Personality Typing I: Electrons with West’s Disease

Chris Wilson1 Comment

Original Post (with comments)
Did I mention I’m addicted to Deadwood? Okay, maybe addicted is a strong word, but I’m really enjoying it, and as it happens, I’m in kind of a weird place, temporally speaking. I’ve absorbed the whole first season because I rented the DVDs. Now I’m ready to jump into the second season, but it’s already underway, four or five (or is it six?) episodes worth. What to do? Rather than lose the impact of seeing them all in order, I settled on the the methadone option – the “Special Features” DVD that came with the last two episodes of Season 1. DND (hereafter invoking a new acronym meaning, does not disappoint).

The guy who writes Deadwood is named David Milch. He’s one of those “established” TV writers, the guys who have the jobs that are the heart’s desire of countless inevitably unsuccessful writers. He’s there for a good reason, irrespective of the lock-out to new talent that typifies much of the industry. Milch started as a writer on Hill Street Blues (won an Emmy) and gained momentum up to co-creating NYPD Blue (won a couple of Emmys), which he rode all the way through the 90’s. Now, he’s doing Deadwood… unorthodox, like.

It turns out that the folks at HBO (geniuses, if you ask me) have given this guy a wide berth – a lot of what he writes is improvised on the set after he watches some aspect of an actor’s performance. The whole crew, according to the interviews on the “Special Features” disk, are like addicts waiting for new pages. (I can relate, but I’m okay.) Anyhow, the last segment on the disk is an interview between Milch and one of the stars of the first season, Kieth Carradine, who plays Wild Bill Hickok. I was impressed and intrigued by this gregarious but admitted self-hater before seeing this interview (he was on Jon Favreaux’s Dinner for Five not too long ago). Nevertheless, I was caught off guard by how insightful and esoterically erudite Milch was when, toward the end of the interview, Carradine asked him about a particular scene from Season 1 – a guy who was praising (and irritating) Wild Bill, after being asked to go away, changed his tune abruptly, and wished him dead. I’ll quote him so you can follow his train of thought as it comes around the bend.

Nathaniel West wrote, I thought, beautifully about that syndrome, and W.H. Auden, the poet, wrote an essay about West’s analysis of that syndrome, which he called, ‘West’s Disease.’ It’s about people who, for whatever reason, are unable to turn wishes into passions in their life, and lacking that capacity, sit passively in mute outrage, anticipating disasters. They go to fires. Any sort of natural disaster attracts them. And in the absence of a natural disaster, they sometimes try and create disasters. And they hate the people whose lives, whether successful or not, are pursued with passion. And first they idolize them, then they want to destroy them. They want to appropriate the vitality of those people…

Whoa. I talk to lots of people and I’d be mesmerized to be in a conversation of this sort. Maybe it just hits home with me because I’m so obsessed with understanding and generalizing about human behavior (which more than a couple of people have told me is futile). Nevertheless, to me, this was fantastic. It rang so true that I just had to investigate this West fellow. Here’s a good bio link. It seems that his most famous work was the novel, Day of the Locust (1939, never heard of it), and it also seems that his most distinguishing characteristic was his tendency to exaggerate to absurdity. This review that followed the release of a compilation of his works in 1997 makes the point.

In West’s cosmology, exaggeration rules: a moment of self-doubt becomes profound self-loathing; fleeting hostility becomes a blow to the head; and the merest gesture of compassion becomes an act of martyrdom. Prose is not always easy to read at this volume — West’s crazy normality has, in the 57 years since his death, often perplexed both the tourists and the folks back home — but this edition, which demonstrates the range of West’s craziness as well as his normality, is convincing evidence that his work is worth looking at again.

I like this idea of exaggeration to absurdity. Clearly, “West’s Disease” isn’t pervasive in society, in literal terms, but it’s recognizable. Better said – you can’t miss it! We all know people like this, people who hate those who achieve or succeed or just plain live life with a smile on their face. Most of these electrons (as I call them – negatively charged and all) do so under the radar, though I find that they’re easy to spot, for the most part. Very few will actually translate their contempt into actions – recall that their problem to begin with is that they can’t do this – but some will.

Some folks will go out of their way to screw someone whose very existence, and only that, irks them to no end. These people, even the impotent ones, are cancer. They must be avoided at all costs, and I’ll go so far as to say that they should be shunned the moment their nefarious predilections reveal themselves sufficiently. To me, knowing that this personality type exists has significant value. It’s just part of knowing what we’re up against in our march through life, and knowing what to do about it is often the difference between realizing our dreams and going in circles. Electrons with West’s Syndrome. I fucking love it. Cross another nuisance off the Christmas Card list.

(DISCLAIMER: Never, in the course of identifying personality types, do I intend to suggest that any given personality type cannot be substantially altered via sustained diligence, and maybe some drugs. Therefore, no person who bears resemblance to this should assume that they are a loser and are in danger of being shunned. That is, of course, unless they don’t get their shit together, like soon.)

I suppose the reason I like Deadwood so much (besides the profanity, of course) is the fact that the characters have so much depth and so much complexity. What’s even more interesting is that to be able to write characters like that, you have to have in your mind an understanding of humanity that is the exact opposite of complex. David Milch, being the kind of guy who quotes Socrates as he thinks outloud about the plight of his characters, obviously has a strong grasp of this ostensible paradox. He’s good because he gets mankind, which he owes in some small part to Nathaniel West. Because West could generalize, and then make it so absurd as to paint it plainly in our minds (and maybe even put a face on it), we can watch a Western that isn’t full of cartoon characters. Now that is cool.

You Gotta Have Faith

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Original Post (with many many comments)
In response to yesterday’s post, Freedomslave came back with an interesting comment, and I think it warrants a post of its own.

Now I hate bible thumpers as much as the next guy, and I don’t go to church (except on Christmas). But the one thing I know for sure is that you have to have faith. Your faith might be that when a species hits a point in its evolution that the DNA mutates and evolves into a higher form of life. Just like the bible thumper you need a certain amount of faith to believe that, epically with all the inconclusive DNA evidence that now exists and the lack of fossil evidence to verify it.

You have to have faith. With this, I wholeheartedly agree. This wasn’t always the case. I used to believe that faith is a crutch, kind of a get out of jail free card for when reality doesn’t go your way. In a lot of ways, I still believe this. I don’t subscribe to the notion that just because many big questions are still unanswered we have to use faith to believe in something. It’s like we’re saying we can’t get by without embracing some worldview, and our only options are all debatable as to their merit. This is simply false. We can do very well in life without buying into big-picture concepts that don’t add up logically. But it requires us to put aside our inherent need to explain our surroundings.

I’ve talked before about the evolution of hope and despair. The gist of the concept is that our minds have a built-in ability to assess our environment in terms of whether or not it bodes well for our plans, which in caveman days were simple – survive long enough to reproduce. Situations that bode well generate hope, which keeps us clocked in and active. Situations that look bad generate despair, which prompts us to explore our options and do something different. But before hope and despair can do their jobs, our minds have to make that assessment. Thinking about the hostile environment of ancient times, it’s clear that decisions had to be made – if you stood too long weighing every little option, bad things could (and often did) happen. Statistically speaking, then as now, it is almost always better to do something than nothing when your life is on the line. Thus emerges our need to explain our world.

But our modern world, as this blog routinely espouses, is nothing like that of our cave-dwelling ancestors. Indecision isn’t the perilous circumstance it once was. We have the benefit of nearly assured safety, and we have easy access to food and shelter. Nevertheless, the genes that make our minds are still cranking out models that insist upon satisfied curiosity. This, I am convinced, is why people buy into all manner of odd ideas. Anything to feel certain. And the concept of faith has been so sancitified that it offers the perfect excuse to settle on whatever floats your boat. I would argue, however, that faith isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, at least not most of the time.

For the most part, faith is exactly as I have always seen it – an excuse to believe whatever makes you feel best. In that case, it’s a fast path to intellectual laziness. If something requires faith to believe in it, isn’t it worth asking why having faith suddenly makes it believable? What’s the old Churchill saying: “If you say a dog’s tail is a leg, how many legs does he have? Most people answer five, but it’s four. Just saying a tail is a leg doesn’t make it so.” Or something like that. Anyhow, reality is what it is. In my book, there’s never anything to be gained by denying it. But…but…but.

As I said, I am actually now on board with the whole faith thing. I have been for two or three years now, but the only thing I have faith in is reason. As it happens, there’s really no other way. You see, reason will only get you so far. You can be the master of all masters at logical deduction and still reason will fail you. It will fail you when you get to the land of quarks and leptons. At the subatomic level, there’s no way to really measure what’s going on, and this makes all the difference when you’re trying to use reason to prove the world is as we think it is.

Think about how many physics equations use time as a variable. But what is time? Or, better yet, what is a second? We just assume that our standard units of measurement make sense, but do they? By definition, a second is the time needed for a cesium-133 atom to perform 9,192,631,770 complete oscillations. Fair enough. But how can we tell a cesium-133 atom from a cesium-132 atom? We certainly can’t pick the former out of a subatomic lineup. We use statistics and probabilities to tell them apart. Aye, there’s the rub. We’re guessing. Our guesses are good, mind you, but we’re guessing nonetheless. So here we are faithless, relying upon reason to guide us in our estimation of everything, and we can’t even get the most basic things right. This is where faith earns its stripes.

If I must have faith, and it appears that I must, it has to be solely in the notion that reason will not fail me, in the notion that even though logic holds up under the most dire of circumstances, I can’t expect too much of it. In the end, it was Karl Popper who helped me with this (me and David Hume, although Hume was long dead when Popper came along.)

David Hume worried so much about his problem of induction that he ended up rejecting rationalism altogether. His hang-up was founded in the idea that even though something (like the sun rising) has happened for 1000 days, it is illogical to suppose that it will happen on the 1001st. Since we’re only privy to part of truth of this world, we could have been wrong lo those 1000 days. Tomorrow, things could change, so it doesn’t make sense to make predictions. Ergo, rationalism doesn’t work. (Given Hume’s popularity in the old days, it’s no surprise that there was a decidedly anti-rational movement that succeeded his death and the Enlightenment. I believe they call it Romanticism. Yes, critics, the French Revolution might have also had something to do with it.) Popper, however, having seen the mental cancer that was irrationalism, took a different approach.

Popper conceded from the outset that making predictions based upon some supposed certainty that was obtained by way of reason was illogical. He acknowledged that certainty, in itself, is unattainable, but he also acknowledged that we have to do something in life. So we use reason to evaluate our alternatives and we choose the best one. In that way, we don’t ask too much of it, and we keep ourselves as tuned into reality as possible. The only thing required is a healthy faith in reason. That’s where I am these days.

I rejoice in the mystery of our world. I’m thrilled to know that there will always be things to be curious about. I’m thrilled to know that there’s always a chance that something big and heretofore established will come crumbling down in the face of new evidence. I also watch car chases – maybe it’s me. In any case, my explanation for this world is simple – it’s all explainable (not explained, but explainable). It’s up to us to chip away at it so that we can keep handing what we learn down through the generations. I really don’t need anything more than that, and I firmly believe that most people, if they’d take a deep breath and give it a try, wouldn’t either.

Books That Will Make You Think Differently About Yourself

Chris Wilson1 Comment

The concept behind this site is fairly simple. Our genes are controlling us a lot more than we think they are, but this is not a bad news story. We can, if we understand what our genes are up to, take control and live according to our rationally conceived objectives in life. This is not an idea that I have come up with on my own (though I may be one of its most ardent proponents). I’ve just grabbed onto it because I think it is the key to getting the most out of our time here. If we know that emotions are the brain’s rapid response system, and we know that they evolved to react in certain ways to certain situations (social situations, in particular), then we have a leg up in the quest to think when circumstances require thought more than emotion. That, alone, I am convinced, would elevate the general happiness to levels that have never before been seen in mankind’s history. To that end, I’d like to propose the creation of a book list, an enlightened caveman curriculum, if you will.

Let me first draw some lines in the sand. There are countless books that can be said to enlighten humanity – the dictionary comes to mind – so we need some criteria for books that will fit properly into this. The first is this: a book on this list must deal directly with human nature. It may be based in science, such as genetics, or any other field of study that is represented on accredited college campuses. Anthropologists and archaeologists have learned a great deal about who we are as a species, so it makes sense to include their efforts in our pursuit of enlightenment.

Second, the book must invoke concepts about human nature in a prescriptive way. That is to say, it isn’t good enough to say that genes are selfish, which means our elaborate lives are the happenstance result of replicators replicating. (So The Selfish Gene , great as it is, is out.) The book has to say what the science and/or anthropology and/or archaeology prescribes for those of us looking for direction in life. We need to be able to practically apply what the academics have discovered.

I’ll start by adding three books that have been particularly meaningful to me, and I’d ask that suggestions to the list adhere to the same general format – tell what the background information is, and then tell what is prescribed, and how it benefits mankind. Over time, hopefully, we’ll have a nice list of books that all add credence and weight to the theme of this site. Of course, in the spirit of intellectual rigor, I’d welcome any recommendations of books that contradict the enlightened caveman concept.
These books are listed in no particular order.

  1. Mean Genes : From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts
    by Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan
    From the introduction:
    Our brains have been designed by genetic evolution. Once we understand that design, it is no longer surprising that we experience tensions in our marriages, that our waistlines are bigger than we’d like, and that Big Macs are tastier than brown rice. To understand ourselves and our world, we need to look not to Sigmund Freud but rather to Charles Darwin. The authors then go on to address the following list of topics: debt, getting fat, drugs, taking risks, greed, gender differences, beauty, infidelity, family, friends, and foes. In each case, they detail the ancient genetic strategies that are manifesting themselves in behavior and social phenomena today, and then they explain what shifts in thought are implied by the information if we are to improve our lives.I must admit that I was in a pretty solid state of panic when I read the introduction to this book. I was thinking that these guys had basically beat me to the punch. Fortunately, as I read on, I realized that there really isn’t very much overlap between my book and theirs. Yes, we’re both working off the same general premise. However, my book is far less tactical. I’m focused on changing the way we think from the inside out – by starting with how we think of ourselves and what matters in life and then moving on to how we think about our fellow man – all for the sole purpose of bringing happiness to our lives.

    Burnham and Phelan, however, call their book a manual for the mind, and I have to agree with them.For example, they explain that in ancestral times, it made sense to eat when food was available. Therefore, we are now a species that eats far more than it needs when food is plentiful (as it is in first-world countries). That means we have to consciously endeavor to control our intake of food. If we do not, we’ll routinely find ourselves letting our belts out. Think of how many people in this country don’t know this. The mass awareness of little tidbits like this could prolong and improve the lives of countless people. There are many, many others in this book.

  2. Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge
    by Edward O. Wilson.
    From Chapter 6: The Mind
    All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness.Wilson’s book is about reconsidering the way we teach and pursue knowledge. He argues that our schools break subjects apart (math, english, biology, etc.) for somewhat arbitrary reasons and that this works against the design of the mind, which is more comfortable with holistic approaches to learning. Consilience, he says, is, “…literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.” The idea is that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to applying what we learn in computer-based neural networks to implementing better computer systems. We should ask what other phenomenon could be better understood by what we know about these inanimate, but elegant systems. It’s about synthesis, and this, to me, begs a mental paradigm shift.

    Wilson asserts that that the value of consilience is not something that can be proven with first principles or logical deduction. Its value is self-evident, as it has been chiefly responsible for most of the progress of our species. I can vouch for that in my own life. Any time I learn something new, I automatically ponder what this new information could bring to other things I’ve wondered about. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for example, has so many other applications that counting them would be tough, and I thank Wilson for helping me think differently, about myself and the world around me.

  3. The Science of Good and Evil : Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule
    by Michael Shermer
    From the Prologue:
    Ultimate questions about social and moral behavior, while considerably more challenging [than questions about hunger and sex], must nevertheless be subjected to an evolutionary analysis. There is a science dedicated specifically to this subject called evolutionary ethics, founded by Charles Darwin a century and a half ago and continuing as a vigorous field of study and debate today. Evolutionary ethics is a subdivision of a larger science called evolutionary psychology, which attempts a scientific study of all social and psychological human behavior. The fundamental premise of these sciences is that human behavior evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years during our stint as hominid hunter gatherers, as well as over the course of millions of years as primates, and tens of millions of years as mammals.In this book, Shermer takes aim at morality and ethics by arguing that humans came by the two long before religion or any codified social rules existed. In Chapter 5, called, “Can We Be Good Without God?”, he addresses head on how we can rationally arrive at morality and be anchored to it as tightly (and rightly) as any religious person is to his or her morality. Throughout the book, the author calls upon all sorts of academic information, from evolutionary psychology to anthropology to sociology to make his points. And aside from the obvious benefits of seeing our tendency toward piety for what it is, he also brings out a really useful concept, using fuzzy logic to think differently about issues.

    Shermer makes the point that the human tendency to dichotomize, to think something is either this way or that, must be guarded against, because life is simply not black and white. Better to think in terms of fractions. For example, at any given moment, I may be 20% altruistic and 80% non-altruistic (selfish). Though, in the balance, I come off selfish at that time, it is incorrect to say that I am a selfish person. The situation may have called for selfishness. The bottom line is that circumstances have a lot to do with our morality. Being able to see people and ideas as shades of grey helps us to avoid moral absolutes that generally lead to division between people. This is a worthwhile message, to say the least.

So there you have it – three books that I think contribute to the enlightened caveman movement. There are more, but not too many, not to my knowledge. That’s why I’m doing this. I’ll finish my contributions in later posts. For now, I hope to learn about all the great books I’ve never heard of, books that will bolster my belief that here lies something big, something important.

Intellectual Property and Table Clearing

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Original Post (with comments)
Here’s where capitalism and the concept of intellectual property clash. The Time Life folks hit me with a Greatest Soul Ballads ad tonight, and it got me thinking. I’m not really interested in every song on the list, but there are quite a few that I’d love to have on my iPod. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had a website that provided the songlist for all these great compilations that get advertised on TV? You could just choose the ones you want and buy them for $1.05 – $1.00 goes to iTunes, and Mr. Easy Tunes (can I name a business or what?) keeps a nickel. Nice little money machine, right? Maybe not.

It’s likely, I don’t know (it’s late – I been drinkin), that intellectual property laws could protect these lists so that it would be an infringement to use them without permission (and compensation). And if this is true, isn’t it a bit much? Then what can’t you claim as your own?

Tonight, after guests left, I inaugurated the one object under each arm (a pitcher and beer bottle) and four glasses in each hand clean up maneuver. It was an act of custodial ballet – the objects balanced just so, the glasses drawn together slowly as the grasp of each hand closed, and the deft pivot towards the kitchen. I’ve been around. I worked in restaurants, and I’ve been in surreal late night contests to see who could carry the most glasses, so I won’t say my maneuver was ground breaking. But it was smooth, and most of all, efficient – the table was cleared instantly. Now what if I decided that that move was mine, and that I wanted to legally make it so?

Would it not be a series of ideas or memes (like a list) that were put into action (like selling a compilation album) that elicted a desired outcome – in this case, clearing a table in one fell swoop (like making money)? Of course, I know that folks probably won’t be executing my move for financial compensation any time soon, but what does that matter? Bloggers can’t take copyrighted photos and put them on their blog sites. There’s no money in it for the bloggers, but that’s still out of bounds. So where’s the line? By the logic of list protection and copyrighted photo protection, could I not charge a nickel every time someone executed my maneuver? Seems like I could. (And you can bet I’d enforce it.) Maybe it’s silly. But maybe it’s not.
Any of you bottom dwelling lawyers want to weigh in on this?

Thin-Slicing and Attraction Triggers

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Original Post (with comments)
Even though I finished it a while ago, I continue to dwell on the notion of thin-slicing that Malcolm Gladwell writes about it his latest, Blink. ” ‘Thin-slicing’ refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based upon very narrow slices of experience.” Gladwell covers a variety of situations that exemplify how thin-slicing works, and more importantly, how it often works better than making decisions based upon a great deal of information. Indeed, this is really the point of Blink. But, upon further consideration, one example, the one I referred to in my appearance delta theory, has prompted me to extend the concept to include what I’ll call attraction triggers.

Gladwell, in illuminating the “dark side” of thin-slicing, spends some time on how we often form our opinions of individuals based upon the slightest of information. Our visual first impression often has the effect of coloring our assessments dramatically. He refers us to a test some psychologists have developed called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Subjects are given a list of words and are asked to choose which of two categories the words belong to. For example, the list may be a list of names and the category choices may be male or female. Subject responses are timed. Since most people have considerable experiences that say the name Mary is a female name, responses in this easy test are very fast (between 400 and 600 milliseconds). The association between name and gender is well established within our culture. But when the categories and words are changed, interesting things start to happen.

Suppose, there are two possible words for each category – say male or family on one side and female or career on the other. Then, the subject still has to put the words into one of two categories, but they have to figure out which is best by considering four alternatives, not two. Confused yet? Here’s an example.
Male………………………………….. Female
or……………………………………….. or
Family ………………………………..Career
…………………….Babies……………………………
…………………….Sarah…………………………….
…………………….Derek…………………………….
…………………….Domestic……………………….
…………………….Entrepreneur………………..

So the subject simply has to place an X either to the left or the right of the word (Babies, for example) to indicate which category the word falls into. Interestingly, because we naturally associate maleness with careers and femaleness with families, this test is pretty tough. Our natural tendency is to want to put entrepreneur on the male side, but it is clearly related to career. That little mental wavering manifests itself in additional time to taken to make the choice – on the order of 200 to 300 milliseconds more than what is seen for a naturally strong association. The point is that, by pairing certain words together, the psychologists administering the IAT have found evidence of all sorts of inherent bias in how we assess things and other people.

One bias that we might not expect or want to accept is a racial bias. You can go here to take the Race IAT for yourself. (Be warned – you’re likely to be dismayed by the results.) When the categories are European American or Bad and African American or Good, all hell breaks loose. When we should be able to breeze through a series of pictures and take no more than 400-600 milliseconds to make our choices, we take much longer. When we should be able to take words like Evil, Hurt, and Wonderful and easily place them into their proper categories in short order, we simply do not. It appears that our thin-slicing proclivities are very much a function of our personal experiences and of our assessments of cultural norms. Though tests like the Race IAT should give us some serious pause, I wonder if we could take the same idea and apply it to how we assess appearance deltas.

Though the IAT asks subjects to assign words to categories, it isn’t very much different than the “hot or not” craze that has taken up residence in many corners of the Internet. In this case, subjects are asked if a person in a picture is hot or not. Now, they are not timed, so this isn’t particularly rigorous experimentation. But what if they were? What if the point were to determine one’s hotness or not hotness as quickly as possible, and the responses were measured in milliseconds? Would be there be ways that we could manipulate the pictures to get faster or slower responses? I say there would, and they would revolve around attraction triggers.

Suppose we put up a picture of a girl with a dead-pan look on her face and then gave the test to 100 people. Then, we put up the same girl, but with a big smile on her face. Would she get more “hots” than she did in the first test? Who knows? If she was on the fence – say 50 out of 100 said she was hot in the first test – we should expect that number to go up on the second test (unless she had major dental issues). This is because, all things being equal, someone who smiles is more attractive than someone who does not, and we know it in a fraction of a second. Is there more?

Ever seen someone from a distance and thought they were attractive, only to learn as they got closer that you were wrong? Of course, it’s happened to all of us. But can you put your finger on what it was that contributed most to the assessment early on? Maybe the person had an attractive walk, or maybe he or she was wearing a flashy outfit. Whatever it was, I think we can think of it as an attraction trigger, something that, when it is thin-sliced, leads people to think “hot.” Of course, a distant attraction trigger often dissipates as the distance closes. But, is it possible that there are attraction triggers that are seen up close and contribute disproportionally to one’s delta (or lack thereof)?

Teeth might be a good example. If someone has a brilliant smile, it may be so captivating that it offsets other features that might raise one’s delta. And this is not insignificant. As Gladwell’s book points out, the biases that are invoked when we’re thin-slicing are not just fleeting impressions. They color how we behave going forward. So if we could do something to alter those first impressions in our favor, we may find interpersonal acceptance easier to come by.

Again, we find ourselves up against the sell-out conundrum – which is to say, is it worth it to modify our appearances to get what we want from other people? In some cases, whether we want to admit or not, the answer for all of us is yes. So the real question is when. And now, with the notion of attraction triggers, we can consider large-scale changes (such as dieting, exercising, and cosmetic surgery) and more subtle changes.
One friend of mine loves girls in pony tails. On a scale of 1-10, she can be a 6 but he’ll go for her like she’s a 9. It’s weird really, but I’m convinced that most people have these quirks. So if an average girl happened to be interested in my friend, she would be well served to know his attraction trigger and wear her hair accordingly. This is a simplistic example, I know, but I’m just trying to throw another twist into the appearance delta concept. I think it’s useful, even if as only a more descriptive way to observe and contemplate the human drama as it unfolds. Would a working familiarity with attraction triggers constitute enlightenment? Why not? Maybe it makes things just a little bit brighter.

Concurrence and March Madness

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Original Post (with comments)
A friend of mine, a Georgia Tech fan, said last night to a Louisville fan, “Yeah, y’all put it to us pretty good the other day.”

The Louisville guy: “It wasn’t exactly hard. We had you beat by the end of the first half.”

My friend (following a deferential sigh), “Well, now that we’re out, I’m rooting for you guys. I think you have a great shot.”

The Louisville guy: “Yeah, it’s gonna be tough, but we’re up to it.”

I always crack up when I hear these kinds of exchanges. It strikes me as comical that people who neither play or know anyone who plays on the team they like afford themselves honorary membership on the extended roster. Maybe it’s because I really could care less who wins, precisely because I’m not playing and don’t know anyone playing. It may also be because I think I know what’s going on and I find it highly entertaining to watch.

You see, these people are fans, which is short for fanatic. I won’t say that all sports fans are fanatical, but some of them definitely are. Anyhow, as the extended roster, their job is ideally to create a happening that will give the team that extra something. I believe a happening occurs when mass concurrence is achieved.

Over the years, it has dawned on me that something simpler, something more powerful may be behind the human tendency to cooperate, which, as we should all know, is one of the main reasons we are here. It has long been thought that the benefits of reciprocal altruism were sufficient to catch natural selection’s eye. But what if humans developed the need to concur with one another, to get to the kind of emotional tightness where they feel one another’s pain, long before the tendency to account for favors done and favors owed? Would that not have spawned all the cooperative behavior, including reciprocal altruism, that led Homo sapiens to outlast all other hominids? To my knowledge, no one else is talking about this, which means it is pure conjecture. However, even if we can’t say the quest for concurrence is among the grandest and most universal of human emotional drives, I think we can use the concept as a tool for talking about how humans interact with one another. March Madness is a perfect example.

As I stood at a bar watching the Illinois-Villanova game come to its exciting conclusion, I observed, captivated, as the concurrence in the room mounted. Sitting at the bar, the folks were into the game. They were in groups of two to five or six, and they were very much emotionally connected to each other. Eyes glued to the screen as the play unfolded. A guy scores and they either erupt with high fives and cheers, or they groan and then quickly begin to reassure each other. As the game drew to its final minutes, and Illinois started coming back, the concurrence started to expand. People standing behind the people sitting at the bar started becoming concurrent with each other and the true fans. The high five ritual got longer and longer, as each person had more people to high five. Then, by the last shot of regular play, the whole bar was singularly focused on the TV screens. A tie! Overtime! Pandemonium. Disbelief coupled with visceral elation. A happening was officially underway. It continued right up to the last second of the game, and lasted for at least another ten minutes.

What an experience. You really can feel it, the energy in the air, the emotional highs and lows, all of it, and it feels good. It’s like being one of the few in on an inside joke that has been heard by many. That feeling, I think, is nothing more than the result of our drive to concurrence achieving its goal. It is not unlike the relationship between an orgasm and the emotional drive to reproduce. (Remember that our emotions are physiological and neurological programs designed to get us to do things that facilitate our survival and reproduction. Our feelings are the conscious experiences that follow the execution of those programs.) If I’m right, then we have an answer to why people become sports fans.

Being in attendance at a happening is not common for most people, sports fans included, so we can’t assume that this is the primary motivator. However, there is significant concurrence to be had even in small groups watching the game at a person’s house, and the same is true at the water cooler the next day. Indeed, the quest for concurrence is really about one on one and small group relationships. But, like most of our caveman emotions, it doesn’t know when to quit. Add more people feeling each other’s pain and the feeling intensifies, sometimes culminating in a happening. The point is that people who appoint themselves standing as part of the extended roster do so because it affords them easy access to concurrence. This is useful information.

Try this if you’re not much of a sports fan. Pick a person you know to be a big fan of a particular team and start paying attention to how his team is doing. (We’ll assume he’s a male, for obvious reasons). Then, the next time you see him, mention that you caught such and such game, and oh what a nail-biter, and watch his ears perk up. Unless he’s a jerk, you will have established a baseline level of concurrence with him, a level that affords you less scrutiny and more acceptance than you would ordinarily enjoy. It’s uncanny how consistently this works. I’ve never done it to manipulate someone. I just overhear sports discussions and am not above regurgitating a factoid or two later to strike up a conversation with someone I don’t know well. (The curse of the extrovert, I guess. ) The interesting thing is that you can expand this concept to explain why people align with most any group.

At the end of the day, the big universal is that we all want to belong, and this need is about as genetic as it gets. The tool that creates belonging is concurrence, and it is on display all around us. March Madness is just an apt illustration. I just hope my guys score more runs than their guys.

The Pair Bond and the Chiiiildren.

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Original Post (with comments)
I went for a run today, a baby-jogger run (i.e. harder than your average hilly run, and sometimes complete with whining soundtrack). Coming off of the flu, a vacation, and a lot of travel for business, I found that the work part of the phrase work-out kept passing across my giant movie screen – it started hurting less than two miles in. Nevertheless, at one point, another runner turned onto the road I was running. Suddenly, my focus was no longer on the discomfort I was feeling with every stride.

Me to Thomas: “Ahh, aren’t we lucky? It looks like we now have a mark (drawn out to indicate the presence of a new word for his lexicon). Now we have someone we can try to chase down and pass. And if we’re successful, it will feel so good that we’ll forget how our fitness has deteriorated.”

Thomas: “Muh.”

Me: “Very good. Let’s get him.”

Alas, my running foe turned off again before I could pass him. (I was gaining, though.) This scenario reminded me of the usefulness of competitive instincts in physical conditioning. Though being competitive is a direct result of the quest for status, and it is often the cause of serious interpersonal problems in life, it isn’t always bad – it pushes me to work harder than I might otherwise. And, to expand the concept a bit, I think many of the caveman proclivities that I usually denigrate and recommend harnessing are actually useful in the right contexts. The pair bond, particularly where kids are concerned, may be another example.

Yesterday on Michael Medved’s radio show, the discussion was centered around an article in the Northwestern periodical, The Oregonian, entitled: “Single mom a sign Rose court grows with times.” Apparently, each year for the last 75 years, during the Rose Festival, a Portland senior has been chosen as the Queen of Rosaria. This year the Queen is Rosa Montoya, a single-mom with a 7-week old daughter. Not surprisingly, Medved was appalled that a girl in such a situation would be honored in such a way. I’m inclined to agree with him, but not for the reasons he gives.

Make no mistake, there’s some substantial liberal diversity/tolerance/devictimization sentiment behind this Rose Queen selection.

Chet Orloff, director emeritus at the Oregon Historical Society and a member of the festival’s centennial committee, thinks Montoya’s election is good for Portland.

“It’s a recognition of something that’s quite realistic,” he said. “Girls are having children in high school. Getting that out into the realm of something as traditional as the Rose Festival is healthy.”

Medved disagreed. He stated that getting pregnant as a single teen is sign of poor character, and that it should not be praised or promoted as anything other than that. In my view, that’s a bit overboard. Kids are kids, which means they often to do stupid things. They have time horizon problems, so it’s hard to think of them as bad people (Isn’t that what people who accuse others of having character problems are really saying?) when they get themselves into predicaments involving pregnancy. To me, the real test of character is what they do after they learn they are pregnant. Every situation is different, so I can’t say which course of action will be the right one. However, I think it’s safe to say that most all situations will offer a hard right and an easy wrong. Which is chosen says much more about the character of the teen than the fact that he or she is dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. But the character issue is not my main concern here. Given the liberal penchant for upending tradition, should we not entertain the notion that the pair bond is archaic and on its way out (or that it should be)?

Is the notion that a standard step along the path through life is getting hitched up to one person nothing more than our caveman machinery driving the bus? It’s hard to say. Evolutionary psychology would seem to suggest that the monogamous pair bond is unnatural. Though the best female strategy in ancestral times entailed selecting males who had good genes and who would make good fathers, there’s really nothing to suggest that females should have stayed with their childrens’ fathers forever. But…this is not the ancestral world.

We have tens of thousands of years of culture that has shaped the way these caveman (or cavewoman, in this case) tendencies translate into behavior. Our genes push us toward love because it promotes reproduction and caring for our offspring, but our culture pushes love towards long-term, monogamous (at least on paper) relationships. Like I said, it’s hard to say. Maybe it’s better to just ask if it makes sense.

Those who are distressed that single parents are not honored nearly enough would seem to be suggesting that two-parent families are no better. Here we see shades of the theme behind multiculturalism – things (cultures, lifestyles, etc.) should not be thought of as better or worse, just different. Are they right? I think not, but not for moral reasons. I think this is a practical matter.

An Urban Institute article entitled, “Poverty among Children Born Outside of Marriage,” says:

Children born outside of marriage are more likely to have a mother who did not graduate from high school than are children born to married parents. They are also less likely to live with a mother who works full-time year-round. While 44 percent of children born to married parents have a mother who is fully employed, this is true for only 26 percent of children born outside of marriage. Similarly, a third of the mothers of non-marital children do not work at all, compared with only a fifth of children born to married parents.

What we can take from this is that being a single parent is a huge financial risk. A shocking revelation, to be sure. Having been raised by a single-mom, I can personally attest to this – my mother worked two jobs well into my college years. In the end, it seems like the usefulness of the pair bond in modern society revolves around the issue of children. If two individuals have no intention of having children, it seems hard to say that long-term monogamy is anything more than a persistent cultural relic. But, the moment kids come into the picture, it becomes a pragmatic extension of the natural propensity to provide for offspring. In that context, genetic love in the hands of monogamous cultural norms is a good thing, a better thing.

Notice I’ve never said the couple should be heterosexual. As the primary component of this equation, at least in my mind, is financial, I don’t think the sex of the parents is relevant here. What is relevant is the probable consequence of having a child out of wedlock. On that, there are mountains of statistics that make it quite clear that kids do better in life when they have married parents. It’s one thing to honor someone for overcoming hardship – one hopes this is what’s really behind Rosa’s selection as Rose Queen – but it’s something different altogether to honor someone just because she’s a single mom. If anything, the difficulties of being a single mom should be in the spotlight. Rosa should not be congratulated for raising a child on her own. If she must be foisted upon her peers, it should be as an object lesson in what not to do.

We can’t (and shouldn’t even consider) ridding ourselves of the caveman need for love, especially where children are concerned. Therefore, given that our culture has discovered that long-term, monogamous pair bonds are the best arrangements for harnessing love where children are concerned, we find ourselves in another situation where the caveman mind in the modern world isn’t a problem at all. Sometimes, I guess, enlightenment means nothing more than knowing that the old way is still the right way.

Personality Paradigms?

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Original Post (with comments)
The time I spent recently in Canada got me thinking about some generalities in human personality. I have always found Canadians to be extremely accommodating and somewhat non-confrontational, and this trip was no different. They’re nice, even when I wouldn’t be, and even when most people I know wouldn’t be. I don’t mean they take abuse with a smile; I mean they go out of their way to be nice to people around them, even in cities like Vancouver and Toronto. Here in America? Not so much. I wonder what accounts for this?

It’s hard to say how it happened, but maybe there’s some amateur codification to be done here. Why are people nice? One reason – they want something. Sometimes what they want is concurrence, and sometimes they want something more tangible. Sometimes they want both. In Canada, I think they mostly want concurrence. That’s why they’re nice to pretty much everyone, even when there’s nothing to gain. What if we call this a concurrence personality paradigm? I don’t think this is what we have in America, at least not a lot of us, and less and less of us as you go back in history.

In cities in America, people are more business-oriented, more transactional. We talk to the people we know, but we interact with the people we don’t. In a sense, we’re nice to the former and not as nice to the latter. This distinction is less pronounced in Canada. We could call the American mindset the status personality paradigm. Our quest for concurrence is limited to a fairly small circle of people, but we’re not monsters out in the world. We’re nice, and the more we have to gain from it, the nicer we are (to a point, of course). This is because what we gain translates directly into status. When we gain wealth, we can acquire the goods and services that afford us membership in higher and higher social strata. The proceedings in lower-class situations, therefore, are understandably far less “cordial” than they are in upper class situations – no one stands to gain much of anything by being nice. And it is not coincidental that our economic systems are set up to promote this mindset bent on upward mobility.

With the emergence of innovative financial systems (including the fractional reserve system), the status-seeking fire has been perennially stoked. They make it possible to obtain status (through consumption), even when you can’t afford it. You can borrow and, if you’re good, create enough wealth to pay interest on the money and walk away with a profit. The end result is an elevation in status through nothing more than calculated manipulation of available resources – a skill not unfamiliar to the ancestral caveman.
If we accept the existence of these different personality paradigms, then there’s an interesting question to ask. Could it be that the intense presence of the status paradigm accounts for much of the socio-economic difference between America and many other nations? More status people equals more business and more financial prosperity. Look at countries like France and Italy. While they’ve been around far longer than the US and they have natural resources aplenty, they are nowhere near the US, economically speaking. This could be a manifestation of their majority paradigm.

I would say the concurrence paradigm is the default paradigm in these two countries. Sure, people in Paris can be very nasty, but my experience has been that most areas of France and Italy are inhabited by very nice people if you make an effort to communicate with them. You could descend into a conversation with pretty much anyone. And if the feeling overtakes them, they may act in a way that is anything but profitable – like keeping the bar open late night (for free) for some traveling and rambunctious Americans. In America, not so much. And the divergence in personality paradigm doesn’t just account for anecdotal and macro-economic differences. It may very well account for the disparity in national views about war.

The status paradigm, being not so nice to begin with, fares better in conflict. As the desire for concurrence begins on the back burner, judgement is not clouded when disputes arise. The status seeker is a cool negotiator. The bargaining benefactor of his status machinery is in charge, looking for the win-win, and when there isn’t one, there isn’t a nagging desire to get along. There is only a rational examination of the logical consequences of alternative actions. And as obtaining status is often risky, the status-seeker is courageous enough to follow through with the correct (i.e. profitable) course of action, even if it’s going to cost him. He’ll take his licks and cut his losses. In short, the status personality paradigm enables the willingness to go to war. This, I think, also explains much of the difference between America and many other countries. We fight when we have to; they resist till its too late.

So what can we do with this concept? Can we make any determination as to whether it is cultural or genetic? Probably not. That’s always tough, but maybe we can say that a good bit of it is cultural. Could we not say that the proportion of people with the concurrent paradigm to status paradigm is growing? This country gets more touchy, feely every day. That would seem to suggest that the mindset is at least partially cultural – if you grow up in a family of concurrence paradigm people, you’re likely to end up the same way. It would also suggest that the cultural shift toward the concurrence paradigm may have a tipping point, a point at which America would experience something akin to what transpires in Ayn Rand’s, Atlas Shrugged. So, here we come upon a serious question? Which paradigm is better?

Before we answer, we have to acknowledge that the two paradigms naturally clash with one another. Status folks don’t have much patience for concurrence folks, and concurrence folks are horrified at the shallow callousness of status folks. Indeed, differing personality paradigms could explain a lot of the difference between the “bleeding heart” liberal and the “evil” Republican. Now to the question. Which is better? I’d say you need a good helping of both. Though the exact proportion would be difficult to nail down, I think it’s fair to say that we need enough to status folks to keep our rights intact and to keep pumping out better and better Barcoloungers, and we need enough concurrence folks to remind us to get off our Barcoloungers and talk to each other.

We Have It So Good – Perspective Part 2

Chris WilsonLeave a comment

Original Post (with comments)
This country is still very much divided, unnecessarily so. Yes, there are issues about which many people disagree, and there are worthwhile opinions to be found on both sides of the divide, but the fact is that most of the fuss is manufactured by politicians who have everything to gain by pitting one side against another. Given that the political philosophies that once underpinned the Democratic and Republican parties have long since been extinct, it seems that the team mentality is driving the bus nowadays. So with roughly half the masses in Democrat jerseys and the other half in Republican jerseys, the stage is set. The politicians appeal to each team’s desire to win, to their desire to vanquish their evil competitor, and they do so by creating the appearance that, if they lose, America goes down the drain. I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard someone say, “Bush is ruining America!” or “The liberals are out to destroy everything this country stands for!” People, it’s time for a reality check. What follows is an email report from a guy serving in the Peace Corps in Togo (West Africa), which has been in the midst of some serious political upheaval.

Subject: A Brief Hello & Update From Togo
Hello Everybody,
Hope all is well back home in The Good (According to many these days, The Big Bad) Old US of A.. While briefly in Lome I wanted to take the time to let you all know how’s it going here.

Good news is things are relatively calm in Lome and especially throughout the country and other than a couple opposition rallies which took place past resulting in some people killed (In Lome) by the government supported military things are honestly quite safe. I’ve been back in village these past weeks continuing my work which is going very well and it’s not too surprisingly one of the safest places to be as politics don’t reach so far out as the rural bush (Not many politicians could stand a dusty and bumpy ride out to a place with no electricity and without the modern comforts). Most of the villagers can’t read Ewe or French and haven’t even got an elementary level education so the inter workings of politics are somewhat out of thought for them on many levels. What’s on our minds today? What’s going on in the Capital or what my family will eat and whether the crop is growing well to sustain us throughout the rest of the year. Answer # 2 would be more correct. This is not to say that many, especially the men, in village aren’t having a wonderful time discussing their hopes for the future with what’s recently happened.
The death of Eyadema and his 38 years of justiceless rule can make for change and a chance at democracy for these people. It is for sure a very interesting time to be in Togo and I’m learning quite a bit about African politics. Much I’m seeing and learning of these politics is very very sad and very well hidden from the outside world. One shocking thing is that Eyadema was a good friend of the French President Chirac and he has also contributed large amounts of money (Togolese money and wealth) to support Chirac’s election campaigns in France. A developed nation President taking money from a poor small country such as Togo! The last thing money should be doing is leaving this country. I am truly convinced that France continues to help destroy this country rather than help rebuild it and this is quite a sad reality. Our World Needs Way Better Leaders! I’ll have more to say on this whole thing in my next official update to you all, so stay tuned.

One thing I can propose to you in the meantime is to take the time to open your eyes and seek out to inform yourselves about what goes on around you in this world especially outside the USA (With the wide existence of the internet today this is so much easier to do). Make an effort to know what’s happening to people. The injustices and inhumanities are mindblowing and most often the world hardly ever notices! It’s quite sickening.

Take good care of yourselves and again thanks to all sending me their well wishes, love, and support. It’s great to have. Hope you enjoy the photos.

Peace Be With You,
Thomas

Folks, I have a truly hard time mounting anything close to outrage about anything domestic when I read things like this. We have come so far in the US that we have completely lost perspective on what life can be like, and is for many, many people on this planet. If we could just take a step back and reflect upon how good we have it, I think we could find a way to let go of some of the team mentality. Like Chirac in the email above, our politicians are doing dispicable things in the name of leadership, and we, instead of calling them on it, brush their actions aside because the alternative is unthinkable – our team might take a beating in the next election.

After 9-11, we came together as a nation. We remembered what it really means to be an American – to live in a land where people are free to live as they choose, to live in a land where prosperity is the norm, not the exception, to live in a land where the rule of law is a given, where there is equality of opportunity the likes of which this planet has never seen. This happened because an event transpired that forced us to turn our attention away from domestic in-fighting and toward an enemy whose greatest goal is the demise of our republic. Granted, the unity was only a tad longer than the blink of an eye, but it happened, and I hope I am not being too idealistic in hoping it could happen again, but under less devastating circumstances.

As I have said before – there are two teams in this country, but they are not the Republicans and the Democrats. They are the weasels serving, nay plundering, as politicians and us, the people who are being stirred into a frenzy to take the focus off their nefarious activities. The time has come to put aside the differences that are so largely cosmetic and come to realization that Joe Lunchbucket and Jan Q. Public really aren’t that different from one another. Both want the best for their children, both hate the thought of people who are down and out, and both would rather leave politics to people with the time and inclination to do their homework. Of course, there are issues about which they will differ greatly, but those, in my view, are beside the point. Until those who represent us locally and in DC deserve the title of “civil servant,” our efforts should be aimed at replacing them.

Now I’ve been around long enough to know that what I wish for is about as likely as free elections in Iraq. Okay, bad example. As likely as a Red Sox world series. Damn. Missed again. Anyway, I can’t help but believe that it is possible to overcome the team mentality if enough opinion-makers take up the fight. It all comes down to perspective – whether gays can marry or not, there will still be enough to eat. As Thomas says, we need to open our eyes to see what’s going on around us. We need only be mindful of how good we have it to put aside the pettiness and get started on a project to take America back to the days when political disputes were in the hands of the informed, to when, liberal or conservative, being American was the most important thing . You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.

In Dire Need of Perspective

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Original Post (with comments)
I’ve spent the past five days snowboarding in Whistler, British Columbia. What a staggeringly idyllic place, even if this year’s snowfall has been only a fraction of what they usually get. As cancellation policies prevented me from choosing another destination, I resigned myself to short days on the mountains accompanied by aesthetically-inspired writing sessions. I was wrong on both accounts. It turns out that even when Whistler only has 50% of the snow it usually has, it still beats the shit out of most resorts – it’s huge. So I spent as much time as possible on the slopes. And the writing, well, they didn’t have high-speed internet in my condo. Really.

I actually had to walk 10 minutes to an Internet Cafe to get connected. That oppressive burden was enough to prevent me from spending anything but the bare minimum amount of time in front of my laptop. Instead, I investigated the temporal limits of what is known as the apres-ski, but not without a bit of underlying indignation at being forced upon such a task. It wasn’t my fault. Really. And now that I’m home and jacked in wirelessly (ahh, that’s more like it), I can take a step back.

It’s amazing how quickly we Americans get used to things, and it’s even more amazing how irritated we often get when proceedings deviate from the new norm. How could such an obviously planned and well laid-out village such as Whistler not be blanketed in Hot Spots? The nerve of some people. But as trivial (and absurd) as my whining is, I think it points to a larger trend in this country. It seems that American culture promotes a tendency to regularly recalibrate expectations about how life should unfold. As they say in the world of finance – past performance is no guarantee of future returns. In fact, the past is becoming more and more irrelevant every day.

Think of all of the ads that gently bombard us throughout the day. They’re all about the future, the better future, the one that is only a truckload of products and services away. Want something now, but can’t afford it? No problem. No interest till 2006. Want to be thin? In just a few short weeks, with the right book, diet, meal-plan, and/or pill, no problem. Still paying for your past mistakes? It’s not your fault. Don’t beat yourself up. The future is about second chances. It’s about third, fourth, and fifth chances. Chin up. Tomorrow is a new day…provided you drink enough coffee. The rat race moves forward, always forward, and faster, always faster. In its path, it leaves the tattered remains of perspective.

It’s not that we need aspire to be active historians, holding candlelight vigils for the “best of 1997.” We need only widen the lens through which we view our lives, and this is hard at high speeds. Moving at a fast pace necessarily requires focus. Going a mile at a walk, we can take in the scenery. We can see the details of our surroundings, and if we look close enough, we can often see what’s come before. We can get a feel for how far things have progressed. Going the same mile at 60 mph offers us no such opportunity. We have to keep our attention mostly forward – to navigate, make necessary course corrections, and to avoid obstacles. There’s simply no time for taking it all in. Our lens is too narrow. The same is true in life, but here lies a dilemma – what do we do?

The obvious, but, in my view, incorrect answer, is to simply drop out, to get off the wheel, to quit the rat race. This is certainly the cure for the perspective problem, but it often brings with it the kind of scenery that doesn’t make much use of a wide-angle lens. Yes, you can despise the rampant consumerism that, perhaps more than anything else, regrettably defines this country today, but I don’t know how you can reject it without hopping from the frying pan into the fire. The fact is that life in this country can be as blissful as it can be anywhere on the planet. You can shape your environment in any way you like, and you can surround yourself with wonderful, like-minded people, even if you’re a total wackjob. But – there’s always a but – there is a direct correlation between the degree to which you can manipulate your environment and the amount of money you have.

These are the kinds of statements that prompt outrage in some people. Hands will wave and dust will fly at the injustice of it all. But as David Hume warned, it is a mistake to confuse what we want with what is. So, while others will reject the rat race out of hand, I think we should accept it and endeavor to get what we want out of it…without getting sucked in too far. Our harbor in the storm is perspective, and it works in two ways.
First of all, perspective is what allows us to realize that we have it good. I try to step outside myself and view my world with a wide lens. I try to remember that, in pure prosperity terms, I have it better than 99.99% of the humans that have ever lived. You do, too. We have come an amazingly long way, baby. Items that were once only available to the tippy top of the upper crust are now household items for most everyone. Not so long ago, a trip to Whistler, BC from Atlanta would have taken weeks, not hours, and I’d have had to either plan my trip months and months in advance or hope for the best when I got out there. Nevertheless, we curse the gods when we have to take our shoes off to go through security and we fly into fits of rage when our cell phones drop calls. It’s pathetic, really. Life has never been so comfortable for humans, and while the information age makes me keenly aware of what the other guy has, I try to remember that there is always more. You can always be richer, more powerful, better looking, smarter, and so on, which brings me to the second thing we get from perspective.

When we take a step back, it becomes easier to see that there is a very real point of diminishing returns with respect to the rat race. Not only do we recognize that we have it seriously good; we recognize that it may not be much better if we get what the rat race directors are pushing on us. Books like Gregg Easterbrook’s, The Progress Paradox, and Barry Schwartz’s, The Paradox of Choice, make it clear that increasing prosperity is not bringing a corresponding rise in individual happiness. (FYI – I generally disagree with both authors’ conclusions. However, their statement of the problem makes sense to me.) That means that, at some point, good is good enough. Though our caveman minds will urge us to keep chugging along the wheel (anything to keep up with the Joneses), perspective is what allows us to determine when every extra turn is a waste of time and a distraction from what really matters in life. The only folks I would exempt from this are the folks who should be covering the world with wireless high-speed internet. Just a couple more turns, fellas.