Dementedness Is Uniformly Distributed Across Income Deciles
I'm going to ease into this post with a series of short, light thoughts before transitioning to heavier material.
Anyone who doesn't every so often sneak in something a little disturbing is being inauthentic and dishonest with us, and so can't be trusted.
You’re not much more demented than other people--you just know a lot more about what’s passing through your mind.
Does the "sexy librarian" watch or get watched? Are they a voyeur or an exhibitionist?
Puzzle out which one is manlier.
When it comes to books, I am polyamorous
Hard work is not enough if the system is set up to work against you.
Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves
Laziness is uniformly distributed across income deciles.
Live simply but be complicated.
A human being is never reducible to biology.
All dualisms doom us to division and conflict.
A poetic attitude rather than a rational one is more effective.
The point is not to flee our depths but to reconnect with them.
Rudeness just brings you down.
Yet the associative subconscious continues to work, and hope remains.
You never know when a random conversation will lead you to gain awareness of and articulate a belief you never realized you held. For instance, I discovered this one during a work chat not long ago:
Anyone who doesn't every so often sneak in something a little disturbing is being inauthentic and dishonest with us, and so can't be trusted.
You’re not much more demented than other people—you just know a lot more about what’s passing through your mind.~ Alain De Botton
Everyone has disturbing and demented thoughts. It's how the brain works; it's part of being human. The only variable is whether one keeps those thoughts private or shares them.
For instance, my wife and I saw this on Facebook and neither one of us can decide which of the two is the librarian in this scenario:
Because it's the stereotype that librarians want everyone quiet so they can read, except I'm a librarian and that's not what actually happens: we sit quietly and watch others use the library resources, available to help them as needed. Does the "sexy librarian" watch or get watched? Are they a voyeur or an exhibitionist?
Another meme to recently cross my feed in the name of humor is this one:
Go to gendered bathrooms and replace the signs with two random things, like a fish and a sandal, and watch as people puzzle out which one is manlier.It's not vandalism if it's an art project.If you write down the results and properly format the paper, it even counts as science.
It's humor, except I'd actually find this a very interesting social experiment and would love to read that paper. I'd love to see people's associations in random objects for masculinity and femininity. It's a fascinating social experiment.
Recently I (among many others) was asked: What makes you feel heard? How do you know that you have been heard? The answer I came up with:
I feel like I've been heard when the person listening is able to let go of their self-concern and step outside of their framework, mental models, and point of view and enter mine; when they don't simply hear what I am saying from their perspective, filtered through their concerns and applied to their needs, but when they understand it from my context. They validate me and what I have shared, they legitimize my reality. They need to demonstrate they accept it as worthwhile and meaningful (which is not the same as agreement). And then they indicate to me ("show, don't tell") that they have in some way--even if only through greater understanding, sensitivity, and empathy--been altered by hearing me; they have taken it in fully enough that they have been impacted and changed by it.
Also: What do you have faith in right now? My answer:
I have faith that, regardless of any feelings I might have about the book I am currently reading, I will sometime in the future--most likely not far off--I will start reading another book that delights and astounds me and becomes my next new favorite book. I have faith that, when it comes to books, I am polyamorous not monogamous, and will always be falling in love with new ones.
I recently read the book The Myth That Made Us: How False Beliefs about Racism and Meritocracy Broke Our Economy (and How to Fix It) by Jeff Fuhrer.
Except a career studying our traditional economic structures and systems has convinced him that they are misguided. That they are not fair or equal or equitable. That they guarantee certain outcomes, particularly vast economic inequality.
And these structures and systems are kept rigidly in place by widespread acceptance that they are meritocratic (when, in fact, they are the opposite). We believe the narrative, despite it being a myth, and that belief keeps us from seeing things as they truly are.
I want to circle back to more from the book in a bit, but first I want to bring back a few things I've previously shared.
A few years ago some friends and I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and discussed it online through a blog. The book was an attempt to make the general public aware of the horrific working conditions in factories a hundred years ago in an attempt to bring about change. The situation in the article above strikes me as similar. For example:
Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” as a labor exposé. He hoped that the book, which was billed as “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of wage slavery,” would lead to improvements for the people to whom he dedicated it, “the workingmen of America.” But readers of “The Jungle” were less appalled by Sinclair’s accounts of horrific working conditions than by what they learned about their food. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he famously declared, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” . . .
So I think Sinclair is very deliberate about Jurgis’s pat response to every adversity at the start of the book: “I will work harder.” According to the American mythology, that will do the trick. But we see that Jurgis--and the whole family--works as hard as humanly possible only to find it’s not enough to save them. Their disadvantages are too great, the obstacles stacked against them too powerful, to simply be overcome by hard work. Sinclair uses Jurgis’s story to deconstruct the idea of the American Dream, to show that it is more myth than mythology. There is an element of truth to the concept, of course, but the reality is much more complex than the “blame the victim” approach that’s generally espoused.
Revisiting this, I pulled up the Project Gutenberg file of The Jungle and did a search for "I will work harder." It shows up four times, most prominently:
“Little one,” he said, in a low voice, “do not worry—it will not matter to us. We will pay them all somehow. I will work harder.” That was always what Jurgis said. Ona had grown used to it as the solution of all difficulties—“I will work harder!” He had said that in Lithuania when one official had taken his passport from him, and another had arrested him for being without it, and the two had divided a third of his belongings. He had said it again in New York, when the smooth-spoken agent had taken them in hand and made them pay such high prices, and almost prevented their leaving his place, in spite of their paying. Now he said it a third time, and Ona drew a deep breath; it was so wonderful to have a husband, just like a grown woman—and a husband who could solve all problems, and who was so big and strong!
Yet hard work is not enough if the system is set up to work against you.
I want to thank author Andrew Smith for these three quotes, one from him then two from Kurt Vonnegut:
Even poor people in America believe that there is something diseased about themselves, and something holy and pure about the rich. I don't really get it. It's why so many of these ideologues who bash any economic balancing act that involves reestablishing previous tax rates on the super-rich attract so many working poor followers.---America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.---Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
The Vonnegut quotes are from Slaughterhouse-Five.
Let's start with an acknowledgment of the fact that Black people--and I'm going to keep it in Black and white terms for this since that is the current, Black Lives Matter moment, even though other ethnicities, backgrounds, and skin tones add layers of complexity--of the fact that Black people in the U.S. have unequal income and wealth compared to white people. They have higher levels of poverty. And everything that comes with poverty, including more health issues, unemployment, violent crime, and other ills.
So, fact: if you are Black you are more likely to live in poverty than if you are white.
If that is our fact, then we must ask why. Why do Black people have higher levels of poverty than white?
There are two general categories of explanation, either:
- Blacks have caused themselves to be poorer, or
- Circumstances have caused Blacks to be poorer.
If you believe Black choices, behaviors, and attitudes have caused themselves to be poorer, then you believe something about Black people is inferior, wrong, or unequal. Whether it is physical and genetic and a part of their bodies or taught and learned and a part of their culture, you believe they are in some way different based on the fact of their blackness. Something makes them lazier or less intelligent or less capable because they are Black. That belief is Racist.
If you don't believe that something about being Black has caused the issue, then, logically, you must believe that the cause is external. It is not something about Black people themselves, it is about the circumstances they are in. Something about the way they are treated by others. Something about the beliefs of the larger culture, the laws, regulations, and policies, the structures and systems that surround them. If they are not unequal themselves yet still have unequal results, then their conditions must be unequal. The problem, then, is Systemic Racism. It is built into our landscape. And it needs to be changed.
Of course, the reality isn't quite so simple. Built into our racist policies and systems are ideas to support them to make them harder to change. And because we are part of racist systems, we absorb the ideas built into them whether we want to or not. Because of systemic racism, we unconsciously adopt some measure of racist beliefs. All of us. So both sides of the chart are true and both need to be changed.
With that, back to The Myth That Made Us: How False Beliefs about Racism and Meritocracy Broke Our Economy (and How to Fix It) by Jeff Fuhrer. My review:
A powerful and passionate book from an economist who has spent his career working for the Federal Reserve Bank.
Fuhrer convincingly argues, with a wealth of experience, research, and data, that our current economic policies are designed to create income and wealth inequality, to concentrate wealth among the small group of rich and leave struggling a vast underclass. That it doesn't have to be this way, but that we have chosen it because we buy into an overriding set of beliefs, a narrative he calls "The Myth." At the heart of The Myth is the belief that success goes to those who work hard and failure goes to those who do not. It is a false narrative, yet it drives our political and economic policy choices. This book is Fuhrer's effort to show The Myth as false in order to change that narrative--because there won't be political will to change policies so long as The Myth is the story guiding our decisions.
Five emphatic stars for Fuhrer's ideas and evidence. However, he is an economist and not a storyteller, so I dropped my rating for his presentation of his argument. Regardless, it's a book that needs to be widely read.
Fuhrer convincingly argues, with a wealth of experience, research, and data, that our current economic policies are designed to create income and wealth inequality, to concentrate wealth among the small group of rich and leave struggling a vast underclass. That it doesn't have to be this way, but that we have chosen it because we buy into an overriding set of beliefs, a narrative he calls "The Myth." At the heart of The Myth is the belief that success goes to those who work hard and failure goes to those who do not. It is a false narrative, yet it drives our political and economic policy choices. This book is Fuhrer's effort to show The Myth as false in order to change that narrative--because there won't be political will to change policies so long as The Myth is the story guiding our decisions.
Five emphatic stars for Fuhrer's ideas and evidence. However, he is an economist and not a storyteller, so I dropped my rating for his presentation of his argument. Regardless, it's a book that needs to be widely read.
Adherence to The Myth would be more understandable if it were a reasonably accurate and representative depiction of reality. However, I will present ample evidence that the stories many of us tell ourselves about how the economy works--the narratives we hold--are at war with the facts about the outcomes our economy delivers. The key narratives held by many in the United States are not at all fair and accurate descriptions of reality. They may in some case represent aspirations for the country, but they are quite far from representing the reality.
-----
Instead of providing onramps to prosperity, our nation has thrown roadblocks in the way of everyone who is not white, wealthy, and well-connected. We have simultaneously constructed express lanes for the latter groups. We have justified doing so in the name of individual sovereignty, meritocracy, free markets, small government--you name it, we have a readymade philosophy to rationalize our hard-heartedness and stinginess, to say nothing of outright racism. Ironically, we claim that we live in a land of opportunity, when in fact we have systematically denied opportunity for centuries.
It is well past time to cast aside false and hollow narratives, especially our ignorant narratives about who the poor are and how they got that way, and about why people of color fall disproportionately among the ranks of the low-income and low-wealth. Coming to grips with reality, recognizing our role in creating it, acknowledging all our history and its effects today may be dispiriting, but it is simultaneously empowering.
We broke this, we can fix it.
That's a start.
Then I marked enough passages from his argument that it amounts to almost an abridgment; these excerpts capture the essence of the book:
This is not primarily a book for economists, nor is it about economists' theories or economics pedagogy. It is a book about how actors with wealth and power have used narratives to maintain the status quo in a system that slants outcomes dramatically toward the already successful.-----The real world is complicated. That's true of the physical world we inhabit and of the more abstract world of thoughts, ideas, philosophies, politics, art, music, and economics. To make sense of and make our way through the world, we constantly rely on simplifications that strip away the inessential and focus on the essential. Whether we're riding a bike, playing baseball, or making judgements about what's good or bad economic policy, we must use simplified renderings of complex realities to navigate and to make decisions.Narratives constitute one of these simplifying tools. In making complex choices about how to conduct our business, or whether to augment or reduce government safety net programs, or whether the current degree of inequality is acceptable, we often fall back on underlying narratives.-----What economists write has not changed the prevailing narratives among business leaders, politicians, and the general public about self-determination, the poor, institutional racism, or the appropriate role for government in the economy. I hope that the best research from economists exploring these aspects of how the world really works will help move us forward. But systemic change will take much more than that.[I am generally in favor of capitalism;] however, I feel strongly that the way that we have implemented capitalism has been influenced by dominant narratives in a way that has left many behind, unnecessarily. And our brand of capitalism could be much improved through greater attention to the equal provision of opportunity, so that many more of our citizens have the chance to build life-changing human and financial capital.-----This set of beliefs--what I will call "The Myth"--is old and, as aspiration, deeply appealing. Its roots are inextricably entwined with those of our republic. In its simplest form, a key element of The Myth is this: success goes to those who work hard. Failure goes to those who do not.-----I have long asserted the following postulate:Laziness is uniformly distributed across income deciles.A rich person is just as likely to be lazy as a poor person is. Effort may account for some differences within groups of richer and poorer people, but it is not what distinguishes the truly successful from the struggling.-----The simple conclusion from the income data is this: income inequality is huge. Top earners take home large multiples of the average worker's pay. More distressing, low-income workers lack the resources--even after including government payments and transfers--to pay for basic necessities. Race- and ethnicity-based inequality adds another layer of significant disparity. As we will see below, no matter the measure, the magnitude of these disparities in household income is multiplied when we turn to household wealth.-----One pattern is consistent across all of these demographic groups and cities: white families possess net worth that is many times that of their counterparts. . . . Most [groups] report net worth in the single-digit percentages of their white counterparts.-----It takes generations for improvements in human capital to build wealth. To close wealth gaps within an acceptable timeframe, we will need to do more than equalize educational attainment and income.
What this research suggests is that wealth disparities are not well explained by differences in education, employment, homeownership, or entrepreneurship. Instead, they derive from centuries of systemic discrimination against families of color, denying them opportunities to accumulate wealth that have been generously provided to white families.-----While it is undeniable that absolute income levels are hopelessly low for millions, this might be less discouraging if, on average, individuals and households were able to move up the income distribution over time. Sadly, the evidence suggests that is not the case.-----The conclusions I draw from these data on mobility are twofold. First, the lowest incomes have barely kept pace with inflation over the past thirty years, losing ground relative to the rise in the cost of living for much of that period. So low incomes are not getting better over time, and it is highly unusual for low-income households to join the ranks of middle- and high-income families. Second, wealth mobility is rare, even over long periods of time. Once again, what we had hoped to be a land of opportunity appears not to be. That land would be a great one in which to live, which is a way of saying that equal opportunity remains an aspiration, not yet a reality, in our country.-----My role . . . was also to learn more about how our economic systems had conspired to produce a constellation of jobs that feature not only low wages but also poor working conditions in general. The more I read and discussed, the more dismayed I became that our economy accepts working conditions echoing those of the pre-union late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.-----The prevailing features of the employer-employee contract for lower-wage jobs, whether formal legal requirements or informal workplace norms, have shifted profoundly over the past fifty years or so. . . . A central element in the change of norms has been the increasing use of third-party contractors to provide services that were once performed by directly employed staff. . . .Outsourcing of this kind means that the worker is at arm's length from the people who manage the organization they are working for, if not the company that legally employs them. Benefits and work conditions are no longer the responsibility of the outsourcing organization. . . .In addition to contracting out many low-wage jobs, firms have gradually pared back the generosity of benefits, especially at the lower end of the wage scale. . . .These changes did not happen by accident. They were instead the result of decisions by countless companies that have adopted the shareholder-first business model, necessitating ruthless cost cutting with little regard for the consequences for workers.-----The "trickle-down" element of The Myth defines a key part of our society's relationship with the poor: the best way to get money to the distrusted poor is to instead give it to the rich, proclaiming against all odds that it will make its way down to the needy. This theory has been widely discredited by economists, although its popularity remains. John Kenneth Galbraith described the trickle-down theory as the notion that "if you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows." Joseph Stiglitz finds trickle-down's continued esteem puzzling, noting that "rising inequality has not led to more growth, and most Americans have actually seen their incomes sink or stagnate . . . the opposite of trickle-down economics." Generally, studies that attempt to find a link between tax cuts for the well-off and increased investment spending or employment come up empty.-----Among developed capitalist nations, the United States is an obvious outlier in key respects--with regard to our tax system; inequality of income and wealth; and access to health care, childcare, education, and economic mobility. This strongly suggests that Americans could make other choices and that capitalism can work without producing the thundering inequalities that we observe in the United States.-----On too many key measures--income, wealth, health outcomes, education, economic mobility--America's failure to bring prosperity broadly to our citizens does not jibe with our country's world-leading income and wealth. We have chose to be broken in these ways.If we keep saying The Myth is true, we abdicate responsibility for changing the worst outcomes in our country, blaming them on individuals rather than systems. Global evidence suggests that it simply doesn't have to be that way. We can do better without sacrificing overall prosperity. The alternative is continue to pledge allegiance to The Myth, ensuring that our systems keep funneling income and wealth to the already insanely affluent.-----The stunningly poor outcomes that characterize our broken economy reflect choices that Americans have made consistently over generations. We have again and again provided resources and opportunities to the white, the affluent, and big business. Our economy does not have to work as it does. We have chosen to ensure that it does. The history of choices in key areas--systemic racial and ethnic discrimination, the careful design of our free markets, tax policy, the safety net, working conditions for low-wage jobs, and macroeconomic policy--demonstrates the consistent desire of the powerful to perpetuate an economy that leaves millions behind, with little chance of success.Central to the critique of The Myth is that this narrative, while flawed and inaccurate, is not only used passively--to justify or interpret outcomes, or as an input to voting choices. It has also played in active role in creating the reality it interprets. Those with wealth and power use The Myth to manipulate tax policy, public programs, the safety net, and workplace norms to maintain or strengthen their dominant position. When convenient, wielders of The Myth defer to the wisdom of markets rather than promote policies that might lead to more equitable distribution of income, wealth, health, education, and opportunity. In ways subtle and not so subtle, the powerful use their political connections to shape tax and spending systems for their own benefit.-----[Of the 1996 law revising welfare:]The focus is completely on family structure, including marriage and the presence of a father. The implication is that poverty is due to irresponsible or nontraditional parenting. . . .By blaming poverty on poor people's choices--in this case, with respect to family life--the legislation harkens back to Josiah Quincy's 1821 report on the deserving and undeserving poor. To couch the argument in terms of The Myth: if only the poor would get married, get to work as they should, and stop exploiting government programs, all would be right and as a primary benefit, our welfare rolls would be reduced. . . .Welfare reform provides a clear example of US policy choices made on the basis of stories the well-off believe about the poor. Lack of trust in poor people is central to our design of public policy. Although the evidence suggests that low-income families us money for the same things everyone else does--food, shelter, clothing, utilities--American are enduringly suspicious of entrusting money to them. The Myth is powerful and guides the design of our economy in a host of ways.-----Unless something changes, we will continue to add to this toll for generations to come. Lives will be lost, families will struggle, children will receive poor educations, wealth will go to the already wealthy.I offer two positive spins on these observations. First, because we constructed our economy, we can change it. Second, one can think of most of these forward-looking losses as potential future gains. This suggests that we could gain about $15 trillion annually if we successfully integrate millions more of our residents into the economy, avoiding unnecessary deaths, lifting children out of poverty, and improving education and earnings.-----We have a choice. We can leave our less-fortunate fellow citizens to their own devices, pitching them into an economic tournament where the luckiest win. Good luck to them!Or we can build a system that provides real pathways to success--the opportunity to build human and financial capital. This system would recognize that few of our poorest outcomes reflect the inevitable result of well-functioning free-market economic processes. Instead, they flow from a system that has been designed to yield poor outcomes for many and to concentrate wealth and power among the few. The challenge is to use the power that has been wielded throughout our history to instead craft a very different, inclusive economy.In that economy, luck will play a smaller role in determining success, opportunity to build human capital will be widely available, the benefits of a healthy and necessary symbiosis between government and private enterprise embraces, and the continuing effects of our history of racial injustice acknowledged and addressed.What specifically needs to be done to get there? Both narratives and policies need to change.-----The way forward as I have described it is not a matter of shifting success from one population to another. It is not a zero-sum game. Instead, what I am proposing promises improvements for everyone, because it focuses on shoring up the foundations of economy-wide growth and prosperity by providing equal opportunity to build human and financial capital. People will benefit not because they are given a slice of the economic pie which used to belong to someone else. They will benefit because the size of the pie will grow dramatically.-----Instead of providing onramps to prosperity, our nation has thrown roadblocks in the way of everyone who is not white, wealthy, and well-connected. We have simultaneously constructed express lanes for the latter groups. We have justified doing so in the name of individual sovereignty, meritocracy, free markets, small government--you name it, we have a readymade philosophy to rationalize our hard-heartedness and stinginess, to say nothing of outright racism. Ironically, we claim that we live in a land of opportunity, when in fact we have systematically denied opportunity for centuries.It is well past time to cast aside false and hollow narratives, especially our ignorant narratives about who the poor are and how they got that way, and about why people of color fall disproportionately among the ranks of the low-income and low-wealth. Coming to grips with reality, recognizing our role in creating it, acknowledging all our history and its effects today may be dispiriting, but it is simultaneously empowering.We broke this, we can fix it.
Okay, that's the big central theme of this post. Now back to more collected random ideas that I've recently encountered and enjoyed.
The last couple of posts, I've quoted from Thomas Moore's book Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality. I've been trying to find time to read and reflect on one essay (2-3 pages) each day. I'm currently about half of the way through, and have marked many thoughts to revisit. Here's a big chunk of them:
Live simply but be complicated.-----Understandably we may be sad that the world is suffering so much. It's appropriate that we despair at the prospect of continuing brutal wars and hungry children. We seem to have a choice between deep sadness, which could move us to respond to the causes of sadness, and the existential and absolute pretense that this is the way it is, always was, and always will be. We carry the depression of life in our hearts, thinking that the weight must be personal, unaware that it is the world around us that is suffering. Not seeing the nature of our world's sadness, we feel its anonymity as a symptom of its presence.-----A human being is never reducible to biology. To make that reduction is to enter the fallacy of physicalism--the idea that a human being can be defined and then treated as a material body. This fallacy overlooks a world of emotion, memory, fantasy, and meaning, all of which more directly define a human being that the body pictured on a doctor's skeleton chart of bone and organs.Gender is a state of mind, a product of the imagination. One man experiences masculinity in a way entirely different from another. The femininity of a particular woman is unique, an aspect of her personality or, even deeper, a manifestation of her soul. The many images of woman we find in mythology, from the battle-ready Athena to the adorned and perfumed Aphrodite to the woodswoman Artemis, are not mere accidental qualities of womanhood; they are radically unique ways in which femininity shows itself and is experienced. The same applies to the male figures of myth and fiction, each of which shows how gender is woven into the thick fabric of personality.-----All dualisms doom us to division and conflict. They are simplistic descriptions of experience and tend toward easy literalism.-----"The soul is filled throughout with discord and dissonance, and so its first need is poetic madness. That way through musical sounds we can waken what is dormant, through sweet harmonies calm what is turbulent, and through the blending of various elements quell the discord and temper the different parts of the soul."~ Marsilio Ficino-----Neurosis is the failure to weave autonomous fantasy and stirring emotion into life and is the visible sign of a divided self. The ideal is not to become sane and hygienic, but to live creatively by responding positively to the powerful moods, feelings, and ideas that captivate us. . . .To deal with the powerful urges of the deep soul, a poetic attitude rather than a rational one is more effective. Wisdom rather than information guides us, providing the patience to become acquainted with the soul rather than the impatience that leads us into quick cures and explanations. The point is not to flee our depths but to reconnect with them.-----I don't grow, I am. I don't change, I merely manifest differently the prime material with which I am born. Perhaps if we got off the demanding belt of change and growth, we might relax into the circumambulations of life that turn us over and over, polishing the arcane stone of our most essential selves, revealing more and more of who and what we are.Modern psychology tries to tell us that we are constantly developing creatures, but I prefer to think of us as seasonal beings. We have our summers of sunny pleasure and our winters of discontent, our springtimes of renewal and our autumns of necessary decay. We are essentially rhythmic, musical. As the ancients used to say, our emotions are in orbit, like the planets. Patterns that define us return again and again, and in these returns we find our substance and our continuity, our original nature and our identity.
And I highlighted this in my last post, Develop a Positive Xenophilia, I've decided I love the whole essay so much that I want to preserve it here in its entirety.
Welcome the Other into Your Life, both the Stranger and the Strange.When a society loses its soul, it develops many neurotic behaviors, among them paranoia and xenophobia. Xenophobia is anxiety in the presence of strangers or simply whatever is strange and unusual. The Odyssey is a story about a wandering man who is always a stranger among those he visits on his journey. The Greeks were well aware of the vulnerability of the traveler and considered it a great virtue to offer hospitality.We are each Homo viator, each on a unique odyssey. We are all vulnerable on our journey and need the hospitality and understanding of others. But it takes an awakened heart to identify with others through our own needs and experiences. When the heart goes numb, as it does when a culture loses its would in a generic way, we can no longer feel empathy based on our own emotions. We may feel cold and lonely in a world where deep hospitality has disappeared, and on the other hand, we may close our hearts to the needs of others because we have lost the capacity for empathy.Empathy is the work of the imagination, the ability to recognize the impact (the pathos in em-pathy) of life upon another. We may not have the capacity for empathy because our attention is fixed on ourselves and we cannot make the shift toward another. Anxiety about our own welfare may preclude the very imagination of another's distress. As with any manifestation of narcissism, it doesn't help to encourage altruism, because the root problem is a failure to care enough about ourselves.A first step toward empathy might seem paradoxical: we may have to discover our own worth and have a basis for self-concern. It is impossible to appreciate the complexity of others if we are not able to love ourselves, knowing our contradictions. A positive love for one's own soul then might extend beyond oneself to include the world, and it might have more emotional weight than an abstract tolerance for humankind.It is not enough to let down our defenses and overcome our xenophobia. An awakened soul requires more of us: not just an end to xenophobia, but the development of positive xenophilia--love of strangers and the unusual, an appreciation for cultures that are unlike our own, and a desire to know groups and individuals that have different ways of understanding and living. All that is not ego is by nature exotic, outside the familiar and usually protected and defended precinct of the self, and so, as we awaken to a life beyond egotistic narcissism, we might feel an attraction to the unfamiliar.When we are living only a portion of what a human being is capable of, our lives are incomplete. I don't mean that we each have to do everything possible in life, but that the more possibilities we can imagine, the richer our lives will be. Defending ourselves against the stranger is a way of keeping out our own potentiality. The diminishment of our acquaintances is a diminishment of ourselves.The most challenging stranger is life itself, or the soul, the face and source of vitality. Life is always presenting new possibilities, and we may fear that bountifulness. It may seem safer to be content with what we have and what we are, and so we cling to the status quo. But in these matters there is no convenient plateau. When we refuse a new offering of life, we develop emotional calluses. The habit of acting from fear sets in quickly and becomes steadily more rigid. Refusing life, we become attendants of death.Therefore we need arts of xenophilia, constructive and habitual ways of welcoming the unfamiliar. One concrete way is to travel with an open mind, not judging others by what you already know and love, but being receptive to alternate ways of imaging the good life. Xenophilia may involve nothing more challenging than eating or even cooking unfamiliar food, learning another language, wearing some clothes of another culture, reading about and from other societies, or making an effort to become acquainted with people from distant lands. All of these things may be done for business or for information and education, but they have a different flavor when they are done from the heart, with no gain in sight except the personal pleasure of enlarging one's imagination.Almost every day we are asked to extend the range of our acquaintance with life. It is one of several ways to live intensely, and it is also a way to prepare for death. for death is the ultimate stranger. This is not necessarily a morbid thought, because only by allowing death to play a role in daily life do we really live. Opening to another society or another individual--they are two levels of culture--we die a little death in relation to what has become familiar. But those little deaths create openings to new life.
We are all vulnerable on our journey and need the hospitality and understanding of others.
I endorse this article.
This coarsening, even toward nonhuman entities, is not harmless. Indeed, it is probably hurting your well-being. When you become less polite, the alteration in your conduct can make you less happy, more depressed, and angrier about life. You may not be able to fix the broader trends in society, but you can—and should—fix this in yourself.Politeness can be defined in four ways. The first two are: etiquette, which governs basic manners and speech, and conduct, which involves actions such as holding open a door for someone to pass. The other two are a pair: positive politeness, which refers to doing courteous things for others, and negative politeness, which involves refraining from discourtesy. Social scientists define these forms of politeness not just as a set of behaviors but as part of personality. Specifically, one of the Big Five Personality Traits—agreeableness—is made up of compassion and politeness. One well-regarded study from the 1990s estimated that the heritability of agreeableness is about 41 percent genetic, allowing us to infer that you inherit some politeness from your parents partly through your genes, but more through how you were brought up. This also implies that you can become more polite with good influences and by cultivating positive habits. . . .Rudeness just brings you down.More surprising, perhaps, is the effect that your being courteous toward others has on your own mood. Researchers in 2021 showed that being polite to others raises happiness and lowers anger. This might be counterintuitive at first, because we may at times feel a powerful urge to be snippy—so doesn’t that mean that snapping at someone should make us feel better? The reverse is the case: Being impolite is more like scratching at your poison-ivy rash. Giving in to the urge makes things worse. I doubt you’ve ever felt great when you’ve known, deep down, that you’ve been a jerk, whereas you’ve almost certainly felt better when you’ve been your better angel. Being prosocial, even when you don’t feel like it or the object of your courtesy doesn’t deserve it, has been proven to raise your mood.The effect is so powerful that you benefit from being polite even when your courtesy is extended toward nonhumans. . . .In short, be polite for your own sake. And be aware that if tech-mediated interactions are making you less polite, that can still hurt your happiness. . . .
And I believe it reflects me.
(Never read the comments.)
Trees, presumably, would laugh at the very idea of a sonnet. But perhaps not: perhaps they have broader responsibilities than she thinks.You might not think an entire book about fighting distraction--the course of one day, from waking to sleep, inside the head of an Oxford student trying to focus on writing an essay about Shakespeare's Sonnets, intentionally isolated in her room--would be engaging and entertaining, but this one is. Marvelously so.
Annabel has an image of herself as a scholar she is trying to embody: devoted, deliberate, mindful, minimal, and meticulous. A slow, intentional ascetic, satisfied entirely by the world of the mind and great ideas. She has structured her day just so, scheduled to flow from one meditative practice to the next, so that even the ritual of her mid-morning coffee indulgence is intense with meaning and experience.
Yet into this tightly-controlled scenario keep intruding thoughts. Worries, fantasies, longings, ponderings. Her mind will not cooperate, and the inspiration she seeks for her essay topic evades her.
Brown's writing is lovely. Equally intellectual and sensual, focused both on the world of the mind and the intrusions of the body. Sometimes overwrought and hyperbolic as Annabel might want it to be, other times beautifully capturing everyday moments with simple language. To Annabel, literature and literary thoughts are on a pedestal, and those who engage with them almost holy; otherworldly and ethereal. Yet the opening page ends with a description of her leaving the bed to urinate; other bodily functions are described, perhaps most of all her sexual ones. Annabel is at odds with herself, her romantic notions against her fully human urges.
Most of all, Brown's story is highly relatable to anyone who has ever tried and failed to focus, hounded by interior and exterior distraction, feeling a great thought is right there, tickling, taunting, just out of reach. Yet the associative subconscious continues to work, and hope remains.
It seems a book about almost nothing, yet each time I opened it to read further I was joyful.
The coffee enters her like a hot dark phrase. Something in its ferocity is deeply excellent: it reaches her stomach and she sighs. She takes another mouthful. Fuck coffee is wonderful. It takes hold of things in her mind and starts to pull them steadily apart: showing through like silvery light is nuance, subtlety, intricacy. She loves the Sonnets, oh god, their plainness and glitteringness, they sparkle in her head like leaves in sunlight. Be where you list, your charter is so strong, That you yourself may privilege your time To what you will, to you it doth belong. As the caffeine turns things faster all these words seem to pant in her: a word like privilege spreads itself out until she is top-heavy, saturated: she could let her head thump forward onto the desk with the weight of it. Every thread is stirred by coffee, like a field of fine grass.
She turns a chunk of pages to another sonnet and breaks into a smile. From you have I been absent in the spring. And this is Sunday morning, no one rushing off to lectures, everyone just getting up slowly and going to play sport or sit in church or eat huge brunches. Her mind always deeply knows what day it is, and no matter how much work she does, Sunday is always somehow a day of rest.
Meanwhile coffee tastes of four hundred years squeezed together now bursting apart. She flips the pages again. The poet is Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity. She notices the insistent glamour: a shabby glamour to be sure, but definitely a sardonic cleverness: she looks round at the bright window, then back to the poem: yes right here is the tired and bitter flavour of the old, brilliant, unrequited poet-lover. A cold English winter, men with red noses along the docks at Southwark, why don't you ask Will Shakespeare, he's been fairly pumping out sonnets lately, the flash of a smile. If you know what I'm saying.
She touches the thought again, to see it moving: the Sonnets as a strange glamorisation of the unattractive poet. Whatever glamour might mysteriously be - and how it might also be shabby - and how that (even more mysteriously) might be the best kind. He knows things. What he knows is admittedly fairly fucking abject: but by god is he an expert in it.
Yes, even scholars have their demented, disturbing thoughts.
Anyone who doesn't every so often sneak in something a little disturbing is being inauthentic and dishonest with us, and so can't be trusted.
You’re not much more demented than other people--you just know a lot more about what’s passing through your mind.
Does the "sexy librarian" watch or get watched? Are they a voyeur or an exhibitionist?
Puzzle out which one is manlier.
When it comes to books, I am polyamorous
Hard work is not enough if the system is set up to work against you.
Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves
Laziness is uniformly distributed across income deciles.
Live simply but be complicated.
A human being is never reducible to biology.
All dualisms doom us to division and conflict.
A poetic attitude rather than a rational one is more effective.
The point is not to flee our depths but to reconnect with them.
Rudeness just brings you down.
Yet the associative subconscious continues to work, and hope remains.
posted by Degolar @ 3:44 PM
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