younger demographic in both what they consume, what work means to them and how they are willing to define their work/live divide are such that if you aren't prepared to adapt, your future as an active player is limited.

 

Such is the nature of evolution - that which adapts, etc.  It's simply an interesting coincidence of history that when people put their own interests first, society falls, while those who believe in moving forward together thrive.

 

And who are we to challenge the natural order of things?

Syria: The Milgram Experiment

I could go on and on with examples of limbic, reactive, defiant or protective behaviour that goes contrary to the facts.  I don't need to, though, because you see them in the headlines every day.

Case in point?  Syria.

Mostly, however, those who are unmoved by the victims in the Aug. 21 attack - those who are indifferent about our collective obligation to punish the use of chemical weapons - have simply said one thing, over and over: Prove it happened.  "I doubt/deny it happened."

Forget Marxism - Randian objectivism is the major political philosophy at play today.  Couched in "heroic" terminology, the essence of Rand's philosophy is this - self-interest is the only noble pursuit and a fancy justification for "my mind is already made up, don't confuse me with the facts."  She misuses the term axiom (a premise so true that it is universally accepted without controversy) in a way that the laissez-faire crowd has latched on to with pride.

We're back to Syria.  Sitting in a coffee shop or 'round the kitchen table or boardroom table somewhere in North America, how do we really know what's happened in Syria?  It's in our best interest not to get involved in other people's business, even where innocents are being slaughtered - that's a bit too much like committing sociology.

Footage on TV could be faked - or, it could be misrepresented.  There's nothing axiomatic about what we're seeing, right?  I used a fancy word, so my position is validated!

Reports from Doctors Without Borders?  They're pointedly not assigning blame, so that doesn't help us any, does it?

Lots of people are saying Assad bombed his civilians with chemical weapons - Assad agrees chemical weapons were used, but says it was the other guys that did it.  How can we know for sure who's guilty on our side of the pond?

This is where the Milgram experiment comes in:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.  Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible wit fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Or as Adalbert Lallier admitted: "I pretended not to have seen, I pretended not to have heard because I didn't want to be responsible."

Here's what'll happen if Obama caves in to "the Russian proposal."  Having already said he hasn't used chemical weapons, Assad's stockpile will be overlooked, moved, made inaccessible and therefore, the existence of them will prove unaxiomatic - you can't believe in what you can't see, right?

Meanwhile, word will spread that the rebels have chemical weapons that they received from Saudi Arabia or whatever.  That's how self-interested players in power operate, after all - present rumour as fact and make your opponents work to prove it's false.  With the Syrian and Russian governments, probably with some nods from China, point to this as evidence that they've been right all along, Western citizens looking for excuses not to get involved will defer to the "authorities" and dismiss the faceless, unelected rebels as deceitful.  The burden of proof, after all, always lies with the weak.

Believing what they want to believe - that there's no reason for them to take any responsibility - more and more Western citizens will demand their governments stay out of the fray.  For his part, though, Assad will have two tools at hand; one, a discredited opposition that he can continue to call out as liars, regardless of the facts and two, ammunition that he needs to escalate his attacks - after all, you have to fight fire with fire, right?

It's a story we've seen before, that we continue to see played out across the world and in our very own backyard.  North Korea?  Not our problem.  Falun Gong?  They're a bit airy-fairy, so you can't take their arguments seriously.  Ethnic violence and systematic abuses faced by Roma-Sinti?  Honestly, can you trust a Gypsy?  Abused and missing First Nations' women?  Drunks, drug-addicts and if anything is being done to them, it's by their own kind, so not our problem.  

If any of this was of real concern, why, the authorities would be doing something about it.

Wake up, people - we are the authorities of our own actions and, in a democratic system, our governments'.  It's not "do unto others as your governments dictate" - it's "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you." 

What Rand described as consciousness - being aware of something - is really just awareness.  True consciousness is the realization you can do something about it.

There's only one way to get ahead of these avoidable tragedies that we all wear by our inaction as much as our action; that's to own up to our responsibility to society, both here and abroad.  

Syria is as good a place to start as any.

UPDATE: I've been asked about what I would like to see us do, so in broad brushstrokes, here you go.

We (the West or just Canada if no one else is ready to pony up) should get in on the ground in the hot zones.  The goal wouldn't be to threaten one side or the other, but to put ourselves in the line of fire - with the risks and responsibilities that entails.  If we place our troops around the civilians with a mandate to protect themselves and those behind them, it forces aggressors to decide how committed they are to killing their own people.  If Assad kills Canadians/Western troops in the process, they are essentially declaring war on all of us.  Either way, he's forced to own the consequences of his actions.

Canadians can help out with mediation on the diplomatic side, but if aggressive defence is called for, we are skilled at that, too.  Is it interventionist?  Absolutely.  If we believe in protecting the innocent, intervention is called for.

Selfishness That Plans Ahead

 

I'd say I feel bad for Ayn Rand, but were she still around that probably wouldn't be received as intended.

 

People are selfish creatures, just like our cousins - after all, altruism is simply selfishness that plans ahead.

 

Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?

 

Did selfishness — or sharing — drive human evolution? Evolutionary theorists have traditionally focused on competition and the ruthlessness of natural selection, but often they have failed to consider a critical fact: that humans could not have survived in nature without the charity and social reciprocity of a group.

Last week on Slate, evolutionary anthropologist Eric Michael Johnson explored the question against the backdrop of two cultural events in 1957 — the consequences of the rogue, selfish activities of a pygmy hunter in a Congo forest, who used the group’s collective hunting efforts to benefit only himself, and in New York City, the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, whose protagonist champions the author’s notion that human nature is fundamentally selfish and that each man “exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”

Atlas Shrugged counts many politicians as admirers, perhaps most notably Republican vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, who cites the book as one of his main inspirations for entering politics and is known to give Rand’s books frequently to his interns.

(MORE: ‘Paradise Built in Hell:’ How Disaster Brings Out the Best in People)

So, does Rand’s theory comport with current evolutionary theory? The data is not exactly kind to her position. For example, Johnson describes an anthropologist’s account of the pygmy tribesman, Cephu, in the Congo who lived by the Randian ideal that selfishness is the highest morality. Cephu was part of the Mbuti tribe for whom “hunts were collective efforts in which each hunter’s success belonged to everybody else,” Johnson writes, detailing how the tribe “employed long nets of twined liana bark to catch their prey, sometimes stretching the nets for 300 feet. Once the nets were hung, women and children began shouting, yelling, and beating the ground to frighten animals toward the trap.”

It was a group effort, for most:

But one man, a rugged individualist named Cephu, had other ideas. When no one was looking, Cephu slipped away to set up his own net in front of the others.

Soon caught in this blatant attempt to steal meat, Cephu was brought in front of the whole tribe:

At an impromptu trial, Cephu defended himself with arguments for individual initiative and personal responsibility. “He felt he deserved a better place in the line of nets,” [the anthropologist Colin] Turnbull wrote. “After all, was he not an important man, a chief, in fact, of his own band?” But if that were the case, replied a respected member of the camp, Cephu should leave and never return. The Mbuti have no chiefs, they are a society of equals in which redistribution governs everyone’s livelihood. The rest of the camp sat in silent agreement.

Faced with banishment, a punishment nearly equivalent to a death sentence, Cephu relented.

He apologized, handed over his meat to the tribe and then, essentially, was sent to bed without dinner. As Johnson explains, selfishness is considered far from a virtue in such tribal groups, which still live in ways similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Indeed, every such group ever studied has been found to idealize altruism and punish selfishness, in everything from their mythologies to their mating practices.

(MORE: How Economic Inequality Is (Literally) Making Us Sick)

Although Rand accepted that early human life was a collective effort, she failed to realize how this shaped our brains. In most societies, for example, a man like Cephu would be seen as the opposite of a good catch for a woman wanting a partner. A good mate — and one whose genes were likely selected for and passed on in our earliest evolutionary history — would have been a cooperative hunter, one who didn’t put his own goals ahead of those of the tribe. He would have been altruistic in battle too, particularly when warring with other groups. A selfish soldier, after all, is known as a coward, not a hero.

The evidence for altruism as a critical part of human nature isn’t limited to anthropology. Studies of 18-month-old toddlers show that they will almost always try to help an adult who is visibly struggling with a task, without being asked to do so: if the adult is reaching for something, the toddler will try to hand it to them, or if they see an adult drop something accidentally, they will pick it up.

However, if the same adult forcefully throws something to the ground, toddlers won’t try to retrieve it: they understand that the action was deliberate and that the object is unwanted. These very young children will even assist (or refrain from helping) with a book-stacking task depending on what they perceive to be the adult’s intention. If the adult clumsily knocks the last book off the top of the stack, the toddler will try to put it back; if the adult deliberately takes the last book off, however, toddlers won’t intervene. Even before kids are taught to chip in — perhaps especially before they are told it’s an obligation — children are less selfish than often presumed.

Another study found that 3- to 5-year-olds tend to give a greater share of a reward (stickers, in this case) to a partner who has done more work on a task — again, without being asked — even if it means they get to keep less for themselves. And those cries of “That’s not fair!” that plague sibling relationships: they’re not only selfish; they reflect children’s apparently innate desire for equity.

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Fundamental tendencies toward altruism aren’t only seen in children, either. Worldwide, the aftermath of natural disasters are typically characterized by heroism and a sharing of resources — within the affected community and in others farther way — not selfish panics. During the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for example, there were no accounts of people being trampled rushing out of the World Trade Center towers; rather, those who needed assistance descending were cared for, and calm mainly prevailed. The same occurred after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011. The cases in which people stampede or look out only for themselves tend to be rare and involve very specific circumstances that mitigate against helpfulness.

Moreover, our stress systems themselves seem to be designed to connect us to others. They calm down when we are feeling close to people we care about — whether related to us or not — and spike during isolation and loneliness. Even short periods of solitary confinement can derange the mind and damage the body because of the stress they create. And having no social support can be as destructive to health as cigarette smoking.

Of course, none of this is to say that humans are never selfish or that we don’t have a grasping, greedy part of our nature. But to claim, as Rand does, that “altruistic morality” is a “disease” is to misrepresent reality.

(Share the love and read the rest of Johnson’s fascinating feature here.)

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Rape Culture and Manufactured Consent: Hustling Success vs The Public Good

 

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

   - Ayn Rand

Being alone in a crowd, for instance.  Surely, that's an impossibility.

The rape and death of Rehtaeh Parsons has horrified and angered a nation.  Yet the reactive horror and anger is coming long after the fatal blow was struck.  There are calls for justice for the family, which is necessary - but where were these voices before justice was necessary?  The boys that raped and re-victimized Rehtaeh must face justice, but unless we plan to kill them off or merely just rape them back, that justice must be of the restorative variety.

While we focus on response to the tragedy, there's a bigger question that needs to be addressed.  How is it that these boys came to act in such an inhumane fashion in the first place?  While the RCMP is rightfully being criticized for their failure to act and the school is being chastised for a failure to recognize the problem earlier, no one else was there earlier, either.  Is justice something we consume from providers only, or something we are supposed to embody in our own daily behaviour?

And what are we doing to understand how this happened - and how similar tragedies can be avoided?

If we're serious about addressing this question, we have to get past bullet-point explanations and starfish-throwing solutions.  We need to wrap our heads around content, context and consequence of everyone's behaviour by engaging in a lot of talkfests with evidence-based experts whose opinions might rub us the wrong way and whose research might need more funding for sufficient bandwidth. 

To start, though, we have to admit to ourselves that we're coming at the big problem from the wrong angle.  Rape culture is just that - a pervasive culture that enables and forgives individuals who push the limits of what is acceptable.  Cultural problems aren't individual - they belong to all of us.  Of course, nobody teaches courses about how to rape effectively; that would be criminal.  What we do do, however, is encourage people to look out for number one and to be willing to hustle to get what they want.  The emphasis is on efficiency, not ethics.  That's not about rape - that's about free market capitalism.

What does this have to do with Ayn Rand?

While Karl Marx and Communism have gotten plenty of attention, there's been less public dialogue about Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism.  This is a shame, because a great deal of Western political thought, particularly in the US and more recently in Canada relies on the concepts of Rand's philosophy.

In Rand's Objectivist world view, "achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not the pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values."

Rand built this system of thought on Nietzsche's contempt for systems; in her world, society is a false concept imposed on moral individuals by immoral ones.  Selfish pursuit is the way to get ahead - greed is good.  In a non-system where individual actors pursue the fulfilment of their own greed to attain happiness, balance is achieved (though balance would seem to imply middle ground - and Rand was convinced there are only two sides to every issue - one right and one wrong - and the middle was invariably evil).

So there are no such things as contradictions, middle-ground doesn't exist and pursuing one's own happiness is the only moral purpose in life. So how do we achieve happiness, according to Rand?

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

One would surmise from this that individual actors acting in their own interests to achieve their full market share of happiness will express their morality by letting nobody stop them from getting what they want - and that's all you need to know.

Ironically enough, Rand's most famous work, Atlas Shrugged, was published in 1957 - the same year Leon Festinger's A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance hit bookshelves.

 

The assumption of Objectivism (and for that matter, the free market) is that when buyers and sellers are able to transact freely, they'll come to a mutually agreeable trade value - the market price.  The problem is, not everyone wants to buy what's being sold or sell what's being sought. 

Rand was a believer in laissez-faire capitalism, but she also expressed the belief that you should go out and get what you want.  The art of "closing the deal" is anything but laissez-faire; anyone who works in sales can relate to the need to aggressively nudge a potential buyer into signing on the line which is dotted. 

Now, there are many ways you can push for the deal to be closed - you can follow the aggressive advice of Alec Baldwin; you can employ neuropsychology; you can even design products which produce uncontrolled behaviours in a potential client.  The point is, if people aren't willingly playing along in giving you what you want, don't let that stop you - there are other ways to seal the deal.  Playing the push-game works; through aggressive sales, Apple increased its sales in India by 400 per cent.  As I hear all the time, people don't care about process, so long as the end result is great.  The implication is that they don't care what else you do in life with that aggressive, go-get-'em attitude so long as their piece is delivered, cleanly.

The concept of your happiness coming as a result of harm to someone else doesn't come in to Rand's world, because she refused to recognize the notion of society.  Laissez-faire capitalism is the exact opposite of going out and aggressively getting what you want, but Rand didn't deal with that, either; instead, she positioned herself to be able to say "I'm right and you're wrong", thereby refusing to accept the contradictions of her own position.  By refusing to accept this cognitive dissonance, she was confabulating (making up a self-validating story to paper over the conflict) excuses to avoid addressing the problem.

If you're still with me, it means you're willing to accept there are such things as contradictions and that the devil is in the details.  If you were Ayn Rand (or Rob Ford, for that matter), by now you'd be upset, feel reading this was a stupid waste of time and that I'm unnecessarily complicating a simple issue of good-guy/bad-guy and the state as evil.

But you are with me, so here's where the background starts to pay off.

“A lot of people had kinda seen it coming, but didn’t actually think that it would happen,” said Scott Thomson, 16, who for years had gone to the same school as Parsons before she transferred schools to escape bullying.

To put it in a slightly different way: All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good people to do nothing.

We know this, but do nothing anyway - we're too busy, it's not really our thing, etc.  Someone else should get to that.

At least, that's what we tell ourselves.

AGGRESSIVE SUCCESS

ie - gunning the engine to catch the light

 

Success is seen as a road to happiness.  Success comes through hustling - nobody's going to hand you fistfuls of money, you have to go out and take it.  The success stories we admire are anything but laissez-faire.  We admire people like Steve Jobs or Stephen Harper who had the persistence and "moral toughness" to get what they wanted at any cost.  They may have had to step on a few heads to get there, but you know what they say about eggs and omelets.

By and large, we feel that it's socially acceptable to nudge people in favour of our own interests.  In fact, that's what sales is all about. We can convince ourselves we're just trying to help people obtain something they want, but the very implication of that sentiment is that vendors know what's best for the buyer. I can try to guilt you into buying a product, threaten you into buying a product or trick you into buying a product, but at the end of the day, I'm gonna make that sale. Success, after all, is what makes me happy.

Socially, we reward the hustlers with jobs, fortune, privilege and power - yet somehow don't expect that behaviour to spill over outside their field of work.  A-type personalities dominate executive positions, yet we still express shock when they get caught behaving in vile ways.  We decry bullying but in politics, sports and business, we admire and respect bullies for their success.

Stephen Harper is a bully. Steve Jobs was a bully. Michael Bay is a bully, but we don't care - if his movies make us happy. 

PASSIVE SUCCESS

 

ie - not breaking when you see the light turn yellow.

 

Just as it is seen as socially acceptable to push people to get the results we want, it's also acceptable to be passive about things that benefit our own interests.  This is as true of ignoring where our eggs come from as not caring how cheap foreign imports end up on our shelves or what labour goes in to the success of our companies.  So long as you get a solid return on your investment, who cares?  Process matters less than results - the ends justify the means.  Wading into the details is something you do only when there's clearly a problem to be addressed.

There's a corollary to this, though - just like the aggressive salesfolk, there are trade offs in our own wins.  Cheap, abusive labour might be behind our imports.  The folk managing our investment portfolios might not be so scrupulous about their efforts.  The same could be could be true of other service providers.

Arthur Porter was successful, until he got caught. Adam Carroll was pretty pleased with himself, until he got caught. Chris Mazza was totally going out and taking what he wanted, until he got caught. Some aggressive ladder-climbers have behaved badly and been caught. But not all of them.

Each of these entrepreneurial folks was hustling, making money, buying goods, contributing to the economy, living happy. In short, they were doing exactly what society asks them to.  There was some benefit in what they did for those they sold their services, too - so long as the accumulated risks could be ignored.  That laissez-faire approach led to massive losses, public humiliation and the cracking of investor confidence. 

These aggressive, individually successful individuals were left to their own devices, resulting in steep and avoidable costs to the whole.

PASSIVE AVOIDANCE

 

ie - tisking someone who runs a light, but nothing more; after all, it doesn't impact you.

 

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death."

     - Elie Wiesel

Ayn Rand believed there was no such thing as a social system; that individual self-interest was the primary mover of success and that the world was black-and-white.

Here's what she missed - when you split the world up into "right" and "wrong" you invariably end up with an unspoken third category - irrelevant.

Horrific tragedies in faraway countries?  Not our issue, unless we're threatened.  Terrible plights of people in remote First Nations communities in our own country?  Until we're shamed, we remain unresponsive and even then, our attention is fleeting.  Homelessness?  Poverty? Mental health?  The best social program is a job - and it's the job of the individual to get out there, hustle their stuff and make employment happen.  Individuals are their own best advocates; they just need to get up and advocate.  It'll be nice to see it when it happens, but it's not our place to nudge anyone into protecting their self-interests.

Passive avoidance works the same way passive success does - through inaction.  We don't act in someone else's favour and find reasons to justify why.  If, for instance, a passive person is on the receiving end of someone else's aggression, they probably have it coming.  It's certainly got nothing to do with us.

We definitely find it hard to act when a negative to someone else results in a positive for us - at least, if we don't fear the consequences of that negative behaviour coming home to roost.

What about when the risk we face of ignoring the bad behaviour of a provider is recognizable, but not enough to make us feel threatened - or lands so close to home we're sure to be impacted?

AGGRESSIVE AVOIDANCE

 

ie - hammering the horn when someone runs a light and nearly hits your car; or giving the finger to someone who beeps at you after you've run the light.

 

Despite the fact that he killed his girlfriend, Oscar Pistorius still has legions of fans.  People who like him as a performer or admire his embodiment of competitive success will protect him by blaming his girlfriend for her own death.

You'll see the exact same things in politics; Ford Nation will attack anyone who criticizes the Mayor and, oddly enough, will say that the only thing that matters is the results the Mayor achieves.  Pierre Penashue is using this same "the ends justify the means" approach with his constituents - so long as you get the goods, what do you care about what else I do with my time?

Offense is the best defense, even in those incidents where something you have done is the thing most offensive.

Of course, aggressive hustlers are looking to defend themselves, too, at the exact same time they're viewing others as marks.  For all the aggressive posturing and ego you get from Wall Street suits, you also get this:

"They have big egos and are big babies. If I made any sign that they weren't the best lover, or that their d**k wasn't the biggest d**k I'd ever seen, they started asking all these questions and putting me down like: "Oh, well you've just seen more c**k than a normal, nice girl would."

But this girl, clearly, is a paid whore.  You can't take what she says seriously.  She's probably pissed that she didn't get tipped well, but that says more about her than it does about the client - right?

REHTAEH PARSONS

Let's apply all of this to the death of Rehtaeh Parsons.  The boys who raped her would probably have never faced justice were it not for the picture they took.  After all, sex is a transaction between two parties; if one's complaining after the fact, it must mean they weren't happy with the deal they got, right?  That's how transactions work.  It's why we have a social habit of blaming the victim. 

 

This leaning towards whatever stance lets us be passive is made worse by the urge to protect our own self-interests; when it becomes clear a wrong was committed, we're more likely to double-down on our positions and absolve ourselves of anything resembling responsibility.  If it gets so bad that the consequences can't be ignored - like the suicide of a 17 year-old - we will recognize fault only as long as its fashionable (unless you empathize with the victim, maybe because you've got a teenage daughter yourself) and assuredly not point the finger of blame at the mirror.

The rapists themselves were probably pleased with their actions, at first - they hustled, seized an opportunity and took what they wanted, with maybe a bit of risk of getting caught.  They see this behaviour all the time, in different contexts, so even if they knew it wasn't right they wouldn't be dwelling on the risk of repercussion.  This is a crime we will see repeated; maybe the boys were wear masks next time, but that will only feed into the power-trip of the crime.

If Rehtaeh had been physically brutalized, then people would have taken action - but as it was, the wounds were internal and easy to avoid.

Which is what peers did.  They kinda knew about it or definitively knew all about it but easier than taking on the boys who came out on top was piling on the girl at the bottom.  It happens all the time.

My grandfather tells stories of Buchenwald Concentration Camp; inmates would become so numb, so mentally walled off that if someone fell over dead on the grounds from disease or starvation, you'd simply go check them for useful gear and then move on.  The ones who got the shoes or the bread were the toughest and they did so at the expense of the weak.  There was no mental space to grieve death.  

 

The RCMP and school triaged the rape case by focusing on why it wouldn't be relevant to them, not the reverse.  That's how business works, right?  Empathy has no place in rational decision making, it's a bad motivator.  Passively or aggressively, you want to avoid expenditures of any kind.  If an issue is severe enough, the process will make that clear all on its own.

 

And that's indeed what happened; the police and system did their triage, let things go and the system course-corrected.  I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking it shouldn't take social uproar to get the wheels of justice turning.

 

And there's the ultimate contradiction.  Justice isn't being done; we're throwing the starfish back in the ocean, one at a time and ignoring the structural challenges that really need addressed.  By addressing the wrong problems and ignoring the very real connections between process and outcome, we're not recognizing that social challenges take social solutions.

 

L'etat, c'est nous.  If we really want a world where things like the rape of Rethaeh don't happen, it's not isolated individuals who need to change - it's all of us.

 

Here's a place to start:

9. Teach children that their behaviors affect others.

You can do this in simple ways, anywhere. Ask them to observe how people respond when other people make noise or litter. Ask them what they think will happen as a result. Will someone else have to clean up the litter? Will someone be scared? Explain to kids how the choices they make affect others and talk about when are good times to be loud, and what are good spaces to be messy.

10. Teach kids to look for opportunities to help.

Can they pick up the litter? Can they be more quiet so as not to interrupt someone’s reading on the bus? Can they offer to help carry something or hold a door open? All of this teaches kids that they have a role to play in helping ease both proverbial and literal loads.

http://elitedaily.com/elite/2012/goldmantop10/

 

A Meme You Can't Not Love

Paul Ryan cribs the Ryan Gosling meme addressing Ayn Rand, with an ending that hints at faith in the collective "us."

It's inspired, really.

The Myth of the Superhuman Ancestor

 

"I am the last of the Númenóreans, and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at my will and give back the gift".

 

Kids these days, eh?

They're not as tough as the previous generation. They're softer, weaker, less focused, etc. It's a common, conservative theme found cross-culturally, around the world.

The implication is pretty clear - the youth of today are ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the real world, challenges that were ever-present in the past. The womb-like protections of society - things like book-learning indoctrination, public safety and over-bearing social institutions are leeching out the tough physical and moral fibre that has allowed our species to endure.  Something has been lost - the future looks less and less certain for humanity.

Today's conservatives add nothing new to this persistent theme.  Feudal Japan bemoaned the loss of fierce, independent warriors as the Tokugawa period came to a close. Ayn Rand feared the damage the imposed illusion of society would wreak on the human condition. Andrew Keen fears the loss of tangible relationships due to the increased use of technological tools of communication.  Part of conservation, I guess, is preservation, so this fits.

Human mythology (formerly an oral tradition, memorized and retold as consistently as possible) is rife with tales of glorious ancestors - longer-lived, stronger, in more direct commune with the God/Gods who were the absentee CEOs of society. The myth of the Noble Savage is the same - we harbour the belief that Native peoples the world over were somehow more pure, more intertwined with nature than they became once tainted by the unnecessary complexities of modern (Western) society.

While there are no giants - no Hercules', Samsons or Hunahpu/Xbalanque anymore, there's no substantial evidence that there ever was. If you look at archaeological records and human remains from everywhere people have settled, they tell gruesome tales of degenerative diseases, crippling wounds and deaths from simple conditions that we take for granted as non-issues today.  Our ancestors were smaller, less well nourished and more prone to illness than we are today.  In fact, it was the lack of the hallmarks of complex society (diversification, adaptation, administrative complexity, domestication and social services) that led to the fall of aboriginal peoples in the Americas and elsewhere to European invaders, their diseases, animals and technology.

Yes, people without medicine and shelter would have had greater exposure to and in some cases, resulting resilience in the face of nature, but that didn't really help them any.  The domestication of animals has done far more to further the development of disease immunity, though inoculation remains one of the greatest tools of human invention.  Life spans and quality of life haven't been decreasing with the spread of the Disease of Civilization, they've been increasing.

The same holds true for communication and social living - child and spousal abuse is more common, not less, in tribal society. The tough, independent streak sets tribes at war, hindering dialogue and increasing the likelihood of wasteful conflict and xenophobia.

If you really want a glimpse at what life among our noble ancestors would have been like, look at the tribal fiefdoms of Northern Afghanistan.

So, what gives?  What purpose could we have for glorifying the past with grandiose notions of a lost perfection that bears no resemblance to actual history?

 

Another LOTR quote to hammer home the point:

 

'He is not as other men of this time, Pippin, and whatever be his descent from father to son, by some chance the blood of Westernesse runs nearly true in him; as it does in his other son, Faramir, and yet did not in Boromir whom he loved best....'

 

Traditional wisdom - instinct, if you will - tells us people are like sandstone, our essence slowly being leached away by time and foreign elements.  There is a recognition of strength as a concept, but as a thing that gets taken away by change, not enhanced.  Endurance and forcefulness are the virtues that matter.  We are the cure - they are the disease.

 

Now, take that concept out of Middle Earth and place it in a real-world context.  Don't want your daughter marrying the coloured guy?  Suspicious of foreign intentions, new music, technology?  Fear something immutable is being threatened by change?  Worry that a sea of troubles is eating away at your shores?

 

Tell me - what are your thoughts on evolution?  What are your thoughts on innovation?

 

Evolution is essential for survival.  It comes through exposure to the new - new genes in the mix, exposure to new diseases through livestock (allowing for disease resistance to develop), etc. are what allow us to survive.  Evolution - change - is good and necessary; true strength comes through adaptation which requires diversity, not through intransigence.  Unlike Tolkien's Numenoreans, intransigence and the absence of fresh blood leads to weakness.

 

Yet its intransigence, the absence of mingling genes and the maintenance of purity that traditional wisdom values as a strength.

 

Reality - stasis is bad, change is good.

 

Myth - strength is demonstrated by unwavering endurance; change, trickery are evil.

So why is our belief at complete odds with nature, especially when the historical evidence is so perfectly clear?

It's because traditional wisdom and instinct gives us the wrong starting point.

 

The focus on a mythical state of grace that has been lost over time is a red herring, a confabulated justification for the true heart of the matter - people have an instinctive fear of the unknown, including change.  This fear of change comes first and because it's such a hard-wired instinct, we don't question it.  Instead, we find ourselves needing to rationalize this fear to the detriment of fact. 

Consider the biological impact of change:
 

Change’s impact on mind and body Change triggers fear and stress, creating a complex physiological/neurological reaction, according to the ESI study. Here’s what happens:

The pre-frontal cortex region of the brain receives the transmission through one or more of the physical senses.

The pre-frontal cortex compares the new condition with the current condition by accessing another region of the brain, the basal ganglia, which stores the data we receive and contains the wiring for the habits we have.

If a difference between the new condition and the existing condition is detected, an error signal is produced and sent throughout the brain.

The error signal is received by another part of the brain that tells us to be wary of danger.

The brain sounds a warning alarm, which triggers the emotion of fear.

The new condition is resisted by the pre-frontal cortex, which causes the person to back off and be wary.

 

Our ancestors would have feared change in the same way - in fact, we know they did, because the traditions they left behind tell us so.  When we fear change and buy in to the notion of a fading perfection, we're actually limiting ourselves to the tools of the past.  Kids today aren't weaker than the generation before - they are, instead, better adapted to the present.  With the right training, tools and exposure, they would be as capable of surviving the same elements our ancestors did.  Soldiers, wilderness campers and even scouts do this all the time.  However, with modern tools, medicine and strategies, these modern-day wildlings are even better able to survive than Otzi would have been.

 

We need to train ourselves to flip our perspective around - diversification, adaptation and accommodation aren't things that weaken the human condition, but enhance it.  It's counter-intuitive, perhaps, but a conscious exploration of the facts explain why this is.  Besides, if we give in to instinct and fight off change, we are equally condemning ourselves to the annals of myth and legend.

 

Perfection is not a thing of the past but rather a think of the future.  Truly, the best is yet to come.

Barack Obama: Leaders Stand with Their People

 

"The president has been outstanding in this and so have the folks at FEMA," Christie said on NBC's "Today."

 

If you're a cynic, you probably don't believe anyone, especially presidential candidates on the eve of an election, do anything that isn't self-serving. You might even think that's the way things should be; individuals duking it out for superiority. It's what Ayn Rand believed. It's what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan believe.

But it isn't leadership.

There's nothing like a natural disaster to test the depth of politicians' preference for small government.  Whereas Romney might have asked Donna Vanzant if she had her insurance paid and talked about how his policies would reduce red tape and allow her to better plan for the next crisis, Obama got right in there and responded to her not as a citizen or a potential voter, but as a human being. The hug, the reassurances, the positive redirection might seem like little things, if you've never suffered a loss - but if you have, it can make all the difference.

I guarantee that Obama gained her vote that day. His empathetic response to victims of Sandy (and they are victims, through no fault of their own) has renewed a lot of support for him.

People will follow true leaders into the depths of hell, knowing their Commander in Chief has their back. You can only make that level of commitment and inspire that kind of devotion if you believe in something greater than yourself, grander than your own aspirations.  It's too late when the crisis hits to think about preparation. 

Leadership puts 100% of the people first in times of feast and famine; they are proactive, not laissez-faire in their approach.  There's only one candidate for President who has a demonstrated ability to do that.

AND Obama shows where leaders get the hope they lead with - from their people.  Amazing.