Your Brain Is Getting Into a Fight With the World

My library system recently decided to go fine free. We still charge for damaged items and items that are never returned, but there is no longer a monetary penalty when items are returned after the due date. No more late or overdue fines. All old fines were forgiven as well.

Our primary motivation was to create more access to our collection for borrowers. Fines were prohibiting access for some patrons, particularly those who couldn't afford to pay them. Those patrons would stop using the library, either because they didn't have the money for what they owed or to avoid accumulating fines in the first place. Many others had some capability to pay but stayed away because they found fines undesirable or burdensome. For many people, library fines are a source of shame. They hate the way fines make them feel, regardless of financial concerns.

So overall the move has been a good thing and has made many people happy. However, we faced a surprisingly large amount of backlash. A significant number of our patrons have been upset that fines are gone, because they think there is now no motivation for others to bring the items they check out back to us on time. Many worry it will increase the amount of time they have to wait for popular items. Others feel we are failing in our duty to instill a sense of responsibility in our community, that we are teaching everyone that actions don't have consequences. Even if the decision doesn't impact them directly, they are upset on principle.

I think an additional, underlying, unstated motivation most of them are feeling--based on what I've seen and heard--is a desire to punish. I explored the idea of punishment a while back in Morality & Empathy: A Chain of Associations, pulling heavily from the book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil by Paul Bloom. The desire to punish others is instinctive, a facet of our cooperative, social natures. Punishment helps preserve morality and the social order by not letting cheaters who undermine it get away with their actions. However, the benevolent desire to punish for the sake of social order all too often gets mingled with more personal feelings of dislike, disgust, and vengeance. It's hard to keep punishment pure, and it quickly turns mean.

This explanation for third-party punishment--that it stems from our desire for revenge--also explains some of the odder features of our punitive sentiments. Most notably, people are surprisingly indifferent to the actual consequences of punishment. . . . People are more concerned that punishment should injure the punisher than that it should make the world a better place. . . .

We want to punish, but we don't think about the purpose of punishment.

So I tend not to trust a desire to punish. I understand the people unhappy have good intentions, yet I can't help but feel they simply want "irresponsible patrons" to suffer for not being as responsible as they feel they themselves are.

More importantly, I don't believe punishment via fines is pragmatic. It's not the most effective way to motivate people. Over and over during this process I've referred colleagues needing language to the research I've read on motivation, particularly that in Free Market Values, and used that language to reassure the patrons who are worried.

In a nutshell, extrinsic motivation can undermine intrinsic, and monetary pressure undermines the instinctive desire to work for group cohesion and social benevolence. The library is a shared community resource owned and used by community members as a group. Its nature encourages an "us" framework. Fines undermine that framework and create a "me" mentality. When faced with fines, borrowers stop considering what is good for our shared system in deciding when to bring items back and think only about what it does to "my" personal finances.

To recall part of a phone conversation I had last week with one of our patrons:

"So without fines, what motivation do people have to bring their books back on time?"

"The knowledge that other people are waiting their turn for those books. The desire to be good library citizens and share fairly."

"Oh . . . just so."

I think that ties in nicely with the latest from Homeless Training by Ryan Dowd. A portion of Jack the Jerk?:

Reframing

It is really hard to de-escalate someone else when you don’t have control of your own emotions.

When you’re in that situation, you need to control your emotions first. 

My favorite method (by a wide margin) is called “reframing,” in particular “reframing” how you see the other person.

Basically, you “see” the other person’s pain.

You “see” the issues they struggle with.

You “see” the causes for their behavior.

It is much easier to stay calm with someone who struggles with cognitive issues than with someone who is “merely” a jerk.

By the way, you don’t even need to know someone’s issues for this to work. Guessing about what they are going through works too!

Next time

The next time you find yourself getting upset with someone, remind yourself of something they are (or may be) struggling with.

Oh, and take a deep breath. Breathing helps!

That kind of reframing also calms the mean aspect of the desire to punish.

Breathing helps.

Related, this excerpt from a book I recently finished:

"There's always division," Ekaterina would say. "No matter what is shared, there's always a way to separate groups of people into one tribe or another. You belong to a collective, and you feel driven to protect it."

"Yes," Alice would chime in, "and that drive leads you to see threats that don't really exist. And if you act on them, you spark a reaction, and it all billows out into more violence, more threat."

"Then it's hopeless," Rory would counter. "It's human nature to form tribes, and the natural result of that is tribal rivalry, with each group set against each other. We'll always have conflict. This war will end, eventually. All its death and destruction will be behind us--we'll have peace for a time, perhaps, and then we'll fight again. Probably over what we've done to each other over these decades."

"If we could only break down the idea of tribes altogether," Nora would add. "Or convince the world's people that they are all part of the same one anyway."

At this point Willem would laugh and scoff. "Yes, exactly. All we need is to tell people there are no borders between us, that we're all one."

It was baffling to watch. I'd never seen people talk like this, disagreeing but not arguing. I would watch them debate late into the night, energized by their differences. It was a heady environment to be in. Rich. Exciting.

It might seem hypocritical to decry borders, fences, when we ourselves defended our land from outsiders. And perhaps it will be odd for you--whoever's reading this--to consider that removing borders was an absurd suggestion. Today a borderless world is the norm. It is much more difficult now to envision a Europe, or a world, carved into hundreds of distinct sovereignties. These are fantastic, ancient tales grandparents would tell you, if there were such a thing as grandparents anymore.

Well, we are all the descendants of societies we cannot understand.

That sounds an awful lot like some of the things I've written on this blog. It's an area I've explored, done a bit of reading, and despaired at how destructive our tribal instincts can be.

So I couldn't help feeling a bit uncomfortable when I realized those most opposed to tribalism in the conversation took their ideas so far they became--in the background, only hinted--implied bad guys. They are the ones who start a society without tribalism of any kind; a good idea, except for the downsides of missing all the benefits that close social units provide and the punishment meted out to those who don't conform.

The book is You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson. Here's my review:

What a perfectly sinister, unsettling little book. Well, not so much a "little book," more a little amount of unease. A mildly sinister and unsettling book--in the best possible way. It is subtle. A tickle. Something not quite right gnawing at the edges, never openly stated, never resolved. Ambiguous and open to interpretation, with no interpretation feeling like a good one.

This is a fictional memoir set in a fictional though familiar world, ours with an alternate history the last century or so. Something like World War I happened, then grew and spread to literally involve every part of the world, lasting for decades, destroying much of civilization and eliminating much of the world's population. That period of history has become known as the Great Reckoning, and a new world order has emerged from it, a united global government and civilization. The protagonist narrator grew up during the Great Reckoning, then played a minor though pivitol role in the New Society that was created after.

The story that Miriam tells is a quiet one even as gradually, ever so subtly, it becomes a disquieting one. Hints and cracks that something may not be quite right. Much of the tension develops in the interplay between her manuscript and the commentary of the (fictional) editors who have published it. In a short introduction, afterword, and footnotes, they discuss how many of the claims she makes are outrageous and cannot be verified as factual (or they provide "historical" context). They claim she is an unreliable narrator. Yet readers begin to wonder if it's she who is unreliable or the editors--and, by extension, the controlling narrative of this world's leaders and population.

A footnote, for instance:

*The Repopulation Initiative was purely voluntary for the first sixteen years of its existence. This was less a deliberate choice and more a result of ongoing debate about the level of compensation participants should be entitled to. A small but vocal contingent argued that it was unfair to offer less to those donating sperm than to those donating bodies. While this argument was never in danger of succeeding, its proponents did manage to block successive votes on the issue--which was resolved only when two of the men concerned were discovered to have been embezzling funds from the committee. Their dismissal left the group with too small a minority to have any sway.

It seems like a nice little bit of color added for world building, insignificant details to make this history seem more real. Except. If the Repopulation Initiative was voluntary 70 years ago, that means it hasn't been since. So this ideal New Society has mandatory repopulation? What does that mean? What does that look like? Is that an okay thing? None of it is ever addressed or answered. It's just a hint that maybe the "reliable authorities" calling this memoirist a crackpot maybe shouldn't be trusted. A crack in their veneer. Is this the sad story of a life gone wrong, a notable figure who slipped into paranoia and infamy? Or is it the story of a tragic hero trying and failing to stop a dangerous machine too big to control? It's left ambiguous, up to readers to decide.

Without spoiling too much, a general summary of the story: Miriam grows up an orphan in war-ravaged Europe, doing her best to survive in changing circumstances. She develops a meditation technique that she realizes could help others deal with their trauma from the war, and becomes a self-taught psychological expert. A key part of her methods is removing memories. As the New Society is developed by some of her mentors, idealists dedicated to the idea of eradicating the tribalism that leads to war, she sees her methods adopted by others and spread across the world. A linchpin of the system is eliminating "familial nationalism," as Miriam calls it. Eventually, the government mandates that families be eliminated entirely, using Miriam's methods to erase parents' and children's' memories of each other. Miriam helps with the work for a while, but eventually comes to question it and how it's being put to use. Her questions, though, are too little, too late, and amount to nothing.

Most dystopian stories are about the cracks and totalitarian downsides of a utopia at the end of its life, the protagonists helping to tear it apart. This one flips that story on its head. In the background of this tale is the creation of a successful utopia just getting started, the protagonist unwittingly helping to create what may, in fact be a dystopia.

After all, she doesn't even seem to be sure herself which it is:

We were an orphaned people in the Reckoning. We had all been surviving alone, by our wits and gambles, for so long. But as the New Society gained traction as a philosophy, and later as a fully realized world government, that began to change. Soon, whatever need we had could be addressed by some newly developed agency.

What a luxury.

These days it doesn't seem like a luxury, of course. Such a system seems essential, basic; it's taken for granted. The state is everyone's parents and it will see to everyone's needs--whether those needs are nourishment and support or discipline.

There were revolts against the formation of the New Society throughout the 1930s and 40s. But they usually burned out before they spread too far. They would lose momentum because it's hard to rise up against a government that's giving people everything they need. Even if that same government is taking something away in the process.

Or, maybe the editors are right, and she's sadly unhinged from reality. Another footnote:

*The author is being both exceptionally arrogant and alarmist. She sounds like a conspiracy theorist. The Age Ten Protocols and the treatments relevant to them were not "unleashed"--they were carefully and thoughtfully developed. It is foolish to suggest that they were implemented without proper vetting. Our world was almost destroyed by violence caused by inherited hatred and prejudice. By removing the ability to inherit, we have achieved a truly peaceful and equal world.

She might be a conspiracy theorist wrongly protesting a utopia or she might be the only person seeing clearly in a dystopia. It's never settled; and either option is an unsettling one. Mildly sinister and haunting, a quietly disquieting story. Deliciously so. Definitely thought-provoking and fun.

-----

A footnote of my own: I read this book because I loved the other book by co-author Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray. I learned it is also part of the world the authors have created for their podcast Within the Wires, a backstory and history for the stories they tell there. So I'm sure fans of the podcast will love this, but I loved it even without knowing the podcast.

If I didn't spend all my listening time on audiobooks, I'd have to look into the podcast.

A few other quotes I like that weren't part of the review:

It is hard to stop yourself from developing affection for people, even when all your past experiences have taught you how dangerous it is.

-----

Familial nationalism. That's how I came to think of it. Families, like nations, generated a sort of patriotism as a protective measure.

-----

As the New Society was protecting the lives and minds of children, was it dismissing the needs of adults? The Society was raising competent, confident youth, who would give back to this world in extraordinary ways. They would be raised without the burden of families, without the cultural conservatism and selfish sheltering or parents. Without the privilege of generational wealth and connections, without the struggles of inherited poverty. These children would be the first truly equal generation.

And in turn, those of us born during the Great Reckoning--I have heard some people, derisively though not without some truth, refer to us as the Meager Generation--would be freed from the burden of parenthood.

We would lose the innate joy of raising a child, seeing them grow and develop, replicating our gestures and habits, improving upon our failings. It is a powerful loss, and the treatment program Teresa had enlisted in was supposed to help ease that.

-----

Stories, like damselflies, populate and spread in the right conditions. In the humid haze following a storm, eggs hatch below the water, and soon thousands of exotic insects color the dense air like floating jewels. They are beautiful, with bright bodies, keleidoscopic eyes, and wings like stained-glass windows, so we appreciate them. We allow them space in our ecosystem, because they stimulate the surface of our imaginations. We accept them because, unlike wasps or ants or bottleflies, they cause no harm.

But order requires balance. Nature is an eclectic mobile, and if one side overwhelms its partner, it can throw off the entire precarious system. This is true of storytelling too. We allow stories of criminal invaders to grow unchecked. But are these stories damselflies, or are they termites?

The stories we tell matter.

I also recently read The Pest in the Nest (Rabbit and Bear, #2) by Julian Gough. Of it, I wrote:

I liked the first Rabbit and Bear book so much I gave it five stars, which I try to avoid doing unless I think a book is really deserving. But those five stars don't compare to the five stars I'm giving The Pest in the Nest. I love it. Love love love it, as Woodpecker would say. Delightful, fun, and wise. It is a great illustration of "accept the things I cannot change." Just wonderful. I'm going to share it with as many people as I can.

The main reason I mention it is to share this long excerpt in three chunks:

"How lovely," said Bear. "We've never had a woodpecker in the valley."

"LOVELY?! She's so noisy, and happy, it's driving me crazy," said Rabbit. . . . 

"Gah! He's driving me crazy, too." said Rabbit.

"But tortoise is sad, and quiet," said Bear.

"Yes! And it's driving me crazy!"

Bear thought about this. "So noise, happy things drive you crazy?"

"Yes!" replied Rabbit.

"And quiet, sad things drive you crazy?"

"Yes! Yes!" said Rabbit.

Bear thought about this some more.

"But . . . the only thing those things have in common," she said, scratching her head, " . . . is you."

Rabbit gave Bear a Look. "So?"

"Well," said Bear, "I think the creature that is driving you crazy isn't Woodpeck. And it isn't Tortoise. It's . . . "

Hmmm. Bear didn't want to say it. Rabbit had a FIERCE temper.

"It's YOU, isn't it Bear?" said Rabbit, and raised his right foot to kick Bear. "Er, no," said Bear. It's *you*."

I'M driving MYSELF crazy?" said Rabbit, shocked. He raised his left foot, to kick himself. But he had forgotten to put his right foot back down first, so he fell over.

"Yes," said Bear, "You see? Your Brain is getting into a fight with the world."

 . . . 

Bear chuckled.

"Look," she said.

And Rabbit opened his eyes. "Wow," he said.

"That what I always say!" said Woodpecker. "Wow wow wow wow wow wow . . . "

"Hey!" said Rabbit. "Mountains! Wait . . . There are mountains behind the mountains! And . . . " His rabbit eyes were having trouble even focusing that far away. " . . . There are mountains behind the mountains behind the mountains!"

The tree swayed in the wind, and Rabbit swayed with it. Rabbit felt like he was part of the tree; and the tree was part of the forest; and the forest was part of the world.

"It's nice nice nice, isn't it," said Woodpecker.

"Wow," said Rabbit very quietly. "I thought the world was small, and full of me; but it is big and not full of me at all."

"Yes," said Bear.

"Yes yes yes," said Woodpecker.

"Maybe my problems are not so big after all," said Rabbit.

"I think you are right," said Bear.

They climbed back down.

"I don't understand," said Rabbit. "I feel calm. And happy."

"Me too," said Bear.

"But then, I usually do."

Rabbit looked up at the tree. "I can't believe I have learned wisdom from a bird with a brain the size of a walnut," he said. "A brain that bangs off a tree all day."

"I don't think you found the wisom in Woodpecker," said Bear.

"Ah! I found it in you, Bear!" said Rabbit, and hugged Bear.

"No," said Bear. "You found it . . . in you."

 . . . 

Rabbit jumped twice his own height. "AaaaaAAAAaargh!"

"What?" asked Bear.

"I'm angry! And I want to be calm! So I'm angry that I'm angry!" And Rabbit kicked himself, and fell over.

"Why did you kick yourself?"

"Because I'm annoyed with myself!" said Rabbit. "Because I can't change myself!"

"But you can change your thoughts," said Bear.

"Change my thoughts? What's wrong with them? My thoughts are PERFECT," said Rabbit.

"But your thoughts are making you unhappy," said Bear.

"No!" said Rabbit. "The world is making me unhappy! I must change the world!"

A little cloud passed in front of the sun. Rabbit threw a stone at it. "Stupid world! Change!"

But the world didn't change.

"Maybe you could just think about the world differently," said Bear. "Maybe you could . . . accept it."

"Accept! Accept!" said Rabbit. " . . . What's accept mean?"

"Saying, well, that's just the way it is," said Bear. "Not try to change it."

"No!" said Rabbit. . . . 

"What did you learn up the tree?" said Bear.

"Oh, yes," said Rabbit. He remembered swaying in the branches of the treetop, a very small Rabbit in a very big world. "Wow!" he said, remembering. And he stopped fighting the world. And he stopped fighting himself. And in that moment, he accepted everything.

I thought the world was small, and full of me; but it is big and not full of me at all.

A quick something that came across my feed:

source

Words are weird.

With arbitrary grunts and moans I can implant an idea directly in someone's brain.

Giraffe pimp.

I refuse to use this power wisely.

Words. They can help us reframe. Be "us" not "me." The stories we tell matter.

To the humor of refusing to use the power wisely, I love this:

In Praise of Pointless Goals

These achievements aren’t about productive self-improvement. They’re designed to make the pursuit of joy a deliberate practice.

A good meaningless goal is an act of protest against the self-optimization hamster wheel. It subverts the cult of productivity by sneakily leveraging the tools of productivity. . . . 

Pointless goals, in contrast, are meant to be enjoyed. They trick us into doing the things we love, which can also put us in a flow state, where we’re deeply satisfied, present, and absorbed in the task at hand. (If you must justify the time, Price says, know that flow states can also boost creativity and serve as an antidote to the constant hijacking of our attention by our work, our devices, and our kids.)

The psychological trick of silly-goal setting is that its structure creates stakes, however arbitrary: You can succeed or you can fail. It generates something to be finished, and people like to finish things—the closer we get to completing a task, the harder we work at it, a phenomenon psychologists call the “goal gradient effect.” 

In other words, a goal gives us the sense of purpose that we all need. . . . 

A common aphorism says that we should enjoy the journeys in life, not just the destinations; big meaningless goals encourage this attitude because whether we reach the destination truly doesn’t matter.

Making enjoyment the goal is a type of reframing.

As a language lover, this intrigues me.

Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries

McCulloch argues that female teenagers are actually “language disruptors” — innovators who invent new words that make their way into the vernacular. “To use a modern metaphor, young women are the Uber of language,” she writes.

William Shakespeare has long been seen as the poster boy for introducing new words into the English language, though some have questioned his celebrated language disruptor status. But young women may have been the true linguistic revolutionaries of Shakespeare’s day. McCulloch notes that in the 2003 book Historical Sociolinguistics, University of Helsinki linguists Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg surveyed 6,000 letters from 1417 to 1681. They found that female letter-writers changed the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers, spearheading the adoption of new words and discarding words like "doth" and "maketh."

Women are consistently responsible for about 90 percent of linguistic changes today, writes McCulloch.

Do teen girls use the power of words wisely? I'd say so.

An aside that only peripherally ties into today's themes; I shared this last month in Emotions Are What People Do Together, but I want to bring it back because more shootings have led me to better articulate my introduction and reason for sharing it:

Gun rights advocates often blame shootings on individual mental illness and individual choices, but the problem is that it is our gun culture that is mentally ill. Not individuals; the culture.

Chinese Philosophy Has Long Known That Mental Health Is Communal

An emphasis on the individual can lead us to neglect communal approaches to treatment. Often overlooked are the ways in which social norms, cultural beliefs and communal attitudes contribute to mental illness. Ancient Chinese scholars understood this well. . . . 

Our gun culture is mentally ill.

Finally, a poem.

Pamela Lucinda Moss

I ASKED THE CHATBOT TO WRITE ABOUT A LIGHTHOUSE, BUT IT GENERATED LIES

You need to be human to know about lighthouses.

You need to know what it feels like to wait in the dark for your teenager to come home, with your weighted blanket and your dachshund stretched long against your side, your brain spinning with worry, flashing beams of fear into the blackness of your bedroom.

You need to feel old. You need to mis-hear things, mis-state things. Mess up the arithmetic when you add a tip to your check at the 65th Street Diner. Write a note to your kid that says: You rip what you sew. Write in your journal: I am in the throws of motherhood.

You need to feel fear and rigidity as you stand on your metaphorical windy promontory, poised at the point where land and sea and the rest of your life meet, but maybe not so much fear that you write reviews like: This book is too pointy. When my toddler fell on this book, he scraped his cheek. I give it one star.

You need to know about being alone, about reaching into a popcorn bag in a second-run movie theater and never touching other fingers. When the movie ends, you walk through the doors into the audacity of so much sky, so much light. A flyer on a telephone pole reads: Do you miss singing? You take a picture of it, and the possibility of joining a choir recedes into the vastness of your camera roll, along with pictures of stray cats, of recipes you’ve never cooked, of your bare toes on sand on the first day of spring when there was light on the water and so much joy, spinning and shining from the tall, round room of your heart.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge

March 2023, Artist’s Choice

A recent work meeting included an optional haiku workshop for enrichment and refreshment. One of the attendees mentioned she's never really liked poetry. I read this aloud to demonstrate that good poetry is out there if you take the time to hunt it down.

You need to be human to know about lighthouses.

Human brains inevitably fight the world.

The world is not small and full of me; it is big and not full of me at all.

Breathing helps.