Discipline of thought

There is a profound difference between the language used to convey information, and the language used to convey propaganda. Here is a trivial example.

Information: Right now (1:06 PM on March 6, 2018) I am holding my cat. He has curly black fur, gold eyes, and he is purring.

Propaganda: People everywhere are enjoying the immense benefits of pet ownership.

The information statement includes specific subjects and verifiable details, and leaves room to ask follow-up questions that can further identify the subjects and ground the information in time and space. The propaganda statement invokes poorly-defined subjects ("people everywhere"), a relatable emotion (enjoyment), and something to desire ("immense benefits").

What happens in your head when you read the propaganda statement? If I imagine someone else saying it out loud, I can trace my own physiological responses and most likely thoughts (assuming I hear it while in an unguarded state).

"People everywhere..." (I am part of people everywhere!) [Receptive, ready to relate]
"...are enjoying..." (I want to enjoy things) [Imagining feeling enjoyment]
"...the immense benefits..." (I could seriously use some immense benefits) [Imagining feeling healthier]
"...of pet ownership." (Oh cool! I own a pet. That makes me one of the smart people enjoying immense benefits. Keep talking, you're making me feel good about my life choices.) [Feeling validated]

I think language has powerful effects on our state of mind and emotional well-being. I don't know how common it is for people to develop the self-awareness to notice those shifts as they happen, but I think it's mission critical to aspire to that self-awareness.

The above was intended to be a benign example. However, propaganda language can be (and, I think, often is) used to place an audience in a negative emotional state (such as fear, anger, dissatisfaction) and then tell the audience how to fix the problem. So here's my goal: every time I hear a propaganda message (from any political origin) and feel my emotions start to shift under my feet, take a few deep breaths and tell myself, "I am happy." Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.

Meaningful action need not be contingent on negative emotion.

The process of anti-racism

Today's post is inspired by this TED talk by Jay Smooth about the way people discuss race and racism, and this Washington Post article about how calling out racism is good for your health. To summarize, Jay Smooth wisely advises that racism is not an all-or-nothing state of being. Recognizing and dealing with racist thoughts doesn't work like this:

About one second later that boiler explodes.
(Source: http://i.imgur.com/Y2oRv.jpg)

Racism is, among other things, a byproduct of how the human brain responds to social and cultural influences. Just as those influences are ongoing, dealing with racism is an ongoing process - like brushing one's teeth.

I am quite sure I've had a big green leaf of racism caught in my teeth from time to time. It is never, ever intentional and it is completely counter to my dearest beliefs, so it's really hard to admit that it happens... but it does. I don't think it's okay. I don't broadcast those (rare, I think?) thoughts, and I don't accept them as part of myself. I try to keep my mouth shut until I can find the mental floss - but if I screw that up somehow, I hope somebody tells me before it gets caught on camera.*** (EDIT: I don't really like how this paragraph turned out - I think I did a better job with the idea below. I'm leaving this here as an example of something I expressed that left me feeling really awkward.)

The social ramifications of racism are horrific and daunting. Recognizing and countering racism on an immediate personal level doesn't have to be. It's about what we do. It's about building good habits. Humans think all kinds of things, good and bad, shifting moment by moment - but just because we noticed a thought flitting through our brain doesn't mean we have to believe it. To invoke another metaphor, we get to (and have to) choose which thoughts we cultivate, and which ones we weed out.

*** Adding on to this three days later...

This post didn't feel done because I'm not sure I picked the right words above to express what I'm going for. I felt inspired watching Jay Smooth, so what I'm trying to do is go through some self-examination and then share what I find to be most helpful in moving towards the goal of resisting and overturning systemic racism.

One of the problems in working through this stuff is the word "have." In a culture where people are frequently identified by what they do and do not possess, saying I "have" thoughts can unintentionally imply that I identify with them. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I "notice" the thoughts. I think the gardening metaphor works best for me here. I don't plant weeds in my garden, but the wind blows and birds poop and seeds get into my garden that I never wanted. I don't claim ownership of the weeds. But because I do claim the garden, I own the responsibility of doing something about the weeds when they crop up.

So that's what I'm going for. I don't "have" racist thoughts - I don't claim ownership of them. I do notice problematic voices, words, phrases, and interpretations in my mind from time to time, and I own the responsibility to respond appropriately. I can choose to incorporate those words in my head into my outlook on life and let them shape my behavior (NOPE!), or I can say "This doesn't belong here." I 100% choose the latter. Weeds don't go away if you pretend they don't exist, they go away when you dig them out.

...and if the weed is something like poison ivy, digging it out without getting a horrible rash is an involved process.

Decision Fatigue and Enabling Autocracy

Decision fatigue "refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making." Studies have found decision fatigue to lead to irrational trade-offs, impulse purchasing, and impaired self-regulation, although one professor observed that people who believe willpower is a limited resource are more affected than those who do not. I choose to believe that willpower is unlimited. However, I am well aware that in the absence of conscious and deliberate intervention, my internal monologue tends to get louder, more disruptive, and increasingly negative when I don't want to make a decision because I would rather be doing something else.

As a connected concept, information overload is "a term used to describe the difficulty of understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue." Basically, when we're bombarded by more data than our brains can process, it impairs our decision-making.

Autocracy "is a system of government in which supreme power (social and political) is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control..." In essence, a system in which (for everyone but the autocrat), all decisions and consequences thereof are nominally someone else's responsibility. I say "nominally" because, as history has shown, people can always choose to fight - it just costs something.

The following is an extreme simplification of what I found to be an interesting idea. In the modern information age, in the U.S., we have access to an enormous amount of data, and have the opportunity to make decisions about many, many small things throughout the day. If we deplete the reserves we can (or want to) call upon making a thousand small choices, what happens when we're faced with a big, complicated choice with consequences that can positively or negatively impact thousands, millions, or billions of human lives?

"I'm spent. Can't somebody else take this one?"

"You bet," says the would-be autocrat with a smile.

Thought of the Day

Distinguishing oneself from one's habits is the foundation of personal growth.

Family

Family is....

...the people who accept your faults with a wisecrack.

...the people who share your love of graph paper and packing tape.

...the people who have gone before, stretching out in a line of unknown names and untold love.

I give thanks.

All Out of Feels

Well, it’s been about a year since the election. My husband told me that some people are planning Screaming Parties to celebrate the occasion. I have to admit, the idea holds a certain appeal.

Looks like a party to me.
(Photo by Asa Rodger on Unsplash)

The trouble is, I seem to be Out of Feels. I’ve checked all the closets, dusted under every bed, and even cleaned up several Piles of Horror (you know the kind I mean… 6 months ago it was an accessory to a short to-do list but now it’s 15 times bigger and has spiders living in it), but I’m like the Monty Python cheese shop which is uncontaminated by cheese. Screaming without feels seems questionable.

Screaming on the inside but mostly about Cheetos.

I am politics-averse. I make no secret of this. Chalk it up to an INFJ personality, a dislike of raised voices, a deep-rooted skepticism towards mob responses and tribalism, whatever. The deck is stacked against me getting anything personally fulfilling out of political engagement. Generally my only motivation to get involved in the political realm involves feeling intensely negative about something. So what am I to do on those days I can’t muster emotion to drive action, but there’s still stuff to do?

Lately I call these "days that end in -y."

The answer is, I do three things. Two are specific, and one is broad.

Specific Thing #1: Sign up for the Americans of Conscience Checklist created by Awesome Human Jennifer Hofmann.

You can read all about it by following the link. The weekly checklist is composed of straightforward, non-partisan actions you can take to defend your democratic ideals. Hofmann is a superhero for putting it together.

Specific Thing #2: Make it a habit.

I recently had one of those moments where I thought “there really should be an app that does <X>,” only to spend two seconds searching and discover that there IS an app that does X. In fact there are multiple apps that do X. In this case, X = give me an RPG-like framework to track the things I need to do and earn XP for it. My wacky gamer brain LOVES this concept. I’m basically rewarding myself with pretend currency, and I’m eating it up because I am a GIANT NERD.

I’ve cleaned up the mess in the bedroom, organized my desk, cleared a 6-month backlog of shredding, and (of greatest relevance to where this post started) participated in the Plus3 initiative to Get Out The Vote for Virginia, all because of this marvelous little app giving me the power to claim XP for it. If you find the notion appealing or simply intriguing, take a look at Habitica. And let me know if you sign up, there are rewards you can only get by doing “quests” or “boss fights” with a group, and Mama wants more cute digital pets.

I’ve spent some time pulling away from the seemingly-endless cascade of horrible things vomiting forth from the current Presidential administration, and now I need to come back to action. The bad is not stopping, and neither can we – but we don’t have to go forward motivated by fear, stress, horror, and panic. We don’t owe anyone those responses. The appalling indecency and divisiveness of our 45th President isn’t normal and we should never accept it as such, but we can make our responses to these situations habitual. As soon as the Americans of Conscience checklist fires up again, I’ll be coding tasks into Habitica and earning heaps of XP.

It's the zero-calorie version of doing this.

This segues into the General Thing: Lean into the pain.

This is a weird one for me. I used to interpret ideas along these lines as masochism and withdraw from them rapidly and without deep consideration. Maybe it took parenthood for it to click – there’s nothing like taking care of an infant to beat the snot out of one’s formerly unshakable standards for How Life Should Be.

Just washing bodily fluids out of all the cloth things in the house again. Whatevs.

The point is, all the negative and painful feelings are bound to come up for as long as the United States of America is processing this infection. The pain is a neon sign that shows us where we need to pay attention. The pain is a call to arms for the white blood cells. It’s just a variation on the same pain as yesterday. It didn’t stop us yesterday, it can’t stop us today, and it won’t stop us tomorrow.

Twilight Zone

This right here was high up on the list of things I never thought I'd do:

Hello, yard sign!

Election day is November 7, 2017. I've learned a few things about Virginia state elections.

1. Virginia has elections in odd years. This tends to result in reduced turnout, which means that victories are often decided by small numbers of votes.
2. The entire House of Delegates (100 seats) goes up for re-election at the same time. This means, if you live in Virginia, there are reasons to go vote every single year. This may be the case in other states as well, but I haven't studied up on those.
3. While the outcome of the Virginia state election is not predictive, it is very significant as the first regularly-scheduled election since Insanity 2016.

I will be voting this year. May it be a lifeline of hope.

Privilege and hostility

Hats off to Jeph Jacques, writer of webcomic Questionable Content. In this strip featuring two AI characters, he calls out a critical underlying influence in our current cultural explosions. Says one AI to another: "I suspect this is the first time you have been confronted with hostility due to your privilege. It is a painful and confusing event."

Confronted with this particular kind of emotional discomfort, some turn inward, and some turn outward. Either direction can have positive or negative outcomes. Turning inward can result in honest self-reflection, or desperate self-justification. Turning outward can result in reflexive aggression against whatever sparked the discomfort, or honest inquiry and evaluation of the larger situation. In either case, prioritizing defense of the personal status quo is the equivalent of digging a hole deeper.

Dear anybody with any kind of privilege: if somebody gets mad at you because of what you have, take a deep breath and have a cup of tea and get past the emotional discomfort of somebody being mad at you because of factors that were not conscious choices on your part. Or go beat up a literal punching bag, whatever works for you. Tell yourself you can cope with somebody being mad at you, even if you think it's for "no reason." Repeat it in your head as many times as you have to until it's true. Remind yourself that you are capable of making a choice that is distinct from your gut reaction. Ever read Dune? This is a way more mild version of the Gom Jabbar. Bear the pain and be human, then take the opportunity to do something better.

Flying the Flag

There is a perception (which appears to be backed by a Pew Research study) that Democrats are less patriotic than Republicans. PLEASE NOTE this article is from the National Review, which has a far right bias. I have included it specifically for that reason, to examine the author's interpretation of the Pew Research data as indicative of patriotism.

Based solely on personal observation, it seems that while the liberal narrative embraces love of people, love of liberty and justice for all, it omits the idea of pride - pride in our country, pride in our history, etc. For me, it's easy to understand why. Reading through the atrocities in our history, committed in the name of America the Beautiful with apparent pride, I felt revulsion over the very idea of flag-waving patriotism for a long time.

Yesterday, we hung a great big red white and blue American flag right next to our front door, because we are patriots. I think we who want to resist the darkness and fight for the best of what our nation can be need to reclaim the idea of patriotism. I am proud of the dream of this country. I am proud that in spite of the darkest moments of our history, there is a light that shines bright enough to call amazing people from all over the world to join us. I am proud that there are millions and millions of people who pledge their loyalty to liberty and justice for all, with an emphasis on all. I can disagree with the current administration and feel appalled by its actions and fight it every step of the way, and still be proud to be an American. I do and feel these things BECAUSE I am an American, and I refuse to allow those who cannot or will not reconcile self-criticism and pride set the definition of what it means to be a patriotic American.

Something I took note of in that study was the phrasing of the questions, and particularly the use of the phrase "stands above." The data presented shows what percentage of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats say that the U.S. "stands above" the other nations of the world. In the context of, for example, sports games, in which there can be only one winner, buying into the idea of "standing above" makes sense. But looking at the international, planetary scale and the future of the human race, if there's only one winner, we all lose. 

Can we help grow the narrative of patriotism into something better than it has been before?

Pitfalls in Emotional Management

Pitfall #1: Taking emotions as indicative of truth or fact.

The evaluation of emotions on the spectrum of false<->true (obvious idiomatic example: "true love") muddles the relationship between feeling and fact, and can lead to the (potentially extremely harmful) conclusion that feelings can be right or wrong. This is not the case. Beliefs about the world can be wrong (as in incorrect). Choices / actions can be wrong (as in causing or enabling undue harm). Feelings are never wrong, they simply are.

Pitfall #2: Translating emotion directly into action.

Emotions can certainly be overwhelming, but I hesitate to ever endorse the assessment that "I just couldn't stop myself." I believe both in treating oneself with understanding and forgiveness, and in recognizing one's capacity to replace gut reactions with conscious choices. I think it's more appropriate to say "I didn't stop myself." Evaluations of "could" and "couldn't" are fundamentally oracular in nature, and generally speaking we cannot say with absolute certainty what could or couldn't have happened.

I present these thoughts as a backdrop to my approach to civic engagement, because people on all sides (me included) seem extremely volatile in their emotional response right now, and it's something that needs to be recognized and addressed. It sure would be awesome if we could avoid destroying each other and the planet along with us. (I do not believe that presenting these as possible risks is an exaggeration, hence my personal volatility). Stay tuned.

No More Fear

Question / poll: How many of you folks have spent most of your lives afraid of personal conflict and willing to stay silent when you disagree? If that describes you, I'm curious to know: do you remember how that started for you, or when it took root? Because that's totally been me for a long, long time -- I've only recently begun to shake free of it -- and I want to figure out if there are common origins. Whatever you're willing to share.