Cries for Civility Ignore Disgusting Reality Created by Freeloading Bullies

Today's entry will consist of a few things that I've encountered on the Internet in the media that provide some insight into our culture and the human condition during partisan times.

My first entry for consideration: "Democracy Is a Blessing: Phatic Ritual and the Public Sphere in Northeast Brazil".

The essay gets fairly academic. However, "Democracy Is a Blessing. . ." provides some interesting perspective that Brazilians may have forgotten in the last decade or so. The essay might help us innovate some ideas and practices to address some parts of our existential crisis. Frankly, I might characterize a fair amount of people in the GOP and Trump supporters as White Supremacist deplorables. A lot of them also people might have what George Lakoff calls Authoritarian Hierarchical Personalities that feel frustrated at the levelling off of relations between people, the generations, etc. etc.

A lot of this thinking on my part comes from hearing Baby Boomers complaining that younger generations showing too much familiarity, not enough respect, expecting the world from the people around them, and not paying their dues. At the same time, though, most older generations on their way out make this complaint about the generations under them. Even elder politicians told Barack Obama, a late Baby Boomer, that he should wait his turn as Obama clawed his way to the top (for a podcast version of Obama's story, check out WBEZ's Making Obama series).

Read enough about politics and businesses, and you'll run into younger generations "not paying their dues" or "not waiting their turn". At the same time, the younger generations complain that older people are "keeping them down" or "not teaching them how things work".

The United States definitely has proven an interesting testing ground for the tensions between tradition and progress, conservatism and liberalism, young and old, hierarchy and informality. This country has also acted as a Person on the Frontier trying to act as the City on the Hill, a youngish country ignoring its tradition while trying to create and "protect" its tradition (read up on the Magna Carta, An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown, and you'll see where some of our traditions and Constitutional Amendments come from!).

I appreciate the tension between the slackening of formality and the phatic demonstrations of less digital people in the world. Lately I've wondered if this country's focus so much on growth and efficiency has led to people enjoying each other less and trying to avoid human interaction as it gets in the way of improvement and accomplishment. At the same time, I'm probably the person most likely to complain about people interrupting me and how much of my day goes into interacting with people.

Maybe my appreciation of that tension comes from a yearning of more connection with people in real time, hoping for more experience of positive emotion, not just guilt at not accomplishing as much as I should have. Even before a study pointed out loneliness as a public health crisis, my mind had fixated more on the rational fact that I need to connect with people for my health, to fend off bad health, not necessarily because of some authentic, instinctual gregariousness.

All of which feels like a ruminating transition to an interesting discussion on an episode of the NPR Individisible limited series podcast (not associated with the "grassroots" political organization by the same name). Kerri Miller (NPR host in Minnesota) hosted the episode, trying to focus on and understand how partisanship since 2016 has built walls and has created so much tension.

A portion of the episode explored our sense of what we consider the sacred (or inviolable) lines that we think others shouldn't cross. Amongst family, friends, co-workers, strangers on the streets, people we meet in bars, etc. we cross each others' line, working ourselves up when we learn someone else has voted for Trump or Hillary, how they feel about immigration, their thoughts on capitalism or socialism, abortion, and so many things now.

I have a criticism for these kinds of discussions by the media about the loss of civility. The pundits that just want civility and peace don't appreciate that these situations cause real harm. The discussions don't, but the events and interactions that create these topics do. People who need asylum because of horrible conditions behind them get turned away, leaving them with nowhere to go (after the United States swore never again after World War II, when the country turned away Jewish people trying to escape the Holocaust). Just yesterday, after the shooting at UNC Charleston, I wondered if shootings and hate crimes would soon become an everyday experience. Will we bat a lash at a White Supremacy act of terrorism next year?

Finding some kind of ritual or set of gestures that could diffuse tensions and glue together social bonds would do a great service for this country. At the same time, my readings into evolutionary anthropological morality shows that these tensions and conlfict has existed from day one of human existence, and maybe even longer before that. The Republicans since at least Reagan like to complain about freeloading welfare cheats, just sucking up our taxes. A theory that has just started revealing itself to me today has argued that bullies act as a type of freeloader, too. How did older societies regulate freeloading on the bottom and at top? Shame, which most of us seem to wield as a weapon until someone picks up a physical weapon or explosive (even though in more serious cases, people would be expelled from society or even killed).

Suffice to say, the United States has some serious issues that people need to talk about and resolve (and possibly more). Good will and faith needs exercising, but the will, faith, and civility can't come at the cost of actually discussing the issues to resolve them in a way that uses facts, truth, real respect, and kindness.

Because right now, we have people in positions of power that look to push into reality found community causes like Dominionism that seeks to "redistribute the wealth up to priests" and to make the United States into a Christian theocracy. One person with a powerful political position that believes in Dominionism: Ted Cruz. Just take a look at this video of Ted's father, Rafael Cruz, give a speech about how Ted will further the cause of Dominionism (first few seconds is part of the speech, then you have to wait a bit to get back to the speech, but these other parts provide some further context):



I just became exposed to Dominionism today. It has helped make a lot more sense of Trump's administration to me.

We really need to get our act together, fellow country people. The freeloading of bullies needs to stop.

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Celebrities, Artists, Narcissists and the Illusion of Significance and Meaning

A few months ago on the New York Times Website, I found an essay about people telling each other about how busy they are and complaining about being busy all the time. It concludes that people engage in this behavior because it provides the illusion that they’re significant and their life has meaning. After all, if you’re so busy with commitments, you’re doing something important.

I’ve bought into this argument. I try not to complain about being busy and telling people I’m so busy when people ask me how I’ve been doing.

Having bought into so much, I’ve even bisociated this compulsion of busyness with narcissistic celebrities and artists, the ones that always want attention and have to be in the spotlight. . .but may not always have anything to show for it. Their crazy PR campaign may even have an element of an art piece.

Writers and artists capture meaning and stories in their works. Some of those works even capture enough attention to become part of tradition and cultural heritage. Art and stories become an attempt to contribute efforts into something permanent or to make that something permanent. It voices a desire for immortality and to influence the future.

I know that urge influences my desire to write and empowered career decisions I’d like to make in the future. Contributing to the transient and everyday doesn’t satisfy me. As Henry David Thoreau influenced me with a book after more than a century, I’d like to do the same for a young, impressionable mind. Even touching minds with an older person open to thoughts and experience would be cool.

I had told myself when I talked about my work and projects with people that I was simply sharing, working though a road block or even looking to see if others might have insight that I don’t. After all, that WAS what I was doing.

People would most of the time just ask why I don’t sit down and get it done. Definitely a two pronged analysis can be made:

1. I want to look important and significant by complaining about my work
2. People get annoyed by empty words and would rather see action and results

My explanations here definitely sound narcissistic, but I don’t think most people would see me this way. At least that’s the impression that people give me. A lot of these premises and conclusions come from overthinking more than anything. At least, I hope it’s more overthinking rather than narcissism.

Combine the elements mentioned in that opinion piece about busyness providing illusion of significance and meaning with the desire to contribute to the permanence of heritage and tradition through my writing. My sense of significance and meaning has a level of illusion to it until the future, possibly after my lifetime. Imagine people who either don’t have any material to present, still working hard on presenting said material or present material or lots of material that gets exposed to critics. Maintaining motivation with no or negative results can get discouraging and impact confidence or self-esteem.

In this case, an illusion can provide more benefits than negative. I have mentioned in the past that people often live with an illusion of inflated worth and meaning. The busyness linguistic illusion probably works into that. As does probably getting yourself seen, seen with adulated people, letting other people know about your big (maybe even highly pretentious) projects, coming off as a style maven, a trend setter, going to the big social events and all types of things.

These things may have a loose connection to permanence (you have to know people, after all). We have to ask ourselves, though, how much are people in the spotlight trying to maintain an illusion of significance and meaning? If an artist or celebrity didn’t have that outlet, what would happen? Does an artist or celebrity really just want a taste of that significance and meaning, or do they want to make it happen?

I like to think that they want to make it happen. I don’t think it’s that horrible that they want the illusion until it really happens. Sometimes people have to fake it until they make it.

Everyone, though, should get a chance to drink from that goblet of meaning and significance. There’s a reason why celebrities and attention-seeking artists get viewed as narcissists. . ..


LINKS OF NOTE: The ‘Busy’ Trap – New York Times, bisociation, Henry David Thoreau

Social Karma (third of a three part series on karma)

At Shift Happens, a couple weeks ago, an audience member asked Emanuel Kuntzelman what he thought of social karma. The answer provided some food for thought because the audience member and Kuntzelman had two different definitions of social karma.

The audience member defined social karma similar to my extrapolation about individual people's karma with our interdependent web of existence. International corporations and governments will grow unchecked, destroy the environment and dictate our social experiences for the sum of a downward turn on the scale of karma. Failure to act leads to bad karma, and contributing to the good through action is the only way to create good karma. Makes sense to call this phenomena 'social karma,' as it affects networks and requires action upon and within networks to correct.

Kuntzelman provided a novel definition of social karma. Instead of karma referring to collective cause and effect in the interdependent web of existence, Kuntzelman defines social karma as our individual socioeconomic inheritance.

White, black, asian, Native American. American, European, Russian, African, Australian, Brazillian. Your birth in a country, state, county, town, parish, nation or wherever. Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Unitarian Universalist or whatever religion. Upper class, middle class, lower class. Freeman, slave.

Social karma, to Kuntzelman, are the physical characteristics we're born with and the behaviors and bearings we learn in our families and communities that determine how we are treated and are allowed to treat other people. Social karma affects the opportunities in our lives, the type of childhood we have and possibly, on the negative side, the challenges and limitations thrust upon us by the people, communities, social networks and society around us.

This use of social karma provides a good term to boil down the fact that social norms, prejudices, traditions, practices, laws and other social factors influence our expectations of how others should treat us and how we should treat other people.

The term doesn't necessarily provide us with any practical tool to directly affect the world or to provide further wisdom in any direct way. Rather, it bares open to us the advantages and disadvantages we experience in our everyday social experience that we wouldn't normally see on our own.

How often do we question things that we take for granted, especially when tainted with extreme happiness or extreme anger about our situation? Why blame the social system when we can pinpoint individuals that bring us pleasure or cause us pain? We all register pain and pleasure on such subjective levels that even the smallest gesture or injury can cause some of the most extreme reactions.

Since we all have social karma, however, we have all been influenced by the social dynamics in existence, by all the networks in which we mingle, from family to work to friends to school cliques to political groups to religious associations to even the varied histories we've inherited. Unless we become conscious of our social karma, it will continue determining our behavior as our social networks direct us on what feels like a natural path, from one semi-determined network to the next semi-determined network.

Frankly, after the barest research on Wikipedia, I think the word dharma from the same cultural and religious tradition as karma addresses these matters of social and cultural determination. Dharma creates an issue, though. Dharma, I believe, espouses that it is a virtue to follow these determined paths and not break out them. Doing so would cause chaos in society. No one wants an unstable, changing society, do they?

For someone who wants to change the current progress of society, using dharma as a vocabulary word might be counterproductive unless they can sell people on the term ‘dharma’ without following the determined path as virtuous part. Using social karma as a term to address subversive dharma could end up being more productive. In the end, it comes down to the dynamic between the producer/performer of transformation and the audience of transformation.

I would consider myself between producer and audience. Even though encouraging positive transformation feels good to me, I want to come up with a compelling argument for the transformation I feel good about.

Dharma and social karma will help me figure out a good rationale for my desired transformation. In the end, though, they simply provide linguistic tools to understand the social and cultural constructed status symbols that we use, surrounding ourselves with tools for protection and negotiation.

How could dharma and social karma be used by you and other people to help improve the world?


Links of Interest: Emanuel Kuntzelman, dharma