“Each of us is becoming more confident about our own world just as it drifts farther from the worlds of others.” The Technology of Kindness, by Jamil Zaki
If we don’t have shared truths we can’t co-exist, we can’t protect ourselves, and we can’t set healthy examples for – anyone. That’s my take-away from a truly empowering article for Scientific American by Jamil Zaki, author of The War for Kindness.
The Stanford professor of psychology observes that merely leaving a phone turned off between two people will result in their trusting each other less. Sounds right to me, given how many times I’ve wondered if the conversation I’m having with someone is worth maintaining, since they’ve apparently abandoned our exchange for the “tiny, addictive affirmations” of a text/Twitter/Facebook alert. And I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve resented a passenger in my car for burying their face in their phone rather than joining me in making fun of other drivers. P.S. it’s not attention I crave, but the value of someone’s presence. Communal silence or even lazy, mutual daydreaming is just as much of a life-affirming treasure as mockery.
And while we’re on the subject, here’s another such “treasure”: farts. Now before you judge, stay with me a minute.
Shared truth. Common ground. (Do NOT You Tube “Fart Humor” )
I’ve found that one of the easiest strategies for overcoming how separate we are from each other these days is to quickly find even a sliver of common ground. I contend that fart humor fits that bill. I mean, come on! If ever there was a platform we could agree on across every ethnicity, nation-state, class, and rank, it’s that farts are funny.
My work here is done (you’re welcome), but I do encourage you to read Zaki’s full article for yourself. It’s a terrific piece, and not nearly as disruptive as ripping one in the car.
It hit me 20 years ago: personal debt was becoming the real “bling.” And the question was, how much debt can a person carry without breaking a sweat?
It was a notion that pertained to those of us down here on the ground, of course, not to the swells in private jets. The wealthy had a whole different set of horribly mutating pressures, which have only worsened. This was more of a proletarian thing, based on principles left to dogs that are forced to fight over scraps and dead things. Forget the season tickets, the gold, and the Benz. Flaunting how you’d scored access to a back door in order to procure them was what was important.
Parading around in rich people’s material accessories and mocking “what rich people do” is time-honored comedy. What suggested something different was that Mercedes itself started diluting its brand, offering more models at lower prices and cranking out upgrades and redesigns so frequently that their acquisition required fewer and fewer of the principles behind delayed gratification. We were being met halfway.
Mercedes Benz: over-engineered and sprinkled with rhinestones
Shortly after the twin towers fell, I sensed an increased flippancy and cynicism being expressed in regular folks’ spending. Since average people don’t have a lot of disposable income, blurring the line between disposable and borrowed was already pretty common. But when that peculiarity grew so prevalent so quickly, I wondered if building a personal fashion runway on which to strut ––on credit–– had actually surpassed the glint of jewelry or the glamour of that luxury car.
Where’s your credit score now Flanders?
We watched as increasing numbers of our fellows lived stupidly beyond their means, but we shrugged and tried to keep up. Such was today’s epidemic of narcissism and entitlement while it was still using training wheels. I filed it all under: “Wealth is quiet. Rich is loud. Fake is flashy.”
The kicker was an ability to show emotional resilience and a light heart in the face of crushing personal debt. It was the United States of Credit Scores, the run up to the 2008 financial collapse that was promulgated by contempt-filled men set on selling a million homes to those who couldn’t afford them.
And then came the New Normal…
Elizabeth Holmes wants you to donate your soul for science.
The update to debt-as-bling is far uglier, and now it’s also impossible to ignore. Just look to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, or the FBI’s inquiry into Jussie Smollet’s dropped criminal charges. The government calling the college admissions scandal a “criminal conspiracy” means little when conventional wisdom routinely waters cheating down to “hacks” and “tricks.” Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli may have refused to plead guilty like the others because maybe it’s not really cheating after all.
All around us, there’s a growing sense that if you’re not “connected,” if you don’t know the secret handshake or the hack (a.k.a. how to cheat), you matter less. Because in 2019, if you’re not engaged in an eye bleeding panic to position your assets, your money, and your bling so they can substitute for merit, well…you’re almost not even American.
Government corruption hates your vote.
I used to think I could survive just about anything. Now I wonder how to keep a healthy outlook when the values and principles I was taught as a child ––which were heavily reinforced when I was a parolee–– are being rejected every time the news catches my attention. As someone who served prison time, I fought like hell to re-embrace the norms, laws, regulations, taboos, and customs that used to be important in civic expectation, not to mention everyday humanities. So now what?
I Pledge Allegiance to Aces up My Sleeve
The criminal record is mine forever, as is the knowledge that I have no one to blame but myself. I’ve made peace with and built on that. But for someone whose actions made detention and stigma a necessary part of a difficult learning curve, it’s absolutely heartbreaking ––and frankly confusing–– to see those lessons, values, and principles being blown off from the top down. What’s worse is the feeling we’re being told these ARE the new upright values and principles.
Is America’s moral courage in a fight for its life?
Artist Dan Tague’s Easter Eggs are in the folds
So the question is, what do those of us feeling this dread (we 74% of Americans who believe ordinary people can make a difference in the fight against corruption) do about it? How do we go forth believing the values we were raised to protect are still worth protecting ––or even adhering to? If we’re outnumbered and surrounded by those who demonstrate emotional resilience and a light heart in the face of actual criminal activity, what’s the point? What’s “Post-Truth America,” and how in the world would I answer these questions if a 14-year-old were asking them?
These days, it feels more like we live in the United States of Until You Get Caught. Take, exploit, exclude, and profit as much as possible, without concern for what could happen when the whole house of cards collapses. By burying our heads in the sand once again, we do nothing but make excuses for the fact that this is all really fucking happening.
.
If you’d like to stay on top of where this is going, check out the newly launched Mother JonesCorruption Project.
The first rule of Focus Club is – you do not talk about Focus Club.
Sitting around a table with strangers and snacks provided me with a glimpse of the higher levels of emotional pollution we live with today.
Before focus group attendance required a reference and the best paying research firms became fodder for Yelp, back when the topic of extra cash was still “light” conversation, my school-teacher mom enjoyed bragging about the extra $40, $60 or $90 she’d nabbed just for sitting around talking cars or cooking utensils. Her exaggerated enthusiasm made my brother and I feel like idiots if we failed to grab our own piece of this windfall. So I signed up.
Phone interviews asking after household budgets, TV time, annual electronics expenditures and so forth were the first step. Screeners frequently came off like car salesmen –as if the only thing between them and a three-day weekend was filling a late afternoon quota– but it was difficult not to play along. Answers that were a degree or three off elicited a disappointed sigh and a more “accurate” response. Read more
There’s no excuse for getting all angst ridden over the day’s headlines before first accomplishing something meaningful.
And there’s no excuse for partaking in America’s new national pastime –scratching the outrage itch– without first empowering yourself through personal performance. Fulfillment before fury!
Why? Because we live in a world that encourages us to agree with ourselves every chance we get. Because the strength we get from knowing that we put ourselves first has the power to declutter our thinking and make us feel as though we’ve earned something.
Examine the back end of any hard, successful day and track how much your sense of completion downgraded your anxiety. By comparison, how does a morning of social media feel, or reading articles from your preferred news outlets? Read more
Oh, there are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the world around us. And I do care who you voted for: I’m just not making excuses for letting it live on my shoulder and whisper in my ear.
I’m tired of tolerating increasingly thin justifications from friends and family to be – and remain – outraged. Never mind that I, too, am offended, righteously indignant, morally and socially insulted and feeling betrayed (I mean, Bad Santa 2? Really?). Why contribute to the stream of bitterness that’s become a raging river?
Yes, rationalizing has gotten hyper-stupid. After this year, our cop-outs have developed an overlapping quality where contexts mingle because we offer so many. It’s as though we need Venn diagrams or flow charts to see them clearly.
How many excuses do I make in a day? Well shit, I’m afraid to ask, for fear of being shown self-awarded behavior exemptions I don’t even know I’m making. But whether on a community level, a national level, or by ourselves in line at the grocery store, too many people seem to think they’re entitled to comfort zones in which their irritation reflexes and rude or hurtful antics can’t be called out for the warm-fart coping skills they are. Read more
In high school I stitched an American flag to the seat of my pants and marched onto campus. Just before 3rd period a friend said, “You’ve gotta get out of here: the whole football team’s looking for you!”
I was beaming as I headed down the hallway, but the Vice Principal caught me on my way out. He calmly escorted me to his office, then locked the door, shoved me against his desk, and threatened my life. The pain and anger in his eyes as he described guys my age who’d died in his arms in Vietnam showed me far better than any lecture that I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
That began a lifelong need to understand the American flag. All these years later I can’t say I have any real answers, but I do have a relationship with the Stars & Stripes that’s filled with regrets, worry, and growth. The last one is what I’m most proud of. Read more
Not since the Satanic Panic of the 1980s have we seen as much moral alarmism and fear mongering as we’re now enduring, with today’s terror over gender-neutral toilets.
Texas and 10 other states filed suit last week challenging the U.S. Justice and Education Departments’ issuance of an Obama directive instructing public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity.
Supporters of the lawsuit, filed in a Texas federal court, say the move is designed to protect women and children (presumably from “unemployed homosexuals, deviants, rapists, transgenders, and other sodomites from every state”). Though the actual threat from these jobless homo-nazis is practically nonexistent, according to the Justice Department and others, Texas says it will forfeit $10 billion in federal funding for education rather than carry out the so-called “bathroom law.” BTW, asked if he knows of any instances in which a child’s safety has been threatened by transgender bathroom rights, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has replied, “there’s not a lot of research.”
But foot-stomping is so much more fun (and vote-garnering!) than adaptive social functioning, isn’t it? Read more
Yours, mine, or theirs: citing “control issues” to justify bad behavior is just another excuse. It’s nonsense, too, because we don’t have control issues; we have irritation reflexes, entitlements, and a need for instant gratification. These form a perfect storm in our compulsion to influence the world around us – an Achilles’ heel like no other. And where do go with it?
Behind the wheel.
Office of Total Information Awareness left for the day?
Is the heart-shaped flower of police militarization wilting?
Did D.A.R.P.A. go dark?
Has the Patriot Act pooped out?
Nope. Nor have the corporations and power brokers of the surveillance state yet tapped out American taxpayers.
In other words, the FBI does not need the Genius Bar.
From Feds to street-corner cops and home security companies, law enforcement has more than enough control, technology, and boots-on-the-ground for continued counterterrorism success. And probably lots of fun civil liberties secrets, too.
The FBI has all the tools it needs and plenty more to keep American citizens safe. And when I say “safe,” I mean relatively safe, just as we’ve been since September, 2001. Stuff will happen; that’s just the trajectory of history, especially when we’ve been messing around with it as much as we have. But in trying to force Apple to write new software that will help them unlock an iPhone belonging to the perpetrator of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, the Bureau is overstepping its constitutional bounds. Apple worries that, if they comply, anyone who can grab or mimic their software will have access to every confidence Americans hope to keep electronically secure. Read more
