Reflections

The Devil Wore J.Crew

Posted on by Laughingnomad

There is an excellent reprint of a review in Salon.com of a book published in 2005 by Martha Stout Ph.D. called “The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us.”

I have had at least one co-worker, and a few others, not many, but a few others in my life who have absolutely left me befuddled. Sometimes they made me question myself. Some made me very angry and defensive. Some have charmed my socks off leaving me to realize I’d been had. And maybe you have too. Maybe this is why.

The Devil Wore J. Crew
Salon.com
By Sara Eckel

“A new book says that sociopaths aren’t just Scott Peterson and BTK. They are your neighbors, bosses — even therapists.

Mar 22, 2005 | It sounds like a treatment for a creepy psychological thriller: a world in which one in every 25 people walks through life without a drop of human compassion. On the outside, these creatures appear perfectly normal. They get married, buy homes, hold down jobs. But on the inside, they’re morally bankrupt and completely unrestricted by conscience. They can do absolutely anything — lie, steal, sabotage — without feeling a shred of guilt or remorse.

Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, Ph.D., says this is not science fiction. In her controversial new book, “The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us,” Stout claims that 4 percent of the population are sociopaths who have no capacity to love or empathize. Using composites pooled from her research to illustrate her points, Stout details the havoc sociopaths wreak on unsuspecting individuals — marrying for money, backstabbing co-workers, or simply messing with people for the fun of it. The fact that most of us never suspect our friends and neighbors of sociopathy only makes the transgressions easier to pull off.

Stout, who is also the author of “The Myth of Sanity,” an analysis of forgotten childhood trauma and dissociated mental states, spoke to Salon from her home in Rockport, Mass., about serial killers, bad boyfriends and how to know if your boss is a sociopath or just a jerk.

This idea of ordinary people with no conscience is pretty radical and kind of terrifying. Why are so few of us aware of it?
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An Argument For Travel

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Neuroscience researchers have concluded that “we can pretend we are free of bias, and avoid thinking about how to deal with our own deeply ingrained tendency to discriminate. Or we can take a lesson from neuroscience, and even from dumb computer agents, which can switch from noncooperation to cooperation if they learn that it is in their best interests.”

“Unconscious biased responses (amygdala activation),” they say, “can be significantly reduced by experience and familiarity.”

Oct. 31, 2007
Robert Burton
Salon.com

We’re Prejudiced, Now What?

Scientists now tell us bias toward others may be innate. But that doesn’t mean we have to behave like Bill O’Reilly.
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All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They
— Rudyard Kipling

I am stuck in rush-hour traffic. Maybe I can find a decent radio program to distract myself from the blasting horns, angry looks and cussing behind rolled-up windows. But the radio is worse than the traffic. On NPR, a Washington think tank guru is arguing that “my 30-plus years of studying the Middle East has convinced me that democracy is more appropriate for some cultures than others.” A second NPR station is airing a debate on the medical rights of “illegal aliens.” On Fox, Bill O’Reilly is talking about a recent dinner in Harlem, N.Y., with Al Sharpton: “I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks.”

Everywhere I turn, someone is honking at the other guy. Once upon a time, when psychology was king of the behavioral hill, I thought that prejudice could be explained by upbringing, cultural influences, socioeconomic disparities and plain old wrong thinking. Despite any hard evidence from soft sciences, I nursed the vaguely optimistic belief that education and the teaching of tolerance might make a dent in the bigotry and racism of “others.” And yet sitting in stalled traffic, I cannot shake the irrational feeling that “those in the other cars” are different from “us in our car.” If my mind seems intent upon making such ludicrous and meaningless distinctions, is there more here than meets the purely psychological I?
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Political Correctness: Searching For A Dogma

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I have always chaffed at the idea of political correctness…that honest ideas and opinions must be subject to the language police…a practice that Doris Lessing, this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, has said was particularly evident in Marxist thought. She says “the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. ‘Raising consciousness,’ like ‘commitment,’ like ‘political correctness,’ is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.

In recent years, I understand the reasons for this. We are trying to snuff out bigotry and prejudice. But getting rid of repugnant language does not seem to be successful at getting rid of repugnant behavior. Indeed, when coded words do slip out they are brutally judged and pounced upon by well-meaning people…creating resentment and anger…until there is an opportunity to lash out.

Stifle language and you have stifled civic discourse and the opportunity to openly and honestly explore ideas…and with it the opportunity to, as Lessing says, discover “ideas capable of transforming our societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and thinks.”

Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer
New York Times
October 13, 2007

On Thursday, the novelist Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Moments after the announcement, the literary world embarked on a time-honored post-Nobel tradition: assessing — and sometimes sniffing at — the work of the prizewinner. One of the most pointed criticisms of Ms. Lessing came from Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic, who told The Associated Press, “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable.” He went on to add that the prize is “pure political correctness.” Interestingly, Ms. Lessing had some strong thoughts about political correctness, thoughts she expressed in this adapted article, which appeared on the Op-Ed page on June 26, 1992:

By DORIS LESSING
WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.

The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation…” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.
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Language And The Brain

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I just couldn’t resist this.

Maybe this is an explanation for why we seem to be able to tolerate the contradictions and disconsonate ambiguities in much of our public discourse. Maybe there is an inherent logic to it that is going over my head. Or maybe I’m still experiencing culture shock from listening to so much addled TV after five years without it. Why does Jon Stewart make more sense to me than the “news?”

scrambled, jumbled words and language recognition theory

Arinocdcg to rencet rseaerch, the hmuan brian is plrectfey albe to raed colmpex pasasges of txet caiinontng wdors in whcih the lrettes hvae been jmblued, pvioedrd the frsit and lsat leetrts rmeian in teihr crcerot piiotsons.

The fcat taht you are ridenag tihs now wtih reaitvle esae is poorf of the thoery.

Wehre did all of tihs strat?

It smees taht the trehoy orgteiinad form a 1976 ppaer at the Uvnitsriey of Nigaonthtm wtiertn by Graahm Rwsnailon of Asrhodelt, wichh gvae rsie to an acirlte wihch aaeprrped in the ‘Narute’ pbuolitaicn in 1999.

A fhrtuer alircte in the Tiems neppeawsr in Speemebtr 2003 pivroedd mroe eanxopiatln auobt the peohoemnnn.

In the Tmeis aitlcre, Dr Reoaesln MhActcry, a neruo-phylcoogsy lruecter form Knig’s Ceglloe, Cgmdbriae, ssegegtud taht hmuan bnegis are albe to usnatdnerd jeublmd up wdors buaecse the hmaun bairn parimliry raeds the mannieg rehatr tahn the piothenc cnontet of wdors (the sdnuos of the wrdos and leertts).

Dr McRtcahy was qoteud as saiyng, taht “…if you can acaitinpte waht the nxet wrod in a snnetece cloud be, you wlil not nslsciareey ntcoie if smoe of the leettrs in taht wrod are out of pclae…”, and she aslo taht she was sepsrruid at jsut how rosubt the barin’s rgceotnioin aeiibtils had been pverod to be. “The hamun biarn is a lot mroe toanelrt tahn we had pahrpes risaeled, and it has to cpoe wtih diisputrng in eevydray lfie.”

The torehy pdeoivrs a fiatsincang pprciesetve on mderon cutonacniimmos and the dmveelnoept of laguange.

The terohy aslo hples to eaipxln the doepmevnlet of merodn txet mseniagsg lagunage, and how the hamun biran so rlaidey utendrnsdas atboivbinears and cimtonobnais of lrettes and nbrmeus mainkg new ‘wdros’ whcih we’ve nveer seen beofre and yet stlil are albe to usterdannd alsomt iammeiltdey. For emxpale: ‘c u lte8r’, wihch you’ll nitcoe you can utransnded eevn thgouh it’s jmulebd.

One of the gerat lsneoss form tihs troehy dmsttnareoes the rmaaebrlke pweor of the huamn biarn.

Wehn we are yonug we not olny lraen how to raed, but aslo ibcerndily and uninaenionltlty lraen how to raed waht wuold by nmoral cooevntnin be decerbisd as uettr nnsosnee.

Tihs bges qtuseonis abuot the dicrieotn of laagngue eolotuvin.

Waht wlil lgganaue look lkie in geotrnaiens to cmoe?

Whtuoit dobut hmuan binegs are albe to asobrb pvrseiogerlsy mroe maening form pvolesesrrigy rucdnieg anotmus of wrdos and lrttees.

We now raed in shohtnrad – and iamegs – and sfcginltianiy we are beord by aiytnhng taht is too lhtngey.

Posorneiafl witerrs need to get tehir pniot asorcs in jsut a few seodcns, or the raeedr’s anitttoen is lsot.

The jmbleud wdros torhey datrmneeosts jsut how caalbpe the biarn is at arnboibsg mneaing far mroe qilcuky tahn msot wrietrs wuold eevr iaimnge.

And a fnail daioertomstnn of how celver yuor barin is – can you raed tihs?…

Thoughts After Re-entry

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I have been back in the house in Salem Oregon nearly a month now…a house I lived in for 35 years while raising the children…after traveling for over four years. Re-entry…always the most difficult part of traveling.

In Mexico, as in Asia, people practically live outdoors which offers great opportunities for interaction and friend-making. Here in Salem, I am savoring the fresh clean air and the QUIET! I can actually choose whether to listen to TV or not. Even the massage parlors in Thailand and the “comida corridas” (luncheon cafes) in Mexico were blaring with afternoon soaps. And driving here is heavenly! I totally understand why some people are objecting to Mexican trucks driving in the States! But I have to make an appointment to see old friends…no place to go to mix with people. I loved the Zocalo in Oaxaca…when I wanted to be with people I could just walk a couple blocks and always see someone I knew and could sit and talk for hours over a coffee. Even with my Mexican friends. I think though, even for Mexico, the layout of Oaxaca City, with the Zocalo and even the Centro as a whole, is a unique place and one of the reasons people love it there. I do miss it.

And then of course there is the shock of coming face to face again with a consumer society even though I am relishing the efficiency and customer service that comes with it. But the shock will never be as devastating as it was when I returned from Europe in 1965…a very radicalizing experience that shook me to my core. There is so much I could say about this… In the states we generally keep ourselves so insulated from death. I just groan and roll my eyes when I listen to people here complain about the most minute inconsequential things.

In Mexico you hear a lot of vitriol about global trade and NAFTA. The price of corn, the staple food for the poor in Oaxaca (the birthplace of corn), has risen and tortillas are 7% more expensive this year…a huge increase for people whose minimum wage is 50 cents an hour…even if they qualify. What’s worse, the people favor criollo (heirloom corn) which has a wonderful taste and the hand-made tortillas are delicious and moist…unlike those horrible sawdust-tasting things made by machine that you get in the states. The imported corn is cheaper than the criollo corn now and most people can’t afford the good stuff. And even worse, it is putting criollo corn farmers out of business which will cause the price of it to rise even more.

Yes, many people in Mexico are mad…except for the ones whose jobs and perks are tied to the power structure and benefit from the favors and the money creamed off the top by the government…money that never trickles down to the most destitute. With little rule of law, separation of powers, corruption and no transparency, the poor feel they have little choice other than to openly rebel. The middle class (many of whom are actually lower class by our standards) feel they have little choice other than to hold onto the status quo by it’s finger tips and was the most threatened by the 2006 uprising. It’s short term thinking, I thought to myself. If they only realized that if they were in solidarity with the calls for reform, justice and the end of corruption they too would benefit in the long term. But I also understand their desire to keep their distance from the internal disputes that have arisen within the rebellion because of the pursuit of personal and political agendas. The political and social implications are incredibly complicated and after a year in Oaxaca I felt I knew and understood little more than when I arrived.

And many expats in Oaxaca suspect that the CIA was afoot during the teacher strike last year…it is in the interest of the US and the Mexican governments to keep uprisings down because of the fear it could spread all over Mexico and to other leftist-leaning Latin American countries. And that is another story entirely!

For the moment I am occupied with tree trimming, pruning an overgrown yard, moss on the roof, resealing the deck, utility bills, auto maintenance. The housing market is in the tank right now so no time to sell. I am sorting through boxes and boxes of ___t that have been stored in the basement…stuff that I never needed in the first place and am now wondering what to keep and what to throw out…or give away. Four years living out of a backpack..a few t-shirts, couple pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes…taught me we certainly can live just fine without a lot of stuff in our lives although I do admit that half of what I carried was tangled computer and camera parts. Life was people centered those four years… I am struggling with incorporating perspective.

While traveling I got my news over the internet. After years of no TV I am now aghast at the trivia that is called news. I am noticing that almost every single maddeningly repetitious ad takes place in million dollar homes. “Average” families in the movies are filmed in million dollar homes. No wonder many people in the whole world, most of whom have never been out of their neighborhoods much less their countries, have a skewed view of beyond rich Americans! Even though by their standards we ARE rich. But when I told my motorcycle taxi driver in Viet Nam that one of my jobs here before retiring was managing a homeless program he was shocked. “Why they no work?” I didn’t even know where to begin. And “retirement?” Incomprehensible to most people in the world. “Jubilado” is the word in Spanish…I certainly didn’t have to live off the local economy where the minimum wage is 50 cents an hour and 68% of the people live on less than $90 a month.

In the zocalo in Oaxaca one day, I brazenly told an older Mexican man that I was amazed that the poorest of people living in squalid conditions all over the world could still laugh and be joyful. He just looked at me with incomprehension. That one look told me about all the preconceptions I was still unknowingly harboring about what is necessary for a person to be happy. This moment I will never forget.

The News We Get

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I am still thinking about the information we get and how to think critically about it. After reading the lead stories I love to go to The Daily Show on Comedy Central and get Jon Stewart’s satiric take.

“Stewart and his team often seem to steer closer to the truth than traditional journalists. The Daily Show satirizes spin, punctures pretense and belittles bombast. When a video clip reveals a politician’s backpedaling, verbal contortions or mindless prattle, Stewart can state the obvious — ridiculing such blather as it deserves to be ridiculed — or remain silent but speak volumes merely by arching an eyebrow.” This from an article entitled “What The Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart” by Rachel Smolkin in American Journal Review. Read the rest of the article here.

More from the article: “A colleague says that “one thing he [Jon Stewart] does do is fact-checking: If somebody says, ‘I never said that,’ and next thing you know, there’s a clip of the same guy three months ago saying exactly that, that’s great fact-checking,” and a great lesson for journalists.

Phil Rosenthal, the Chicago Tribune’s media columnist, thinks part of the reason “The Daily Show” and its spinoff, “The Colbert Report,” resonate is that they parody not only news but also how journalists get news…He adds that “so much of the news these days involves managing the news, so a show like Stewart’s that takes the larger view of not just what’s going on, but how it’s being manipulated, is really effective. I think there’s a general skepticism about the process that this plays into… The wink isn’t so much we know what’s really going on. The wink is also we know you know what we’re doing here.

A 2004 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people age 18 to 29 cited comedy shows such as “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live” as places where they regularly learned presidential campaign news, nearly equal to the 23 percent who regularly learned something from the nightly network news or from daily newspapers.

Even if they did learn from his show, a more recent study indicates Stewart’s viewers are well-informed. An April 15 Pew survey gauging Americans’ knowledge of national and international affairs found that 54 percent of regular viewers of “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” scored in the high-knowledge category, tying with regular readers of newspaper Web sites and edging regular watchers of “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” Overall, 35 percent of people surveyed scored in the high-knowledge category.”

And what percentage of the U.S. population reads any news at all? And which of these don’t read the news because they have just given up trusting it?

Writing From The Ground

Posted on by Laughingnomad

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof (incidentally from my home state of Oregon) has written an excellent review of William T. Vollman’s book entitled “Poor People” that reflects a deep understanding of the issues underlying poverty.

From my 30 years of work with impoverished people in the US and from six years of travel in impoverished countries, what Kristof says rings true for me.

Vollman interviewed poor people in several countries and asked them questions like “do you consider yourself poor?” Or “why are poor people poor?” Or “are men and women equally poor?” Or “why are you poor?” Or “why are some people rich and some poor?”

Kristof considered Vollman’s book a kind of “tour guide of the slums.” The answers were not very illuminating without some larger context…just as I pointed out in my last blog entry on getting information and making connections between the pieces.

Referring to just one issue, health care, Kristof says that before seeing the effects of the hurricane on New Orleans, he “had thought that the obstacle for poor people—and the reason they die as a result of deficient health care —was that they couldn’t afford it. But that’s only one factor.

What we’ve seen over and over is that even if there is a free clinic, the poor family may depend on a single mother who doesn’t have a car or driver’s license and so can’t get there. Or she can’t afford the gas. Or her car doesn’t have insurance. Or she doesn’t understand how serious the symptoms are. Or she is working at a low-level job where she can’t just ask for time off to take a child to the clinic. Or she doesn’t speak English. Or she’s illegal and is worried that INS agents may look at the clinic’s records. Or she’s got three other small children and can’t leave two at home while she takes her sick child on a series of bus rides to the clinic. Or…the possibilities are endless. The point is that making medical care accessible to the poor requires much more than making it free.”

Economic-development experts promise that with the correct mix of promarket policies, poor countries will eventually prosper. But policy may not be the only problem. Geography may be a problem. Tropical, landlocked nations may never enjoy access to the markets and new technologies they need to flourish in the global economy. In Oaxaca, only government workers (who usually live in Oaxaca City) get free health care. For the poorest of the poor there are no accessible clinics at all without a 7 hour bus ride out of the mountains…even if they had the money. As a result the infant death rate in Oaxaca is twice what it is in Mexico City.

Comics…A New Way Of Thinking?

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Have been thinking that I need a new way of thinking. Like comics. Not Donald Duck or the Road Runner although those have their virtues. In Salon.com I came across an interview of Alan Moore, who the author, Scott Thrill, thinks reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our (whose?) day.

Some thoughts of his: “Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette…I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries..We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting.”

He goes on: “Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature…If you can find a new synthesis…you can help people find new ways of seeing, thinking and dealing with the times in which they find themselves…”

Hmmm. This need to make sense of our world…to find meaning…I think, is part of what is giving rise to the popularity of radical religious fundamentalism in the world today. Simple. Just pick up the Bible or the Koran. The “connections” are all there…or at least the ones some of us are looking for. Or we could read the comics. Or…

But this all assumes we have the the money and the “luxury” of taking time out from putting food on the table. In other words, how do we access relevent information and when do we think about it? And what if we don’t have the language and education to understand the terms. And what if you are a Trique, or Mixtec indigenous living in the mountains of Oaxaca and all you know is that your land is being taken away?

Seeing Red Over Mao in Alhambra

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Values in China today are only carried forward by the culture largely as a result of the destruction of ethical and civic standards wrought by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. In other words, in my experience, there is generally no honor given in China today for verbal or written contracts and the visitor will find him or herself at the mercy of Chinese pragmatism.

In China today portraits of Mao are everywhere and due to the controlled press few Chinese know the truth of their own modern history. And I am horrified when I hear “Maoism” being bandied about…even here in Oaxaca Mexico!

To understand how this came about, to understand the ability of the Chinese to dupe Westerners and to understand the anger of the Chinese community in Alhambra over the hanging of Warhol-like images of Mao you can read the 1995 “Mao: The Unknown Story,” an 832-page biography of Mao written by the husband and wife team of historians, Jon Halliday and Jung Chang who herself was a Red Guard during the Revolution. It depicts Mao Zedong, the former paramount leader of China and Chairman of the Communist Party of China, as being responsible for mass murder (upwards of 30-70 million people) on a scale greater than that committed under the rule of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.
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Contemplating Going “Home”

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I was quickly stopped by a policeman. “Have you been drinking? Have you been smoking pot? Your eyes are all red! Then he made me stand, in high heels, on one foot and count to forty. Then follow his finger moving back and forth with my eyes. Then he let me, shaken, go.

Last time I got off the plane in Portland from almost a year in Asia, I found myself jet-lagged and completely disoriented…driving on the “wrong” side of the road.

Found this blog by a Chinese-American on Bootsnall. He is probably much younger but his experience is none-the-less very similar to mine.

Coming Home: Sharks Also Need Constant Motion
By: Jeffrey Lee

“Coming home meant coming down. It was easier to stay up. I’d return home to piles of bills and an empty refrigerator. Buying groceries, I’d get lost – too many aisles, too many choices; cool mist blowing over fresh fruit; paper or plastic; cash back in return? I’d wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion.

Out at night, weaving through traffic, looking for trouble, I’d lose myself in crowds. Gaggles of girls with fruit-colored drinks talked about face products and film production. I’d see their lips move, look at their snapshot smiles and highlighted hair. I didn’t know what to say.
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