You Can Trust That I Know How Insane We All Are

I consider myself anti-patriarchal, yet I have to confess that when it comes to Halloween candy I think having nuts is superior to not.

A bit of seasonal humor, that. It occurred to me as I watched our kids organize and inventory their "take" after getting home from trick-or-treating. Which was a few days ago, so no longer quite so seasonal.

More relevant today is that it's the first Tuesday in November--election day. It hasn't been long since my last post and I haven't accumulated my normal amount of content, but I have some election-related thoughts to capture while they're still in season.

After, of course, a few digressions.

I appreciate this Facebook post from The School of Life. It has this lead:

There's a simple way to test how good a listener you actually are. In your next conversation, count how many times you say something like 'that reminds me of' or 'oh, same thing happened to me'. Every one of those is a small handover of the conversation from them to you. 

Try going a whole exchange without doing it once, asking instead 'What was that like?' or 'What do you think it was really about?' It feels strange at first, almost too plain to be useful. Most of us could use a little more of that discipline at dinner.

The main content is followed by a string of thoughts-as-images:

• Being a good listener might be the single most attractive skill anyone can have, yet almost nobody has been taught how to do it.

• We arrive at most conversations hungry to speak and only reluctantly willing to listen. Friendship can end up as two people simply taking turns to be heard.

• A good listener knows that most of what we say at first is vague. "I'm fed up with my job" doesn't say what about the job is actually wrong.

• The ask for more rather than moving on. "Tell me more about that." "Why did that bother you so much?" Two magic words do most of the work: "go on."

• Paradoxically, the good listener is a skilled interrupter. They interrupt to bring someone back to the real point, not to introduce their own.

• They don't moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be shocked by anyone else's, so nobody has to perform being find around them.

• They sometimes admit their own failures and confusions first, not to make the moment about themselves, but to prove that being a mess is a normal condition, not a verdict.

• Listening this well is rare enough that most of us can remember every person who's every properly done it for us.

Followed by a link to the full article: How to Be a Good Listener. A few selections from it:

We come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others, but reluctant to hear them. . . . 

The good listener takes it for granted that they will encounter vagueness in the conversation of others. But they don’t condemn, rush or get impatient, because they see vagueness as a universal and highly significant trouble of the mind that it is the task of a true friend to help with. The good listener never forgets how hard – and how important – it is to know our own minds. Often, we’re in the vicinity of something, but we can’t quite close in on what’s really bothering or exciting us. The good listener knows we hugely benefit from encouragement to elaborate, to go into greater detail, to push a little further. We need someone who, rather than launch forth, will simply say two magic rare words: Go on . . . 

The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness. They know how insane we all are. That’s why others can feel comfortable being heard by them. They give the impression they recognise and accept our follies; they don’t flinch when we mention a particular desire. They reassure us they’re not going to shred our dignity. A big worry in a competitive world is that we feel we can’t afford to be honest about how distressed or obsessed we are. Saying one feels like a failure or a pervert could mean being dropped. The good listener signals early and clearly that they don’t see us in these terms. Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than are appalled by. It is only too easy to end up experiencing ourselves as strangely cursed and exceptionally deviant or uniquely incapable. But the good listener makes their own strategic confessions, so as to set the record straight about the meaning of being a normal (that is very muddled and radically imperfect) human being. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover, a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.

I'm particularly in love with that last paragraph. It articulates my own thoughts wonderfully.

Know how insane we all are so others can feel comfortable being heard by you.

Important word: Aporophobia - the fear, aversion, disgust, or hatred directed toward people experiencing poverty or a lack of economic resources.

An excerpt from a Facebook post from Homeless Training by Ryan Dowd:

 . . . Some people “dehumanize” homeless individuals.

However bad that sounds, I promise you it is actually much worse.

Neuroscientists found something deeply disturbing.*

If researchers hook test subjects up to a brain scanner and show them a picture of a person, their prefrontal cortex lights up on the scanner. (That is the part of the human brain that recognizes another human as human.)

It doesn’t matter if the person in the picture is white, black, male, female, young, old or just about anything else. The test subjects’ prefrontal cortex lights up.

Show the test subjects a picture of someone who “looks homeless,” though, and you get a different result.

For many people, their prefrontal cortex does NOT light up on the brain scanner.

Their brains LITERALLY do not recognize a “homeless person” as a “person.” . . . 

*Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17(10), 847–853

Aporophobia - the fear, aversion, disgust, or hatred directed toward people experiencing poverty or a lack of economic resources.

Anyway, today is an election day, as I said--and it's always anxiety-inducing waiting to see which direction the population will sway.

I'm pretty sure I've shared this quote from Sofia and Del Samatar's book Monster Portraits on previous election days:

According to a recent poll about the Age of Monsters, half the world's testable population believes it has definitely ended, while the other half believes it has just begun.

It seems just as accurate each time.

I decided to capture a few other thoughts related to the values up for election since they're never far from my mind.

As a librarian, I spend a portion of my time talking about the concept of libraries as shared resources collectively owned by the public. In fact, I just copy-pasted some of that sentence from training content for new library employees that I drafted yesterday:

Topic 1: We Are Public Servants

The library is a shared resource -- collection, spaces, staff, services, experiences -- collectively owned by the public.

And below, I share some slides, including presenter notes, from a presentation I created a couple of weeks ago that expand on that premise and some of its ramifications.

Shared public resources are a fundamental quality of communities, including the governmental entities that oversee and maintain their functions.

So I find it strange how so many people advocate for a privatized system of individual ownership. To me, it seems counter to the very foundations of community bonds--and it's generally a more expensive way to get things accomplished, costing each person more for the same amount of benefit. I get that large bureaucracies can breed red tape and inefficiencies, but that doesn't mean the concept of shared resources is fundamentally flawed.

Yet there is an ever-growing clamor of voices advocating for maximum privatization. "People should only pay for what they do/use/consume, and shouldn't have to pay for anything for anyone else," goes the mantra. "I will take care of my needs and you can take care of your needs." Privatized schools, fee-based firefighters and security (police), and on and on. But if every individual is an isolated, independent unit, we end up with none of the "connective tissue" of public spaces. Taken to its logical conclusion, everyone must figure out their own clean water supply, energy and utility supply, wastewater and garbage disposal, etc. Many will be able to afford to "buy into" services, but those who can't increase our overall societal squalor.

And that says nothing about public roads. Imagine we abolish public ownership of roadways. That would make all roads toll roads so people would only have to pay for what they use. If you do more driving, you pay more. If you do less driving you save money. Which means: it would cost you money just to leave your property. Those without enough financial resources would be literally trapped in isolated, individual islands of land. That is not how a functioning society works.

It blows my mind this is something we have to advocate against. Yet here we are.

Libraries are a reciprocal arrangement that naturally builds community and a civic mindset.

I haven't quite finished listening to Traitor's Nest, the latest from Frances Hardinge--one of my favorite authors--but I encountered this passage in my audio reading today and it seems too perfect not to share:

"The House of Treasures is a library. These people are librarians! This is what they have been fighting to defend."

"So the 'treasures' are books?" Burr knew that books were very expensive, so this library had to be worth a king's fortune. "Who owns them?"

"It is a library that anyone in their citadel can visit," Berenice said. "The librarians guard it so that nobody can take the books as their own and hoard knowledge like a miser. This is also a place where great leaders can meet each other in safety to debate great matters of right, wrong, borders and truth without sending armies against each other. The librarians then decide who has won, and everybody respects their judgement. The House of Treasures has the best archers on the coast, to ensure that these great men approach honestly, without trying to ambush or assassinate each other. She says they are a force for peace!"

Librarians are a force for peace.

I just came across this today, and it seems relevant.

Power, Ideology and Culture: The Sediment Beneath Politics

Accumulation applied to politics. Power moves in a season, ideology in a generation, and culture is what both leave behind once they settle.

Political order is not one thing but three, moving at three different speeds. There is power — the hard architecture of institutions, coercion, money and command, the layer that can change in a season. There is ideology — the story a society tells about why those with power deserve it and why the rest should comply. And there is culture — the slow accumulation of everything a people has lived through, settled so deep that it is no longer argued but simply assumed. Most of our political commentary treats these as rival explanations: the institutionalist sees only power, the theorist only ideology, the culture critic only identity. Each is holding one limb of the animal.

The reframe I would urge is this. Culture is not a third thing standing beside the other two. It is mostly the other two — power and ideology accumulated over generations and set hard, the way sediment is only the silt from yesteryear's flood waters deposited over time, slowly compressing to a firmer sedimentary structure. What a people will accept, resist or demand today is the settled residue of the power arrangements and the justifying stories it absorbed long before anyone now living was old enough to question them. This is why culture is the slowest layer to move, and why, when it finally does move, power and ideology have no choice but to follow.

None of this is a model — no equations, no machinery, nothing that claims to predict an election. It is a way of seeing: a lens that treats a political system as a living thing with a fast surface and a deep memory. . . . 

Machiavelli, writing in Florence in the 1510s after watching the Medici expelled and restored and a republic rise and fall inside a decade, was the first to study power stripped of the stories we drape over it — how it is taken, how it is held, how it is lost. . . . 

Ideology is the layer that converts raw power into authority. Its function is to make command feel legitimate, so that compliance becomes internal rather than enforced. . . . 

The cultural layer beneath both — the stories a society tells about itself, the options that feel thinkable. . . . The mechanism is accumulation: culture is what a people has integrated so early and so deeply that it now runs below the threshold of belief. . . . 

Americans analyse themselves in the vocabulary of ideology — liberal against conservative, progressive against populist — but the deeper condition is cultural fragmentation. The American substrate has split into incompatible layers: an individualist inheritance, a religious pluralism, an unresolved racial history, and now a digital ecosystem engineered to reward outrage and punish complexity. Power is dispersed and competitive, which in a coherent culture is a stabiliser and in a fractured one is an accelerant, because every institution becomes a prize to be captured rather than a boundary to be respected. Ideology has become a proxy for cultural identity, and once a political disagreement has crossed into a fight about who you are, it is no longer amenable to the ordinary settlements of politics — the split difference, the deferred question, the loss survived. . . . 

The sharpest danger: a fractured culture destabilises whatever institutions sit on top of it, democratic or otherwise, and no redesign of the institutions alone repairs it. . . . 

Culture is the sediment beneath politics, and most of what looks like a crisis of institutions or ideas is really the slow ground shifting underneath. The wisest thing a country can do is to know its own sediment — how thick, how coherent, where the fault lines run — and to govern as if the ground, not the noise on its surface, were the thing that finally decides.

If not practically relevant, at least interesting.

At its base, politics is a negotiation of culture.

The stories we tell matter.

The divination card I drew today from An Almanac of Birds:

our range of being

is only limited

by the ending

we expect of situations

for life is animated

by the unexpected

that chooses

the extremities

we have to live

rejecting which

is rejecting life

and respecting which

is respecting

the unexpected

strength in us

Hoopoe

Reject that which is rejecting life and respect that which is respecting the unexpected strength in us.

"The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness. They know how insane we all are. That’s why others can feel comfortable being heard by them. They give the impression they recognise and accept our follies; they don’t flinch when we mention a particular desire. They reassure us they’re not going to shred our dignity. A big worry in a competitive world is that we feel we can’t afford to be honest about how distressed or obsessed we are. Saying one feels like a failure or a pervert could mean being dropped. The good listener signals early and clearly that they don’t see us in these terms. Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than are appalled by. It is only too easy to end up experiencing ourselves as strangely cursed and exceptionally deviant or uniquely incapable. But the good listener makes their own strategic confessions, so as to set the record straight about the meaning of being a normal (that is: very muddled and radically imperfect) human being. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover, a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles."

We are all so very muddled and radically imperfect.

Our best course is to rely on each other as much as possible. Mutuality and reciprocity should be our foundations.