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

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.

Crush Bottle After Use

CRUSH BOTTLE AFTER USE   is a notice appearing on most water bottles in India.  Why is that important? At first, I thought it had something to do with recycling.  There was recycling going on, but not the type I had imagined.  I was corrected and learned that this notice was a measure to prevent against fraud.  What kind of fraud would that be?  It turns out that uncrushed bottles were being fished out of trash piles and refilled with tap water to be resold as bottled water.  Ingenious!  The sellers, in their ostensible zeal to offer great customer service, would quickly "open" the bottle for you, while handing it over.

What would compel someone to deceive a buyer in this way?  These bottles of water are not that profitable, and the potential for harm is high.  In a nation crowded with poverty and resourcefulness, this practice was widespread enough that it warranted the notice.  Can we really blame someone for trying to eke out an existence on the few rupees they could get by selling "recycled" water bottles?  Aren't they just looking out for themselves in a world that offers no alternative?  A CEO doesn't want you to be homeless; he is just making sure the company's stock is valuable.  The small businesswoman doesn't want to lay you off, but she can't stay competitive with operating costs inflated by your salary.  It is what is required.  


If you don't like this "ruling value syntax" (John McMurtry), then see how you can change the value orientation.  Until you realize the condition, a bewildering array of symptoms will continue to proliferate faster than you can imagine them.