Out-and-out liars or Outliers?

Often heard in our modern tale of triumph, like Perseus slaying Medusa, is the glossy version of a business person who has beat all odds to become the most successful, most imitated, and ultimately, the most wealthy in their field.  Heavy books are written about them—can you go into a bookstore without having Steve Jobs stare you down?  The almighty business heroes comprise the bulk of our mythos that feed the global capitalist imagination.  Warren Buffet. Oprah. Bill Gates.  They don’t even need a full sentence because you already know their stories.

There are many lesser-known heroes of this sort, but the story usually goes: He began life poor, but was resilient and worked hard to follow his passion, and now he’s made something of himself.  Because of his relentless efforts, he is rewarded with lavish trips,  and has the world at his fingertips. That could be you if you just tried hard enough! The story rarely highlights any crisis in conscience he may have had, nor the decision that was made to resolve that feeling of moral uncertainty.  Did he take credit for others’ work to advance himself? Did he treat others fairly along the way?  Did he outsource production to evade inconvenient environmental and human rights regulations? Did he fund an expensive marketing campaign to manipulate people’s understanding of their needs?  Was a price point set that is reasonable, or do only some people have enough purchasing power to get those goods? Did he cut benefits for employees to increase shareholder satisfaction?

Those issues of conscience are largely ignored because they don’t add up to numbers and cents.  It is only when the hero flouts all sense of social accountability and the abuses are egregious that people take notice.

I have two friends who have been effortful and unwavering in their individual career paths.  They both have a deep interest in what they do to earn a living.  With decades of study and professional practice, the services they provide exceed standards of excellence.  They certainly exceed market standards, yet in this marketplace, they find themselves constantly struggling. Earning a living has been no small feat.  They have mostly adapted to their impecunious lifestyles, but as their friend, I notice the small ways in which their freedom is held in check.  There is a pervasive sense of caution about how they spend money, which circumscribes their socializing, leisure outings, and personal effects.  Luckily, they haven’t suffered from the kind of poverty that deprives many people from food or housing.  They have been able to get by. 

These are two very bright, conscientious, and diligent people!  Their inability to “make it” is not from a lack of capacity, hard work, or passion.  If these were the factors that created the magical recipe of social success, what explains their unsavory and skimpy rewards?  Their work produces a net benefit to society by helping individuals to be healthier.  It is not for a lack of “need” in society that their work doesn’t earn them much of a living.  There is plenty of need, but not enough market demand.  They don’t have the resources to stimulate demand in the market economy, even though I’d argue that the world would be a better place if people lined up for days to grab their services instead of the new iPhone.

What about all those people with passion and a good idea who put in double-time and their life-savings that no one hears about?  We don’t like to talk much about them either.  Not as inspiring. 

If you leave a pot of cold water out on the counter for days, you’ll see that the water level gradually reduces.  Why?  As the H₂O and air molecules smash into each other passing energy along, eventually some of the molecules gather enough energy to escape their liquid form.  The water turns from liquid to gas.  But! This is not from what we call boiling.  To say, “molecule A escaped its liquid burden” is true, but it is not a fair representation of the state of the whole.  Similarly, I could say that person A never smoked a day in his life and he got lung cancer, while person B smoked religiously for four decades and had clear lungs.  Would it be accurate to say that smoking prevents lung cancer based on these examples?  I just saw a story in which a woman eats French fries and no fresh fruit or vegetables, and her cholesterol is around 170.  Should we now recommend that diet to reduce the incidence of heart disease?¹

With the sheer size of the human population, we will always be able to find outliers that seem to bolster an idea or belief.  We may have to go digging to find those examples, but they are out there.  The problem is that we end up lying to ourselves, and our policies reflect this distortion of reality.  Social planning is not an optional policy that we can either have or not have.  Some people believe as Dave Hinnaland does:  “Let us have the means and options to chart our own path. Don’t hamstring us with rules and regulations.  And let people that are willing to go out to work take a chance, let them have the opportunity to do it.  We don’t need a big hand hovering over our head telling us what we can and cannot do.”²

To do any kind of project requires some kind of planning, even when you work alone. What will you do first? What resources do you need? How much time will each step take?  When you work on large-scale projects such as highways, vertical farms, hadron colliders, and hospitals, you need lots of planning, and lots of collaboration.  Rules help facilitate the process.  And whenever someone “takes a chance” there is the possibility of failure—that’s why it’s called a “chance” instead of a certainty.  What Dave probably isn’t aware of is what he really wants.  He wants the freedom to pursue his goals.  (Whether those goals are perverse or not is another matter and not the topic addressed here.)  Despite the known illusion of free will, we like to feel as though we have a sense of control.  Exercising a sense of autonomy promotes our feelings of wellness.  So, does having a market system lubricated by the controlled-scarcity of money meet this need? Do less planning, less coordination, more competition, and more insecurity really help us achieve this goal?  If so, where is the evidence?  In the few outliers, our heroes? It certainly cannot be found in the colossal gap in income, where the richest 20% have 75% of the world’s income. Is our only fix to this problem to “get people” to be more heroic?  Is that really the best we can come up with? Will my friends be better off if I repeat over and over: “work harder!” If I yell it, “WORK HARDER!!” does that help?

Is it possible that more intelligent planning, with a more comprehensive view of life systems and their closely knitted ecosystems could yield better results?  Truly, we don’t have a lot to lose by making a more concerted and savvy effort using the latest findings in research.  We are already losing now, by a huge margin.  Every life ravaged by poverty is a needless death of talent, passion, and intelligence.  Poverty is not natural nor is it immutable.  We need a fundamental system change to resolve this growing problem.  We need a stable infrastructure in which life insecurity is not the constant worry of far too many people.  To go back to my water analogy: we need to find a new heating element that energizes the whole pot of water.  It may be quite different from what we’ve been trying, but we have now some amazingly sophisticated tools and knowledge to bring forth a more sustainable and healthy society.  Let us repurpose them from money maximization to wellness maximization.  Just because you cannot put a face to our global market system (as I tried to do in a recent blog post) does not mean it is not dangerous.  Hitler is reviled by the Western world, but if we compared who was the worst evil, the market system would crush Hitler by magnitudes beyond comprehension.  We need to remove the cultural blinders that are stitched together by these fairy tale outliers, and see the danger for what it is because it is fundamentally incompatible with a prosperous and sustainable culture.

1. http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/adult-picky-eater-will-only-consume-three-kinds-of-food.html

2. http://www.seattlepi.com/news/politics/article/An-uneasy-economy-and-those-living-through-it-3988015.php

Waiting for the Mushroom Cloud

As an activist doing outreach with the Zeitgeist Movement, it is inevitable to come across those individuals who believe that the human race is simply incorrigible.  The message gets communicated in such responses as, “I’m just waiting for the mushroom cloud,” or “All humans are psychotic,” or “Humans are a virus that needs to be eradicated.”  These are actual statements that have been told to me, as if they are the cold hard truth that I must come round to submitting to.   

I could speculate endlessly about why people come to these conclusions, but that’s not my purpose here.  Rather, I want to look deeper into this sense of resignation.  It’s easy to write people off saying that they are delusional, unaware, or silly.  But, that is an approach employed by those who don’t have the energy to investigate further.  If there’s one central idea I took away from the book, Immunity to Change, it is that “bad habits” continue because they serve some underlying need.  An example from the book is that CEOs (the researchers worked with large companies needing to develop their organizational leadership) explicitly state their need to delegate more often, but do not do so because having their hands in all projects makes them feel indispensible to the company’s operations.  The underlying need is to feel important and assured that their contribution matters.  The recurring problem is that they cannot effectively balance their duties and priorities to maximize their contribution to the organization.

So, what is this need that is being met by the mushroom cloud guy?  Does he really feel better “knowing” that the end of humanity is nigh, especially with such a horrific vision of how that end will come about?  Does the girl’s assertion that all humans are psychotic relieve any sense of fear or paranoia?  People who act as though these situations are real in their daily lives generally exhibit symptoms of anxiety and schizophrenia.  My guess is that these beliefs only surface when confronted with the difficult challenge of how to fix the world, which seems inescapably tethered to misery.  The problems are vast and broad.  They seem to crouch unexpectedly in every corner of the world, and certainly in every place where humans find themselves.  Because of the universality of misfortune, the only answer to “how to fix this mess?” is, of course, that it cannot be fixed. Humans are wretched evil creatures who can only be saved by a dose of atomic energy, or perhaps a magical beast that hands out miracles and benevolence as happily and frequently as a rich man pays his taxes.

What are the benefits of this kind of thinking?  The impulse to reach a conclusion quickly is sort of like Energy Star for the brain.  As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy for me to brush off doomsayers by labeling them “silly” or “crazy.”  That’s my inner cognitive couch potato talking.  To sum up all of humanity as “psychotic” or “suffering from sin” is a nearly effortless way to resolve the discomfort caused by witnessing persistent misery.  The problem is essentially solved by saying “it can’t be solved.”  I remember coming across math problems in grade school to which I screamed out red-faced, “It’s impossible—stupid book!” “Those dumb authors don’t know nothing!” I would vent.  (I still have moments like these, but I’m too embarrassed to give examples.)

That reaction gives us a break from the perplexing challenge of how to solve our self-generated problems.  And that break gives us time to do more important things like taking a shower, going shopping, and eating.  It’s so nice when society is set up to function in a way that we don’t have to think about it!  (Yes, this is a snub to those who can’t bear the idea of economic planning because they think it is a trap of totalitarianism.)  It’s ironic how our unwillingness to consider these deeper problems actually makes life more challenging, which requires more energy, than if we had systems set up to function efficiently and sanely.

Besides the benefits of cognitive recess, the other reinforcing aspect of this dead-end thinking (literally, dead-end) is that taking on any responsibility is unnecessary.  Since nothing can be done to correct the problem, then no effort is required to implement the needed changes.  The non-solution basically begs you to “sit this one out” and that definitely appeals to the outer couch potato.  However, there’s always that nagging feeling that you should do something, no matter how much you try to convince it that any effort is a waste of time.  It may also be that this defeatist attitude stems from an internalized sense of inadequacy, but let's leave that for another discussion.

None of us knows what will happen to humanity, on earth or anywhere else.  It is arrogant to assume otherwise.  Because that’s the case, we can’t “sit this one out;” we are already part of life.  Our actions affect the flow of society, whether we intend to or not.  By not putting effort to the problems, we allow them to perpetuate and multiply.  So, “doing nothing” is not possible.  Doing nothing really just means doing what the status quo demands. It means conforming.  It means subjugating oneself to a dreaded idea of “respectability.”  Doing nothing is an illusion.  Even if you kill yourself, that is still “doing something,” with effects that may last generations. The question isn’t to do or not to do.  It is, “what needs to be done?” To start, we can notice the problems around us and be compelled to act compassionately.  Nature endows us with the hardware—mirror neurons—to do this, so the beginning of change is to stop the mind from resting on the simple-minded sofa.  If we can create our own catastrophes, we can figure out how not to create them.  We may have to try completely novel solutions, but with the best of human wisdom, we can likely get to “better.”  What we do know is that “doing nothing” just means we won’t get to better.  And most likely, we’ll just get to “worse.”

You Aren't Free Without Me

An exercise in personification

Hi, my name is Freem.  Nice to meet you.  Well, I’m not sure it’s nice to meet you yet, but I’m going to find out.  I want to learn about you.   To be honest, I just want to learn enough about you so that I can figure out what you can do for me.  I would really like to know how you can help me in my mission of self-aggrandizement.  I like being able to do what I want without restriction. 

For example, just the other day, I went to this charming little town along the river.  Who knew a place could be so beautiful?!  It was impressive to see all of the tiny fish struggling against the currents of the crystal clear waters.  The birds would noisily alert their friends to this buffet below, as though it was a stroke of good luck (luck that happened every day…no wonder they are called “birdbrain”).  When the sun would tiptoe below the height of the ancestral trees, bursts of color shot through their leaves, as though one were standing in a hallway of stained-glass masterpieces.  The air was so pure, the whole of one’s body felt cleansed, not just of stale air, but of restless thoughts too.  In this magnificent place, I set out to enjoy myself. 

I had to move on a year later.  The place was trashed!  When I party, I can’t let anything get in my way.  The rivers now gurgle with a black sludge obscuring any life that might have survived below the surface.  The trees that had survived for centuries were swiftly chopped down—I needed the space.  The people who once wore welcoming smiles and gladly fed me (“Mr. Arket, try this dish,” they would say) when I arrived had become stressed and half-dead.  It’s probably because I didn’t give them enough time to rest and recuperate.  Or maybe it was the unrelenting labor I forced them to submit to.  In any case, they are not my concern.  The weaker individuals ended up getting sick from the particulates I expelled into the air.  I don’t know if they survived.  A few brave folks tried to stop me from having my fun, but I crushed them before they could present any real challenge to my influence. A small group tried not to join my party, but I helped them bring near their expiration date.  It’s not that I intentionally killed them; I just didn’t give them what they needed.  There is a difference between killing someone and not giving away my stuff, even if it produces the same result.  Isn’t that right?  After all, I know how to throw a party so I’m very popular with most people.  They will pretty much do anything I say.  I have been around for quite some time, and let’s face it, I’m pretty much a legend.  When I show up, people kiss my feet, unless I make them lick my boots clean.  They know who’s boss, and they want to get on my good side.  It’s either that, or they fear my punishments, which I dole out generously.

It’s not important to me how I get what I want, so I needn’t unnecessarily burden myself with “responsibilities.”  The coolest thing is that people rarely notice my role in the transformation of their environment or culture.  Instead, they blame each other and fight each other.  They think their problems are from the people on the other side of town, so they are constantly asking me for guns and other weapons (which I gladly provide) to assassinate key personalities.  Where you see despair, I see opportunity.  Seriously! [chuckle of self-righteousness] Do you know how much my power grows when I give them these weapons?  I’m pretty much untouchable.

So, enough about me.  Tell me about you.  How can you make yourself useful to me? I’m not being rude, I’m just cutting to the chase.  I know, I’ve heard it all before from fools like you…[sigh]...”Mr, Freem Arket, you’re so callous, cruel, conniving.”  These may be true characterizations, but don’t you see?  None of that matters.  My responsibility is to myself and my development.  It’s my nature.  And baby, this is what I call freedom.  It's right there in the word: I'm FREE to DOMinate. Say it with me now, “FREEDOM!” [repeat as necessary] If you try to trespass on my freedom, I will mobilize my disciples against you.  I’m part of the people’s mythos now, a cultural god, and we will resist you and your countercultural absurdity.  My disciples will sacrifice themselves for my purposes.  Your ridiculous psychobabble diagnosis suggesting a sociopathic disposition is something my adherents won’t swallow.  They believe that I am the one who has given them a better standard of living.  They believe I’m the source of their innovation.  And best of all, they believe I AM their freedom.  Like the gods of yesteryear whose moods brought lightning, tempests, and sunshine, I am the god of freedom.  That is my power; and as long as people believe in me, I will constantly seek new lovely towns, beaches, forests, and cities to dominate and set ablaze.  There are always more places to exploit. I cannot be wrong about that, can I?  It is not a corruption of my nature, it is my nature.  With new technology, I am now crafting plans to expand to the moon!  What can I say?  I’m a badass!

I understand how you feel, but here’s my card.  Keep it handy for when you feel hungry and are ready to submit.   

Generalizing Grief for the Greater Good

Have you ever been to a funeral or memorial service? The grieving family and friends have their attention divided between holding back their inner sobs while trying to relate to others who are gathered to share their memories.  The harmony of quivering voices overlying a solemn code of conduct gets punctuated by bouts of laughter from the telling of funny anecdotes.  I suspect the comical stories are tacitly required so that participants have some sanctioned relief from the somber mood. 

Death is nonnegotiable in its interruption of our lives.  Unthinking routines are disturbed, backroom beliefs are laid bare in the light of self-reflection, and our values have their own “judgment day.”  The sheer fact of death (not many facts have such power) causes us to wonder about the meaning we place in everyday events and things.  Does it really matter if I get a new pair of shoes or a smartphone?  Does my job make me feel meaningfully productive? Are my relationships as deep and healthy as they could be? Would anyone really care if I died?  Have I lived well?  And simply, “How do I cope with Uncertainty?”

All of these questions are important to ask, and their lack of immediate answers often frustrates grievers.  So, in an effort to outwit death, the finality of the fact is stolen.  Tales are told of an unending ego, mightier than the stars who can only burn bright for so many billions of years. Pfft!  In the burying of those questions, the opportunity for transformation is missed.  The transformative potential is projected on the deceased so that they can be resurrected as a disembodied being.  To learn all that death has to teach us is like going to a school of wisdom.  Radical reorientations of values and lifestyles can be accomplished after just one semester.  But Life is always providing us with more semesters, free of charge!

I want to come back to where I began in imagining the grief and potency that death of a close friend or family member has on those who are experiencing it first-hand.  The sorrow feels so personal, despite seeing the pain in everyone else’s eyes.  Intellectually, you know otherwise, but emotionally, it feels as if a madman called Life came into your home and shot up the place.  Sure, others were wounded.  But, you!  You took a bullet straight into the heart.  There is no surgeon skilled enough to extricate that bullet.  Will your heart dare to beat again?  Other people will move on, but will you?  You share your sadness and expose your fragility because what else can you do?  If you don’t, people wonder if “you’re ok” (meaning, “do you need 24/7 psychiatric care?”).  So, you show your grief to let others know that you are dealing with your loss, even if you doubt the usefulness of such a display.  Numbness may even begin to set it.  There’s a complete disconnection from your life and all its unsettled activity that nips at your flesh.  No amount of tears can drown your grief.

Stop there now.  Wallow in those imagined feelings for some moments.

I want you to generalize that state of being.  Explode your feelings outward and cover all of humanity.  People all over the world are experiencing these feelings of isolation and sorrow right now.  Their pain is just as real as yours.  Their loved ones were just as meaningful to them as yours are to you.  Their cries are full of just as much anguish.

We are educated not to generalize because it leads to distortions in our understandings about the world.  All white people are imperialists.  All Americans support war.  All Thais like spicy food.  All educated people are smart. All expensive restaurants have great food. Despite how popular these descriptions are among a group, we learn to be more effortful in not generalizing characteristics and/or assumptions to people who ostensibly belong to that group.  The next time you lay down your credit card for the bill at the three-dollar sign restaurant, you may be wishing you had just gone to the nearest taqueria instead.  Generalizing, just like anthropomorphizing, can lead to all kinds of false impressions.  The grape vine whose “limbs” I severed a couple of weeks back probably did not feel the pain that I imagined it did.

But, people are all quite similar, no matter how much we focus on what separates us as individuals and groups of individuals.  “Those Africans dying of AIDS” are people who are experiencing an endless chain of tragic losses.  Their grief is no less debilitating.  The Iraqi families who have had their lives blown apart by shrapnel suffer daily not just from their losses, but also from the knowledge that those deaths were preventable.  Soldiers’ families are no less caught in this cycle of misery.

Indeed, you know all of this intellectually, but do you understand it emotionally? Politicians and celebrities who suddenly become outspoken about a social/medical issue when a catastrophe strikes their families speak to this division in understanding.  They were not intellectually ignorant about pesticide-caused birth defects, but they were emotionally ignorant.  They did not care that the laborers picking their strawberries were not properly protected from exposure.  The world has been made aware of the dangers that coal miners face, but we haven’t changed our energy sourcing patterns.  We know about poverty and we know that much of the world lacks access to healthy living standards, but the problem continues to worsen.  This is not because we do not know about these issues; it’s because we don’t care enough to find out why.

If a fundamental shift in your personal life were needed so that your loved one didn’t die, would you make that change?  How would you react if the only way to keep your loved one alive was to get me to reduce my constant use of plastic disposable water bottles?  Would you urge me to do so or would that be “too much work” and not worth it?  In other words, your loved one dying was a fair price to pay for my continued convenience of using those bottles. 

It seems barbaric to put it this way, but that’s pretty much how it works, just on a larger scale.  There are proposals for a better functioning social system in which people are properly fed, housed, and educated.  Crime, war, and poverty are not intractable problems of humanity.  They survive because of your terrifying beliefs about “human nature” (with you and those you know as the exceptions to this monstrous nature, of course!).  Examine the science about human social behavior.  Notice how adaptable humans are, and notice what factors contribute most to our well being. By ignoring the problem and remaining steadfastly ignorant, you are increasing the chances that you or someone you love will be the next victim of a stupidly designed social system.  And when your grief overwhelms you because “something could have been done to avoid the tragedy” just remember that they, like you perhaps, didn’t have time or interest to solve such problems.  Your despair was not theirs, so it was not their concern.  As Helen Keller said, “It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.” Or more bluntly, it is hard to make other people's problems matter to you.

We cannot wait until we have all experienced every preventable human-created disaster, so that is why we must generalize our emotional experiences.  Being oppressed, losing a loved one, witnessing an injustice, feeling cheated, and being hurt are experiences we have all had.  The specific circumstances were different, but the emotional experiences can be generalized.   As we get better at that, the choice between earning interest vs. making sure no one goes without food will be a no-brainer.  We will naturally act towards the greater good, not because of state compulsion, but because our hearts demand it.