The Generation Gap, Part 3: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Quick!  Summon Bruce Willis!

Maybe around the age of twelve, I started to notice that adults really like to talk about the apocalypse a lot.  That was when I first started watching a lot of adult TV (though my relationship with 90s Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network would continue for some time), and whether it was science documentaries, the news, or network dramas, everyone seemed to agree: the jig was up, the party was over, and the world as we knew it was clearly and unequivocally about to end.  Well, in a way, we're getting our wish.  But why is that?  Were we really right, and our predictions came true?  Or did this fear itself somehow cause it?  I'm going to explain why I believe the latter case is true, and how.

Mind you, the end of the world is not a concept I am necessarily hostile to.  As I struggled with my illness and inner demons over the years, it became in a way a comforting belief to keep around.  If I've learned one thing about human suffering during that time, it's that suffering is relativistic, and so while mine is probably a more dramatic example, I can't help but think that the principle is the same for a lot of people.  Explaining why is not simple, and will require a a few more pieces of evidence before I can show exactly how.  So bear with me, and I'll take you through it.  Hopefully you've read my two earlier related posts, on Classism and what I call Taking Reality For Granted.  If not, here's a brief recap: segregated as we are by class and race and cloistered away in communities populated nearly exclusively by like-minded individuals (real or online), Americans, particularly my parents' generation the Baby Boomers, suffer from errors in perception and judgment that effect how they perceive others.  In particular, material wealth is seen as the primary scale of value to society.  This principle extends outwards to errors in perception and communication that lead to social hypocrisy and an ironic lack of self-awareness in which one's beliefs effectively become the opposite of one's actions and history and the world are rewritten to fit the beliefs.  For more details feel free to peruse the individual posts, but this is what matters to my point.

Americans have been convinced they were in decline and the end is just around the corner for a long time now.  Anxiety about status and financial insecurity is largely what drives it.  Just a little while studying basic economic data can show you how income has been declining relative to the cost of living and how wealth disparity has affected it for several decades (this is a nice summary of American economic issues over the past several decades, for reference).  This combined with skyrocketing personal debt and the costs of medical care has given many people a legitimate grievance that things are not as good as they once were.  Combine this with the culture shocks of the 60s and 70s if you happen to be conservatively-minded, and you have a recipe for discontent with the way things are.  Call it deep unhappiness, even.  You can even fairly call it hopelessness.  The rationally-minded who read this are probably right about now saying "Now how can that be?  People go about their days and they seem perfectly fine."  To make that assumption is to again assume that man has no inherent nature, one of the fundamental misconceptions I've mentioned again and again as behind Baby Boomers' dysfunction.  Whether cultural, familial, or vocational, people have a lot of obligations and responsibilities in life.  We're conditioned to put these above our own happiness.  The result is that we have a lot of really unhappy, irrational people who hide their unhappiness from their conscious minds day-to-day in order to get through it.  You don't have to be an ardent Christian or an office drone to feel that way: nearly everyone does it to some degree.

But of course, that will warp your thinking and your perceptions of the world.  Now the idea of the apocalypse, whether the Evangelical Dispensationalist vision of the Rapture or the peak oil/climate change collapse conspiracy theory so popular with liberals, it's all the same.  If the world ends, or at least so permanently alters itself to be unrecognizable, BAM!--you're released from your responsibility.  Either you're up in heaven kicking it with Jesus, you're one of the smart ones living in a Utopian, if humble post-oil community, or best of all you're really and actually dead.  Thus the death wish plays itself out right under our own noses.

Oil...need sweet, delicious oil...

The media, being interested in profits above all (including public service), reflects that sentiment, as that's what the market demands.  Pundits, authors, and producers alike give us what we want, which is a narrative of a world on the brink, about to slide off into oblivion.  This process feeds back on itself, and so what you get is a feedback loop of ever-escalating anxiety and pessimism.  Liberals like to blame Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh for causing problems in life, just as they in turn blame liberals.  The truth is that Hannity and Rush are effects, not causes.  Nobody wakes up one day and says "hey, I don't like [insert group or label here]!  Let's get rid of them!"  It unfolds organically as a reaction to experience.  Beliefs shape experiences and experiences shape beliefs.  Neither exists in a vacuum.  Baby Boomers' widespread ignorance of this is in part what drives their irrational beliefs about Millennials and the world, and greatly contributes to the social and political dysfunction in this country.

These ideas also become self-reinforcing.  If you believe the end of the world is going to happen in the near future, you're going to be looking for signs of it in order to prepare yourself.  Whether or not the world is actually going to end or not is largely irrelevant.  The logic itself is perfectly rational, it's the belief that's misguided.  You're also going to be acting as if the world is going to soon end, and that will change your behavior, which will in turn affect your experience.  So the whole thing feeds back on itself.

Now we're getting somewhere.  The Baby Boomer doomsday prophecy has become largely self-fulfilling.  If you're convinced everything is going to come crashing down around you, chances are you're going to find a way to make it happen.  Now take that principle and apply it en masse.  We've created a self-fulfilling doomsday prophecy society, one in which the future isn't valued, the past is rewritten to fit the ideal of a lost golden age, and the truth--whatever that may be--is completely obscured by the belief.

This is the world our parents have handed my generation.  They have blamed everyone but themselves for it, including us.  And why would they blame themselves?  They believe they're the victims in all this. I don't know what the future holds for them, or for us.  I like to think it'll be better than the way things are now, but I'm an optimist and that's my nature.  One thing is for certain, though.  This generation gap, this irrational delusion, and this self-fulfilling prophecy did not come about by any malicious intent.  It arose as a natural response to the environment and situation in which it was created, and continued reacting to the world as it evolved.  To call Baby Boomers evil is not just wrong, it completely misses the point.  Selfish?  Maybe.  Probably.  But you have to put that selfishness in some sort of context.  It's ironic for sure, given how this played out between them and their parents back in the 60s and 70s.  But it's also unfair to blame them entirely.  This mess we're in is everybody's fault, not just theirs, and was started a long time before they contributed their little piece of it.  Likewise, it will take everyone working cooperatively to solve it.  When and how that happens, I don't know.  But in order to start, we ought to at least recognize the problem.  It's my hope that these past three posts have contributed in some way to that.

The Generation Gap, Part 2: Taking Reality For Granted.

Our oldest and most dangerous assumption.  Now
in coffee mug form.

My last post in this series caused something of a stir on Facebook, and hopefully this one will too.  I was debating whether to work on it today or tomorrow, but then I read this article, which contained a lovely quote from a legislator in my home state openly stating that young people weren't worth minimum wage, and it seemed to me that the timing was good.

America, particularly you older Americans, you have a problem.  You think you're a lot smarter and wiser than you actually are.  I'm going to lay out exactly why and how this is.

I first became aware that my generation and our parents weren't speaking the same language through my fiancee's family.  Kari has been involved in a number of conflicts with her parents in the past few years, each stemming from a basic breakdown in communication.  It's a matter of perspective.  Neither of her parents, but her mother in particular, are very self-aware, and both have difficulty seeing past their own lives and experiences and putting themselves in someone else's shoes.  This is a difficulty I've had with my own parents, as have countless others close to my own age with their own parents.  If our grandparents were naive, our parents are something worse: overconfident.  It comes back to the spirit of the 60s and the Vietnam War, really.  Think about that dynamic.  Postwar America was a place of strong fear, which was mitigated and countered with very strong beliefs.  Think Eisenhower in the 50s.  Those beliefs were countered with other beliefs, each of them promoted as exclusive to the other and in many ways a reaction to the other.  The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and Watergate produced one of two belief responses, each deep and all-encompassing.  Either things had to radically change, or they had to radically change back.  This has helped to form the basis of our partisan divide over the last 40 years (in my previous post I talked about how conspicuous consumption formed another part).

The important thing here isn't the content of the ideology itself but rather how it works.  I have never known a more uncompromising group of people than the Baby Boomers.  Particularly the movement conservatives, but also the liberals, though it manifests itself in a different way.  The spirit of zero compromise is rooted in self-righteousness, which if you're even remotely familiar with the 60s and 70s and the debate over the Vietnam War, should be self-explanatory.  As with conspicuous consumption, there is nothing unnatural or illegitimate about this: it was the most effective weapon at the time.  However, like with many things over time, what was once the previous solution has now become the problem.  Let's break this down.

A good scientist and a good Buddhist know that assumptions are a dangerous thing.  Our beliefs are constructs of our mind, and do not necessarily reflect the outside reality.  That doesn't mean they're never right, only that there is the possibility that they're wrong.  I can't tell you how many times I've gotten into debates or arguments with people over politics and religion that spiraled out of control because one or both of us couldn't see past our own beliefs.  The trouble comes in assuming that you're right.  Of course, if you believe something, it could very well be right.  Or it could be wrong.  But that is only revealed through actions and experience, not words.  I call this principle Taking Reality For Granted (or TRFG, for short).  Kari's mother, for example, doesn't understand that the relative cost of living to income ratio has changed significantly for the worse since the time when she was our age.  She takes that part of reality for granted.  The New Hampshire legislator quoted in the link at the beginning took for granted that low-income workers have the option of seeking better employment should they not be offered a living wage.  They took upward mobility for granted.  There is not necessarily anything malicious about this, it's simply an error in judgment.  I've met very few truly bad people in my life.  Most in fact, had very good intentions.  They were simply either misguided or misinformed.  Yet when you Take Reality For Granted, anyone who disagrees with you instantly becomes a malicious enemy who must either be educated and failing that punished, because how could they be so wrong when the truth is so obvious?

I blame a lot of our current societal and political dysfunction on this lack of self-awareness, both individually and collectively.  When you make those kinds of assumptions and Take Reality For Granted, hypocrisy naturally follows.  Let's explore one way in which this plays out between generations, which is especially pertinent to the case at hand.

Also known as "Alcohol."

Baby Boomers love to criticize the children of others.  Every few weeks, I come across an article in some newspaper or magazine or another written by a Baby Boomer about the Millennial generation, ranting about how lazy and unprofessional they are, about how special they all think they are, how much praise they require, and what terrible workers they are.  It's the fault of their upbringing every time.  They've had an all-out assault waged on their low self-esteem, and it's permanently damaged their ability to work.  Conservatives take this a step further: devaluing us to the point of a commodity.  Liberals are more subtle, but nonetheless make it clear that we're worthless to them.  My response to this is always, well then who the hell do you think is responsible for raising them and coddling them every step in the way?  The retort is always "Not my child."  (I'm paraphrasing here), "My child is perfect in every way.  It's everyone else's child."  Which, after hearing that line from adult after adult makes me wonder, well if all your children to be perfect, then who are these mysterious "other" children I keep hearing about?  The answer, of course, is that to find the culprit they need only take a look in the mirror.  The response, and the retort, betrays the very flawed thinking that produced the prejudice in the first place.  Now, lest we make the wrong counterargument, this is a perfectly logical deduction.  It's the belief the logic is based upon that's flawed.  And not a one of them has any idea about it.  This is what I mean by a lack of self-awareness and an inability to see past one's own worldview.  Once that happens, hypocrisy naturally follows.  The trouble is, of course, when everyone suffers from that same flaw, has it reinforced through a constant  bombardment of propaganda, and only ever associates with people that completely agree, you get exactly the breakdown in discourse that we're witnessing right now in politics and society.

Can anything be done about this?  To be completely honest, I don't know.  There are several lines of evidence that would suggest a potential course of action.  For one thing, I don't know very many young people who are so uncompromising that they demonize those who disagree with them as somehow less than them.  Sure, I know uncompromising people my own age, but I haven't met one with whom I couldn't come to some sort of agreement with in a political debate, even when we're far apart on an issue.  That gives me tremendous hope.  We also seem a lot more social than our parents ever were, and we're far better at making connections than they are as well.  In fact, connecting with people seems to be the paramount priority of my generation, far more than ideological victory, which seems more and more like the highest priority of our parents.  Which is not to say that we are any less hypocrites than they are either; just about different things, and in my opinion, less destructive ways as well.  Seeking experience, with the confidence to not be frightened by it, may in fact be our greatest gift.  It is certainly ironic, as it is that very same quality our parents love to deride in us.

Along another avenue, I think there are Boomers out there (most of them, in fact) who can be nudged into more accepting and compromising positions through personal experience.  Even conservatives who know at least one openly gay person are significantly less homophobic than those who do not.  But getting that lesson to be applied to anyone outside the inner circle of a family may be more difficult.  However, I think trying is well-worth it, as the reward of a healthier and more cooperative society far outstrips the risks and the effort involved.

The danger, it seems to me, is that we become more isolated, not less.  But that pushes against the tides of long-term demographic trends, so if we do, I doubt it'll last.  It's our silence and our inaction that speak louder than whatever militant zeitgeist happens to be blaring out of Fox News or MSNBC these days.  The most dangerous belief of all is that we are powerless and have no hope.  Resignation is not the same thing as acceptance.  Nor is it true that our beliefs are self-evident.  We have to go looking for the reason why, and accept that sometimes we're wrong.  So long as we fail to account for this, our troubles will continue.  At the very least we can be a little bit more flexible about it.

I won't end this post on a note of fear, because I am neither afraid nor do I believe in using fear to make a point.  I choose instead to issue a reminder that none of us is above our humanity, and thus none of us is above our own flaws.  Nor our families, loved-ones, friends, heroes, politicians, and religious leaders.  The expectation that anyone is perfect and anything is infallible is the very worst way to Take Reality for Granted.  Use this information wisely.

The Generation Gap: Part One: Classism and Conspicuous Consumption

More kitchen gadgets!  More clothes!  More DVDs!
Anything to avoid experiencing the scary outside world.

My uncle loves to spend money.  Flatscreen TVs, expensive toys, fancy cars, you name it.  His wife and son (my aunt and cousin) are accessories: items acquired for status.  Conspicuous consumption, it's called.  I recently had a conversation with a political operative wondering why young people weren't more enthused with his party.  More than half of my graduating class still lives at home because the jobs they were able to obtain with college degrees don't pay enough to afford them their own place, and on top of that, almost all of them are drowning in student loan debt.  Right-wing talk radio hosts and liberal pundits alike love to slam the very generation they raised as lazy, incompetent, and self-entitled.  My fiancee has a degree in biology and works at a sandwich shop.

Something is very wrong with this picture to me.  I am going to attempt to explain it.

I am now twenty-seven years old.  I was born in 1984, which places me firmly in the first wave of the so-called Millennial generation.  I left high school before the advent of social media and texting, but only by a hair's breadth.   However, I still feel like I am a part of that whole experience, having otherwise grown up with computers and the internet.  My father was a market executive for a succession of software companies throughout my childhood.  He was always well-versed and literate and with the times, and because of that he had a better grasp on the experience of my generation than most.  But there are many others who don't see it like he did, and it is these particular individuals which I want to write about.  It's not just about technology and privacy.  It's about a cultural attitude, a lack of self-awareness, selfishness, and a need for emotional satisfaction.  The Baby Boomers, who so loudly professed their uniqueness and how special they are, have become their parents, and that will have significant consequences for both my generation and the future of the country.

I want to address three specific issues here, and I'll list them out beforehand.  One is selfishness and self-absorption, which covers the conspicuous consumption angle.  The second is hypocrisy, which covers the relative lack of self-awareness.  The third is more subtle, and has to do with how we view technology and the future.  Call it outlook.  In order to understand our generation gap in this country, we have to understand all three.  In the interests of keeping these posts short, I'll break up each topic into its own post.  I'll address selfishness and self-absorption first.

My generation--a lot of us, at least--grew up in suburbs and exurbs.  We were raised in a kind of outward affluence that not even our parents truly knew.  We had computers from an early age, and grew up on them.  Our lives were managed; nearly every material comfort provided for us with little fuss; we would go to college and become wealthy, and most importantly of all, we were told from day one that we were special, unique, and entitled to the very best in life.  Ours was a world of safety and almost dreary shiny, squeaky-clean monotony.  We came of age in a country increasingly segregated by class and race, where automobile ownership was tantamount to existence itself, and our parents' longing for the lost days of their youth was filled with the ownership of things--stuff, material possessions, anything you could imagine.  I split my childhood between an economically-mixed outer suburb of New York City and a much more uniformly affluent and ethnically homogeneous exurb of Boston.  In the former, I was one of the wealthiest kids in town.  In the latter, if anything I was in the lower-middle tier.  My parents were especially voracious consumers of things.  My father drove luxury cars, my mother bought self-help books and various gadgets to help her relax.  Slowly, they were buying themselves into the upper class.  Spending sprees at various stores in the mall during sales were not unheard-of.  I too had bought into this game.  When the meaning of life to you is wealth and materialism, it's easy to become critical and contemptuous of the less fortunate.  After all, your only value is how much you own.  There are some--the conservatives--who opt for a direct approach to this line of thinking.  But to make this a partisan issue is to largely miss the point.  My parents were liberal, but liberal classism is nonetheless just as prevalent, if subtler.  In fact, I would argue that liberal classism is the far more dangerous of the two.  Here's how it works.

You know, for that mountain you don't live near.

Let's say you're an average suburban dweller.  Your life to you is your children, your job, your cars, your house, and the monetary values of each.  I know, I know.  You're saying to me "But Matt, that's not all there is to life.  I love my children for who they are, not what they're worth."  But is that really true?  Let's look at this mathematically.  120 years ago,  before the advent of modern medicine, it was in the best economic interests of parents to have lots of children inside the confines of marriage.  This is because before the advent of social welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare, the elderly were entirely dependent on their offspring to care for them in their old age.  Before the advent of modern medicine, many children died before reaching adulthood.  In addition, the relative levels of education required to earn a living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not all that high.  Thus, more children meant more income for the household through factory work or, say more help around the farm.  But in the first half of the 20th century this began to change.  Most children were surviving to adulthood.  Automation reduced the need for child labor, and the relative skill level required to earn a living wage increased substantially, to the point where children now required over a decade of schooling or more in order to find suitable work.  This changed everything.  Instead of a net financial gain, having children now became a significant investment in both time and money.  I'm not going to sit here and pretend like pregnancies are usually planned, but in the context of affluent suburban nuclear families, I think having a child means something very different than say for a young working-class mother.  You pay into your child's education through property taxes at a bare minimum, and almost always in a lot more ways than that.  You're living in a community designed to eliminate concerns about safety, access basic amenities, and healthcare.  But to assume that that eliminates human fears and insecurities is to assume that humans have no inherent nature, which would at best be extremely naive.  We're always going to find something to complain and worry about, and compare ourselves to others, and if we're not worried for our safety and basic quality of life, we're going to get crazy competitive about our relative wealth, and the way we engage in this practice is through conspicuous consumption.  Your kid, which already was a significant investment to begin with, naturally becomes a part of this too.  Self-absorption of this sort is not anyone's fault: it's an organic reaction to circumstances, and there's nothing even illegitimate about it.  But it does warp your world view, and this is where it starts to become a problem.  If the conservative position is contemptuous deceit and malice, the liberal position is one of contemptuous ignorance.  I hope the reason is clear by now, but if not, I'll spell it out.  When you're surrounded by people like you, people who aren't like you are no longer concrete and real.  They become abstractions; concepts.  Something imagined and not experienced.  Whenever experience leaves the picture and your conceptualizations are no longer grounded in reality as such, your view becomes warped.

What does this have to do with my generation?  A lot.  As the Baby Boomers age and start to retire, their views of Millennials are changing.  Their views of us, by and large (at least in the way I've just described above), were already deformed by affluence and ideology.  We are increasingly an abstraction to them--an "other" to be feared and viewed with contempt.  It really does seem sometimes as if we were just another form of status to them.  When I talk to people my own age with these kinds of backgrounds, the overwhelming view is one of disgust.  We were taught to pursue our dreams and that money doesn't matter.  And to a certain extent it doesn't, at least in my experience.  To that end we ended up exactly like our parents wanted us to, and for our trouble we are now being told that we are lazy and entitled.  We were all told that we had to go to college, and for our effort most of us have worthless degrees and many tens of thousands of dollars of debt.  Student loan debt has now surpassed credit card debt in this country.  Yet we are told that it's our own damn fault, and not only that, now especially by conservative Baby Boomers that we are not entitled to the same benefits our parents are (I'm thinking of the Paul Ryan budget in particular).  What kind of message does that send to us?  It is only selfishness that leads to such thinking, selfishness brought about by an environment that encouraged an obsession with oneself for several decades running.  Instead of being valued as future innovators or a workforce, we're a target group for advertising so our parents can make even more money off of us by selling us things we don't need to put us into more debt in order to feed the finance system that pays their retirement plans.

The most ironic thing of all this, of course, is that these are exactly the same complaints the Baby Boomers had of their parents, only to an extra degree.  It is certainly ironic that in the name of wealth and the glorification of oneself, they have created exactly dystopia they imagined they lived under in the 60s.  Now history is being rewritten to suit their needs and justify their excesses.  There was a moral to the financial crisis of 2008, but it was lost in the melange of fear, blame, denial, and resentment that followed, when the bill came due for their feast.  I have tremendous faith in the youth of today that we have learned this critical lesson, if not completely than at least more than our parents.   Whether or not we have much of a world left after the Boomers are done with it remains to be seen.

Outside the Matrix

I started this blog late last year because I was searching for an answer to a very basic question: What is the truth?  Where it's taken me I don't think I could have ever fully predicted, and over the months it has evolved to become a reflection of me and how I see the world.  I think that's good.  When I started blogging, I was deeply afraid to share myself period, let alone broadcast it like this.  I haven't really promoted it, because I've spent most of the past year trying to hone my craft, to the point where reflecting myself in this way became second nature.  I think in a way, I've succeeded, and this post is proof positive.  All of this began with a few Facebook statuses, and over the years since I started that, all this has completely taken on a life of its own.  Everything I've posted here thus far has been completely true, but what I haven't shown is how it's affected all of me.  I think I really stand right now on the threshold between what I'd been working towards and something else, and so I want this post to do two things.  First, I want to fill in all the details of what I haven't shown over the past few months, and hopefully put this all into context.  Second, I want to use this post as a bridge to newer and bigger things I have planned for the blog in the future.  So, with that in mind, here goes.

I had, for most of my life, had a real problem with articulation.  Anyone knows me knows how verbal I am, so this may come as a surprise.  I've written something like eleven novel manuscripts in my life, but really they were all about only one thing.  Every work, whether it was The Academy, or any of my other long-running ideas and series (such as Emma's story, or AK's) were all attempts at articulating the same idea, one that has been with me for as long as I can remember.  They are all about freedom.

The word freedom is bandied about a lot these days, and in the past on this blog I've used the concept of the simulated world in the movie The Matrix as a metaphor for my own particular interpretation of the word.  Searching for it, I believe, is one of the most basic efforts of all life.  By now I hope that my struggles to control and manage my mental illness have been made clear what this means to me, at least on a functional level.  Just like in the movie, freedom to me is the awareness that everything around me--everything I feel, everything I think and do and see and experience is in some way an illusion, and that my craving and my clinging for that which is neither permanent nor in reality what I imagine it to be.  It's not even a state of mind: that would imply that I had somewhere to go, existentially, in order to get it.  The only path to freedom in that sense I ever found was acceptance--acceptance of the way things are right now, without trying to change anything.  Life is suffering, and then we get sick and die in the end for our efforts.  But acceptance doesn't have to and shouldn't be an ending.  That's resignation, and resignation is garbage.  Acceptance--true acceptance--is a beginning.

Two Thursdays ago, I walked out to my secret beach, at an undisclosed location in the greater Portsmouth area, determined that I was going to accept something about myself that I had been striving towards for the better part of a year.  I had a problem with validation.  There were many reasons, some of which I'll eventually touch on on this blog, and some of which are largely irrelevant at this point.  As I've come to understand, the reason why something is the way it is in my head is less important than how it works, at least as far as undoing it is concerned.  I couldn't be happy on my own.  I'm hard on myself--even still now too hard--and I have unrealistic expectations of what I can do and how quickly I can get it done.  I used to imagine an audience--mercurial, always just out of reach of the light--laughing at me, talking about me like I was a giant fraud, rejecting me.  At certain points in my life that audience may have been real, but not anymore.  I think that audience turned out to be as much a reflection in the mirror as anything else.  I feel extremely self-conscious about these things, which is why in the real heat of these moments I always try to make them public--on Twitter, which is linked to my Facebook account, which is a real and powerful tool to seek validation.  It was that self-consciousness that was the problem, and by publicly admitting it, I faced the fear and it no longer held any power over me.  It was a realization as profound as the experience was grueling.  Because of it, I have now come to the following conclusion, which holds larger implications than just my own personal betterment.

We think our problems are external to us.  If only we were rich.  If only we had that new pair of designer jeans.  If only we went on vacation.  If only our boss weren't so mean.  If only other people weren't so rude.  If only we could not be hurt.  If only our loved ones would change.  We crave.  And what we have doesn't last.  Relationships end.  Friends move away.  Elation turns right back to normalcy and habit again.  We cling.  We can't see it for what it is, because we're right down there in the cycle of it all and we don't know anything else.  But the problem is not our bosses or our loved ones, or liberals or conservatives to put this in a political context.  The problem is our craving and our clinging.  It's not the people we're fighting, it's the fighting itself.  This is what I've learned.  Now that I can see it for what it is, I feel to some extent freed from it.  Not totally, mind you.  But closer than I have in a long time.  My imaginary audience went away.  I stopped craving validation because I stopped needing it.  As the Third Noble Truth of Buddhism says: eliminate the craving, eliminate the suffering.  I didn't truly understand it until that night on the beach, but I think I do now.

All of the people I've written about thus far are real, and all have helped me reach this conclusion in their own way.  This is the end of one chapter in my life and the beginning of a new one, and thus the end of one phase of this story and a new beginning.  What I'm going to get into next is both more difficult and more complicated, and I have every intention of giving every nuance and detail its fair dues.  Writing this has been tremendously helpful, and I hope it will continue to do so.  If I understand freedom now, at least what it means to me, all the better.  If I don't--well, at least I know a good way of seeking it out.

In Defense of Porn Part 1: The Introduction

Yes, but does porn love you back?

I'd like to do a new arc now, one about sex, pornography, and gender, building off what I thought was the best post of the Mike the Broken GI Joe arc, which was about masculinity.  Talking about sex is kind of a paradox for me, because while I am disabled now, I am planning on seeking employment in the future and these are the sorts of materials online that come back to haunt people on graduate school and job applications.  So, let's start with a few ground rules.  I do not want to talk about the specifics of my sex life or my sexuality if I don't have to.  Therefore, as a general disclaimer, you can safely assume that everything I talk about here is in the hypothetical.  Second, we need to draw a couple of important distinctions.  The most important of these distinctions comes in paying for sex.  I draw a huge distinction between downloading a pornographic picture from the internet and even paying for a lap dance, and so should you.  The key difference is that there is no personal, face-to-face interaction, and thus the opportunity for harm is somewhat limited.  The second distinction has to do with legality.  This should almost go without saying, but the exploitation of minors is not just wrong, it's illegal.  So even if I talk about men being say attracted to teenage girls, there is a very big distinction between thinking this and actually acting upon it.  The former is a commonplace occurrence, the latter is a crime depending on each state's statutory rape laws.

Okay, I think that covers the ground rules.  Now let's get into the meat of this post, where I defend pornography from would-be foes on both the right and the left.

Porn has long been scorned as a moral and cultural abomination, yet few people ever stop to think about where contemporary society would be without it.  There is certainly the classic argument that it's exploitative of women, but it an age of celebrity glamour and fetish models and practicing "lifestyles" I don't know how necessarily true that is.  True, there will always be exploitation in the sex industry.  But a simple Google search for several fetishes (e.g. "schoolgirl," or "maid," or "latex"), or even simply "nude," draws up at least as many well-fed, healthy-looking women who have neither tired eyes nor dark circles and seem genuinely willing to be there.  This is not to say that every model is there entirely of their own free will, but certainly neither is pornography some universally degrading and exploitative experience for women.  In fact, it's essential that it not be.  The reason is two-fold, and has to do with two technologies that pornography helped to bring into the mainstream (as it were): home video, and the Internet.

Back in the late 70s, seeing something pornographic typically involved trekking to a seedy theater in a disreputable part of town, sitting down with your feet on a disgusting floor, and being surrounded by sketchy perverted men.  That all began to change with the invention of Betamax and VHS.  Much as we have a copyright controversy today with digital music, the home video era began with a similar public battle over whether or not it was okay to tape shows and songs on the radio.  For a while, there was a real possibility that home video may never have caught on.  Enter the pornography industry, who knew a good thing when they saw it.  By vociferously defending the right of the public to watch movies in their own home, they not only brought us the video store and the concept of movie rental, they also revolutionized our sexuality.  So many conventions about society seem held together only be collective pretense--if we don't see others doing it, we assume that they don't do it, and if nobody does something, it must be wrong.  How many times has there been bubbling weirdness simmering just beneath the facade of normality in modern American society, only to be released at the first available opportunity of free expression?  Home video did that for sex and in particular fetishism in a big way.  But that was to be eclipsed a little more than a decade later by an even greater revolution.

This was exactly what Al Gore had in mind.

Big ideas seldom work as intended.  The phonograph was originally envisioned by Thomas Edison as a means of secretaries to keep records for their bosses.  In fact, he fought against using phonographic records for music.  But his only part was to bring his invention to the market.  The market ultimately decided what the most profitable use of it was.  The internet started out as a way for academics to talk to other academics, and rapidly became the most powerful tool of self-expression ever invented.  I was on the internet since about 1990.  I remember what it was like.  And I remember what society was like, even though I was only six years old.  Over the course of my life, I've watched that completely change.

What pornography did was give the average person on the street a reason to be online.  I highly doubt eCommerce would have been the resounding success it was without it.  Here at last, gays, lesbians, and the transgendered, many of whom were isolated, had a way of connecting with other like-minded individuals, overcoming geography and local hostility.  Fetishists too could for the first time connect with other fetishists.  Internet porn's effect on our sexuality was as total as it was rapid.  I hold it largely responsible for taking LGBT rights mainstream.  Every weird kink and quirk now had its own community, and people could see for the first time that they were not alone.  Porn had become mainstream almost overnight, taking with it acceptance of sexual orientation and alternative lifestyles such as BDSM.  We were, as we discovered an incredibly kinky nation of small-scale closet perverts.  And because of porn's early investment, the Internet took off, and brings us everything we take for granted today such as Google, Facebook, and smartphones.

I haven't met someone who was opposed to pornography who wasn't also opposed to sex in principle. This position is more common among feminists than conservatives (many of whom research shows oppose it publicly but privately are some of porn's greatest consumers).  Acceptance of sexuality has become in this era an acceptance of pornography as an expression of said sexuality.  There is, however, a frightening double-standard in place, particularly in the way women view men.  I will fully admit that I both own and view porn on a regular basis, even in my relationship with Kari.  Porn was, like for many people, among my sole means of expressing myself sexually for a long time in my life, and that has simply become a rite of passage for males in this society.  Moreover, porn was educational, and helped clarify many things about sex for me.  But there is still a stigma attached to this, and it has come into play in my life more than once.  This post has gone on long enough already.  There are so many things I want to talk about on this subject, and it's fully deserving of its own arc.  Let this post serve as an introduction, then.  I will leave no stone unturned, no kink left out, and no popularly-held conception erm, unconceived.  Sex is an important part of life, and porn is an important part of sex.  So let it all be said--in defense of porn.

A Quickie on Casey Anthony and Public Tragedies

The number one threat to America
(After bears, of course).

Casey Anthony is going to be released from jail tomorrow, and public hysteria shows no signs of abating over her acquittal.  I have no particular vested stake in her innocence or guilt; my gut says she's guilty, but in a court of law, particularly when the death penalty is on the table, it is imperative that the defendant's guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and the prosecution in this case failed to do that.  There has been a lot of disgust directed towards Ms. Anthony, and not necessarily without reason.  She certainly didn't come out looking good.  But longtime readers know I am always skeptical of public hysteria, and as the article linked above cites, threats are beginning to be leveled against the jurors who acquitted her, which to me crosses an important line.  This will be a short post, but here are my observations.

I paid careful attention to who among my social networks was following the case.  Overwhelmingly, they were politically conservative females, many of whom were also either overweight or grossly out of shape, and many of whom were also young mothers whose pregnancies were not planned.  Indeed, most of the public commentary journalists have managed to acquire would seem to come from this particular demographic, though without hard data (like a poll or a survey), I can't say that conclusively.  The people who seemed to be the most moved and/or agitated by the case also tended to watch a lot of television, in particular partisan cable news and highly emotional crime shows (such as the ubiquitous Nancy Grace and networks like TruTV).  These shows and networks overwhelmingly appeal to viewer's emotions and gut instincts, and should Ms. Anthony's safety be challenged (either by physical violence or credible threats of such), it will be these media outlets and television personalities who I hold responsible.

The Casey Anthony trial is a curious case where what we think and feel give us two different answers.  Again, the gut instinct and a cursory look at the case practically scream that she's guilty.  However a closer examination of the evidence shows that it's largely circumstantial and somewhat underwhelming as evidence in a court of law, particularly in a death penalty case.  But that wasn't what we were told by the media.  We were given a highly hysterical, highly emotional zeitgeist that told us what we felt was more important than what we thought or even what we saw.  The trial did not have to be framed this way.  The media abdicated its responsibility to inform the public once again in exchange for the publicity highly histrionic sensationalism would produce.  Whether we would still have credible death threats against the jurors in the case without it, I don't know, but the media and opinion-makers, particularly the partisan ones, certainly did nothing to dissuade the behavior, and in many cases (such as Ms. Grace), openly encouraged it.  Thus, though the individuals who may make threats and/or potentially carry them out in the future should be held accountable for their individual actions, the people responsible for framing the argument and the reaction must also share the blame.

Lest you think that I believe this is anything new, I don't, but that doesn't make it any less true or any less wrong.  Implementing any change would take time (at least a generation) to work, and while that may or may not happen, I don't exactly see us starting tomorrow.  Of more interest to me is what leads someone to feel this way, and for that feeling to override their ability to reason.  We live in a society that affords us little opportunity to seek meaning in our lives, and so we try to replace it by acquiring physical possessions and following the lives of others who seem to be more meaningful than ours.  We use celebrities to build ourselves up, both by drama of their lives that ours may lack and by how we feel better in comparison when the public figures we idolize prove to be just as fallible, imperfect, and human as us.  Televised sports provide excitement where we'd otherwise have none; a surrogate for the human connection we crave.  Yet we have no control over these things, and so it only reinforces our feeling of emptiness, which to me seems like one of the reasons why the public backlash against Ms. Anthony's acquittal has been so fierce.  I have no doubt that a conviction would have been very cathartic for those OCFs (overweight conservative females) in my social networks and throughout the media--a validation of themselves and the choices they made.  But we didn't get that, and so we're left feeling angry and empty.

In many ways, then, this is a tragedy beyond just Ms. Anthony, her life, and the death of her child.  It's a reminder to all of us of just how little we seem to have.  I would hope that if there is a silver lining to this case, that it provokes in someone, somewhere, some kind of serious introspection, and that introspection can lead to awareness and some form of acceptance.  Maybe then some good will come of it.  Until then, a tragedy it will remain, for everyone involved.

Broken Action Figures

So here I come to the conclusion of Mike the Broken GI Joe.  There is just one last part of him I have yet to fully account for, and it's not only the most important, it ties the rest of his arc together.  Mike is in many ways a reflection of people I see every day, and things that we all experience but could never fully understand.  It has to do with empathy and compassion, the conditions we place on both, and even the lack thereof.  Because compassion was the puzzle piece missing from Mike.  Whether he once had it and lost it or never knew it to begin with, I don't know.  But he was as sick as our society for want of it, and if there is one thing that can cure the problems that we face, it's that.

In one of the last conversations I ever had with Mike, he explained to me the reasoning behind his complete and utter lack of empathy towards anyone who was not either exactly like him or a direct relation.  The world had been ruined by others, he had been wronged by others, he could never go back to the way things were when he was younger and more innocent, and he bore utterly no responsibility for any of it.  I had thought it was purely and simply hate, but hate has never been an emotion that ever existed by itself.  Hate requires something to precede it--more often than not anger or fear.  What every self-proclaimed liberal or Democrat I talked to since Obama was elected failed to grasp was that it was the fear of those not like oneself that powered the Tea Party.  Fear of Muslims, fear of gays, fear of liberals, fear of Latinos, hipsters, atheists, China, whatever else you want to throw at it.  It was class resentment, from people like Mike who came from working class backgrounds and never got a fair chance in life, who were conditioned from birth never to ask for help, and to look down on those who do, and because of this have concluded that it's every man for themselves.  Mike's way out of poverty was the Marines, which took a violent, vicious, brutal man and by way of ending his innocence hammered him into a productive member of the economy, if not society.  All Mike ever knew was pain, misery, fear, and insecurity.  I can't hate him.  I pity him.  He was scared of his own shadow, and not necessarily without good reason.

What Mike feared most of all, however, was change.  Change for Mike almost always meant change for the worse.  Think about what that does to a person over the course of 30-40 years.  From promise to disappointment to bitterness to just struggling to survive.  Mike never found love, he hardly ever dated, and sex meant whatever he could get taking someone home from a club.  He was, for all intents and purposes, all alone in the world.  Whether or not that was his own damn fault is irrelevant to the point.  The effect of all this on a person is what matters, and over the ten years I knew him, I watched it devastate him.

If there has been any one theme in postwar America, it has been the urge to run away.  Run away first from poverty, crime, and dirtiness, and when that failed run away from responsibility.  It's hard to blame us: when you have access to wealth and means to rid yourself of unsightliness largely free of consequence, you'll take it every time no matter however you justify it.  Please try to understand that I am not faulting suburbs and malls here.  They are a product of circumstances, an efficient solution to a complex problem of transportation and economics, and have produced a great deal of wealth.  But rushing off to the suburban dream comes with unintended consequences, and it is largely those consequences that we are dealing with now, for a very specific reason.  I am talking about fear, and specifically the fear of those unlike yourself.  I have heard this called Blogger Syndrome, groupthink, and many other names, but for the purposes of this post, let's define it.  Whenever you are surrounded by people with whom you agree, you will become very resentful of those who do not.  That's one component.  The other--functional illiteracy--I have already talked about copiously in previous Mike the Broken GI Joe posts.  Combined, they are a recipe for disaster.  The truth of the matter is, affluent middle class liberals and Democrats have hardly ever met working-class conservatives, and when they do, it is often in the form of the latter performing a service for the former.  The only people willing to talk to these people and listen to them are wealthy conservatives, who arrive with an agenda and have discovered they can gain a lot of power by manipulating and misinforming them and playing to their fear and resentment.  What else was Glenn Beck but the ultimate huckster of fear?  That is the dilemma.

I have until now listed a lot of problems with society at large that I felt Mike embodied.  These are not simple issues, and these posts have a been a welcome meditation on them.  There is a solution, but I don't know how practical or likely it is, and there's always a problem of scaling.  I don't hate Mike.  I regret that I had to cut ties with him, because in the end, he's taught me so much.  I'm not going to sit here and pretend that we never had these problems at some point in the past, and that things used to be better.  Things are, as bleak as they seem right now, better than they've ever been.  I truly believe that.  Many accuse me of being naive when I say this, but I also truly believe in the innate goodness of mankind.  We live in a time when those who scream the loudest are awarded the power.  The internet has given us a wealth of knowledge and conveniences, but also a wealth of misinformation and competing realities.  Television in this day and age is much the same.  We're not listening to each other.  We're all just shouting over one another.  We have no interest in the people who fix our cars, check us out at the grocery store, and clean our homes.  The people who do these things fear and resent us for it.  But it doesn't have to be this way.

My fiancee's parents' downstairs bathroom is wallpapered in a repeating set of catch phrases and cliches.  Most of them I find I can agree with, but there is one I simply cannot abide.  It reads: "Don't tell others about your indigestion.  'How are you?' is a greeting, not a question."  I think the phrase "How are you?" can and must be a question.  It's the only way we'll ever be able to find any empathy for strangers, people who may or may not be like us.  We pass strangers on the street and in the supermarket and the drug store and the bank, the mall, the movie theater, our waiter in a restaurant, the girl who serves us coffee and we never give them a second thought.  They are functionally objects to us.  But each one of those myriad faces you see, judge, and subsequently forget about day in and day out is a person just like you, with their own hopes, dreams, crushing disappointments, anger, fear, and hope.  Mike was broken because he either could not or would not see it that way.  Because his reaction to that was so extreme, he is a useful example of what can go wrong when we give up on humanity.  Luckily, the solution is not hard.  I have won over fans of my work and friends alike simply by wanting to know something more about the person who waits on me or the clerk who checks me out buying groceries or medicine or both.  More importantly, it makes doing these things fun.  It literally takes so little effort, and it brightens both their day and yours.

I'm not asking that we give up our basic human nature.  In fact, I would say that I've argued just the opposite.  But if we're stuck with it, we may as well understand it and use it to help ourselves--and others.  It would be a terrible waste to ignore it, or worse, use it to destructive ends.  We lost when we turned away from each other.  I have much more to say on this, but this post is already long enough, so I'll leave it at this for now.  This is the core of what I've come to realize over my struggles in the past two years, and I want to return to it again and again.  Mike to me is a tragedy that's everybody's fault.  I have done all these things that Mike did myself, and so has everyone else.  No one asks us to deny ourselves these feelings, but we should at least be aware of them and act accordingly.  Doing so is so simple, it's often overlooked in favor of far more arduous and complicated alternatives.  But doing so also forces us to acknowledge who we are, good and bad, and that is very difficult.  I don't count myself lucky or consider myself special that I've been able to come as far as I had this way.  That's just how things have worked out.  If any part of the process changed, the outcome would have been different.  Mike was another way it could have ended.

I don't know what happened to Mike.  I wonder what he'll do with himself a year from now, two, ten.  Things weren't looking good the last I heard from him.  I hope that he finds some kind of peace and release from his fear, but the truth is I just don't know.  Part of me doesn't want to know, either.  If that's the way it is, so be it.  I'm at peace with it.  He was a good friend and a troubled man, whose influence over me was seldom eclipsed.  He's neither good nor bad, he's just Mike, a broken GI Joe of a man.

Is That Porn In Your Congress? That's So Hot

It's time we were frank about porn.  When I get down to it, pornography has a lot to do with Mike, America, and everything I've talked about over the past week and a half.  I am an avid defender of porn.  The pornography industry single-handedly blazed the trail for us to watch home videos and surf the web, it's one of the only things standing between us and the trampling of our first amendment rights, and it made fetishism okay in society at large.  But what is porn, really?  Sexually explicit photographs and video?  Or is it something more?  This herein is an important caveat I have to make when I talk about porn.  Because there is far more to porn than just Bianca Beauchamp in latex or Ron Jeremy doing it to a bass solo.  Still reading this?  Haven't run away screaming?  Good.  This is the story of a very interesting realization.

I am obsessed with fetishism.  I don't mean this necessarily that I'm a big fetishist--like most men, I do have fetishes, but to think of it solely in a sexual context is to miss the big picture.  As strange as it sounds, whenever I read the news, especially about politics, what I see is fetish porn.

I think it would help for me to define pornography before I continue, and this is a trickier thing to do than you might think.  There is no real legal definition, just as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said "I know it when I see it."  It is indeed a very blurry line.  To me, however, porn has always been about the glorification of something for its own sake. This is a pretty broad definition, and it manages to encompass really any idea you can think of, not just sex.  Under this definition, something like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ could qualify, or really any of the movies he produced, such as The Patriot, Braveheart, or Apocalypto.  In fact, this may be a useful example, because when I read Mike's self-published book, I was instantly reminded of a Mel Gibson movie.  I draw heavily here from a chapter in Max Blumenthal's Republican Gommorah (one of the very few examples of quality and informative partisan non-fiction), which details the rise and fall for the Christian Conservative movement, along with the rise of the Tea Party.  The general thesis of the book is that the dysfunction of conservative Christian politicians reflects a personal dysfunction of the Christian Right in general, especially as it regards to personal repression, denialism, and unwitting hypocrisy and self-contradiction.  Like with any partisan book, it's important to take its more political statements with a grain of salt and focus on the reporting, but a large section on the Evangelical Men's Movement of the 2000s, and in particular the works of Mel Gibson and Ted Haggard struck a chord with me, which directly influences my post here.  The important takeaway is that both offered a particularly rigid and self-contradictary definition of masculinity, one that glorified self-annihilation, violence, and dominance for its own sake, and in the process unwittingly glorified male homosexuality.  Anybody who has seen any of these Mel Gibson movies should have a fair idea of what Mr. Blumenthal and I mean.

The key point of the key point, then, is glorification for its own sake.  Particularly that last part: for its own sake.  This is what I think of when I think of Mike, and when I think of conservatives and a good deal of the issues currently being bandied about in Congress and in the news media.  Conservative Christians are very obviously fixated on the opposition to homosexuality, abortion, evolution, and science in general.  I've spoken with a number of Evangelicals both old and young about this.  It's almost as if voting a certain way has superceded Christ.  But think about that for a second.  It actually seems kind of odd, doesn't it?  In the whole wide world of Christendom, with such a rich body of history, tradition, theology, practice, and even emotion, why those very oddly specific issues?  Or take the fiscal conservative fixation on marginal tax rates.  By any definition it's a relatively narrow issue, and part of a much larger picture.  Climate change denialism, too.  And if you add them up, the pieces don't really fit together all that well.  In the Christian case, the emphasis on the traditional family takes us back to the cultural values of a papered-over and imaginary version of the 1950s, whereas the fiscal position fits very well with someone interested in short-term profits and making a quick buck.  But again, that seems very narrowly specific--unnecessarily so.  More importantly, each belief becomes self-reinforcing for its own sake, and largely to the exclusion of anything else.  By my definition, that would seem to be a fetish.  More than that, it's a fetishistic obsession.

Before you make any prejudgments, however, I shoulds say that I am no stranger to fetishistic obsession.  I have gotten lost in the details of both my own sexuality before, not to mention the details of many other things, like politics, anger, even my own religion.  It's interesting to see how much of that rigid, dysfunctional male ideal Mike embodied, despite not being Christian.  Scientists now say that cognitive dissonance isn't real--that would imply that the human mind is integrated in the first place.  I don't think one needs to eliminate the concept just because the mind is compartmentalized.  In fact, that compartmentalization may in fact lead to the dysfunction.  It's sort of like the character Dr. Strangelove from the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name.  His hand has a mind of its own, and doesn't always do what he (his brain) wants.  We may be made up of modules, but those modules interact with the outside world as one body and one mind.  If anything, that makes the suffering of misinformation greater, not less.  Mike truly could not cope with the world in which he lived, and it created in him a specific combination of fetishistic fixations.

To conclude my point, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does come with a downside.  The inability to distinguish between your fetish (be it sexual, political, religious, or otherwise) and your beliefs can leave you very vulnerable to misinformation and cause you to draw disastrously wrong conclusions.  If you're fitting your observations to your beliefs and not vice-versa, you're going to miss the truth.  This is a real problem, and not one with a ready solution.  Thanks to the internet, you can have whatever you believe validated with the click of a mouse, no matter how extreme.  We surround ourselves with people who think and act exactly like we do and agree with everything that we say, and make no effort to challenge ourselves and our ideas with outsiders, all while complaining viciously about vaguely personal forces that oppose us, even though we've probably never encountered one of those in person before.  But this way--the pornographic way--is easier, and so we'll choose it every time.  It sucks, but we haven't developed the mechanism to discriminate just yet, let alone teach it to our children.  However, as bad as things are now, I have no doubt that we'll get there.  I can already see the beginnings of it.  We can all do our part by simply stopping to think about what it is we're consuming, what it means to us, and how it fits in the big picture.  It's not hard to do, it just doesn't come naturally to most people.  But we can do it.  I have faith.  We just need a little practice.

Label Me

If there was one thing Mike loved to do, it was label things.  Even before his descent into paranoid quasi-madness, he was always quick to identify the good guys and the bad guys, and everybody was either one or the other.  I haven't met a man or woman alive who didn't in some way use labels to identify themselves: introvert, extrovert, feeler, thinker, progressive, conservative, goth, punk, jock, prep, vegan, anarchist, Christian, lesbian...the list goes on.  In the concluding chapter of his rather apocalyptic book of cultural and political commentary Deer Hunting With Jesus, Joe Bageant laments the fact that we have all these props at our disposal with which to construct our identity as limiters upon them.  I don't know if that's true or not, but it's certain that if there are advantages conferred by them, there are also unintended consequences.  This post is an attempt to in some way explain the way these labels work, for better or worse.

I should start by talking a little bit about myself.  I have never dealt well with labels.  This is not me proclaiming myself a unique snowflake; being unique is unimportant to me.  Nor is this post in any way an attempt to claim any moral superiority.  I am the way I am because I am the product of my experiences.  That confers neither superiority nor inferiority.  It simply is what it is.  I have, however, struggled with this, mostly in my relationship to other people.  It is true that in the past 100 years, our society has grown exponentially more complex, and the amount of information available to us today is so much greater than to someone 100 years ago that I doubt an adult from that era could even make sense of our world as it is now.  Joe Bageant speaks of a time before all this as some sort of utopian ideal, when we were free to be whoever we want, but I don't know if that's really accurate.  Looking historically, if anything, the lack of access to these identifier props seems to have been a limiting factor, not a helpful one.  What were my options in 1910s New Hampshire?  Not many.  But today when I walk down the street with my hair down in a t-shirt and jeans, I am more or less identified for what I am (though of course a quick visual observation will miss the nuances), rather than some sort of deviant.  Every Christian I know certainly draws a lot of security from that label: at least as much as from their faith itself.  There is nothing wrong or illegitimate about it.  In fact, I think one could even make the argument that it's necessary.  Bombarded as we are with advertising, news, and entertainment, how could we even make sense of what we perceive without in some way labeling ourselves?  We couldn't.  No, labels themselves aren't the problem.  But there is a definite downside, and this is really the heart of the matter.

Mike is not alone in his dichotomous thinking.  In fact, I'm hard pressed to name even a single friend or acquaintance who doesn't in some way engage in this.  My Buddhist religion teaches that this dichotomy is an illusion -- a form of ignorance that prevents me from becoming enlightened.  But that simple statement belies just how difficult it is to break free from that mode of thought.  So let's examine that way of thinking a little bit closer and see just where the problem lies.

Whenever I talk philosophy, or even really politics, one particular dichotomy always seems to come up: thoughts versus feelings.  Time and again I've been told that someone is a feeler and not a thinker, as if that somehow made them any different from me or any other human.  I've heard many times that feeling things is better than thinking them.  Jon Stewart likes to lament this when talking with scientists and other skeptics on The Daily Show.  It does indeed seem to be a difficlut conundrum.  But how true is it really: that feeling things is better than thinking them, or that there is even necessarily a difference between the two?

I think it's no secret that I feel things very strongly.  My capacity to feel emotions is every bit as great as my struggles with them, and if that were the end of it, I wouldn't be writing this post.  Emotions by themselves are largely useless without an ability to understand them.  After all, if you can't explain why you feel a certain way, what hope do you have of controlling your life?  Which is not to say that most people do this--they don't.  I certainly was beholden to my feelings for most of my life, cripplingly so.  The way out was to see them for what they really were--in all their subtlety, nuance, and complexity, and think about them.  We believe that thinking and feeling are two diametrically opposed philosophies.  In fact, one cannot exist without the other.  It's like chemistry: certain combinations produce certain reactions and results.  Thoughts and feelings are two sides of the same coin.  Trusting one to the exclusion of the other is not only dangerous, it's an outright recipe for disaster.  And that is part of what makes politics and religion so maddening in this country sometimes.  There is great precedent for this dilemma throughout American history, going all the way back to the Second Great Awakening of the 1800s and even earlier.  After all what were the New Deal, the paranoia of the 1950s, the culture shocks of the 60s and 70s, the modern conservative movement, the so-called culture wars of the past thirty years, and the Tea Party but visceral emotional reactions to changing circumstances in the world at large?  At the same time, the rational skeptics, the intellectuals, and the scientists grow further disconnected from the seething masses, and that vital line of communication begins to break down, making public policy more and more dysfunctional.  We believe anything that feels right to us, especially if the rational evidence is counterintuitive.  To that end, our illiteracy is killing us--figuratively in our dysfunctional social policy, and literally in the case of vaccine denialism and wholistic medicine.

I don't have a ready solution to this.  I only attained the level of understanding that I did because of a very specific set of circumstances.  Mike was emblematic of a very typical kind of American: emotionally adolescent, not quite self-aware enough to recognize the cause of his problems, publicly immature, and much more keen to trust his gut instinct than his intellect regardless of what he may have believed.  At the same time, swinging all the way over to the other side and trusting your thoughts to the exclusion of your emotions like Nick the Magic Unicorn does doesn't work either.  Sure, you may have a more accurate picture of what's going on in a broad sense, but you're still missing the details, and forget about trying to connect and communicate with someone who isn't exactly like you.  It's up to us as individuals to find the balance and discover our own particular formulas for looking at things the way they are, rather than how they feel to us or what we think alone.  This is not a problem endemic to any one gender, subculture, religion, or group.  We need to grow up, and quickly.

You might be wondering now if I'm predicting doom and despair for America as a result of all this.  I am not one of those people.  We humans almost always rise to the occasion when faced with these sorts of dilemmas, and modernity removes most of the restrictions on recovering from such crises.  We have solutions in hand, but putting them into practice is risky and takes what we perceive to be a leap of faith.  I'll end this post with a note of hope, in that as I see it, we're already starting to make that leap.  This is a difficult problem, but not an insurmountable one.

There is a lot more that I want to say on this subject, more than I can fit into one post.  This narrative is far from finished, and so I'll save the rest for another day.  But the next time you're upset about politics, try and stop and think about what you're feeling.  You may not learn anything new and keep right on feeling what you were before.  But you might not.  The chance, however slim, is more than worth it.

Feeling Special

When I get right down to it, all Mike ever wanted was to feel special.  Special is a very, well, special word in our society these days.  From pop songs to self-help books, individual conversations I've had, and my own introspection, it's a very charged subject, and a very emotional one as well.  This guy certainly seems to think so.  I had originally planned this post to talk about Mike and his relationship with partisan talk shows, but as my week has progressed, I find this post has evolved into something a little bit more.  I had a friend link me that particular video, very excited about its message.  There is nothing illegitimate about it, certainly.  However, if self-esteem is limited to feel-good catchphrases and mix-and-match prepackaged identifiers, it is also missing the point.  Self-acceptance without introspection and self-reflection is ultimately meaningless, and potentially dangerous.  So consider this post to be about two things: a post about self-esteem, and a response to how Mike formed his identity.

I dislike any and all philosophies and intellectual movements that were born out of the 1960s for a very specific reason.  In the 1960s, it was very popular to believe that mankind had no inherent nature: that we were all essentially blank slates that life could mold into whatever we wanted.  I believe that that concept is fundamentally flawed.  As any keen observer would note from the past 30 years of our history, mankind does have a very definite innate nature, and that nature often comes into conflict with the civilization we have built.  Certainly, though, it would also be unfair to dismiss this belief outright without first putting it into context.  The previous model had been the other extreme: biological determinism, which gaves rise to eugenics and such horrors as the Holocaust.  The 1950s and early 60s were also the era of Dr. Spock and Carl Rogers, who emphasized nurture over nature, and it was perfectly reasonable to theorize about the other end of the nature/nurture continuum.  The only mistake was to take it too far.  Reality is very seldom one extreme or the other.  It's almost always somewhere in-between or failing that some combination of the two.  But the idea that man is without an inherent nature is also a very dangerous concept -- equally dangerous to the model that it replaced.  Here's why.  If man has no nature, then fact becomes completely subjective.  No one piece of evidence can ever be considered "truth" to the eye of a believer, because there is no basis of measuring it against anything else.  If that's the case, then evidence and proof themselves become meaningless as concepts: it is simply whatever you believe.  And if we humans are good at anything, we'll believe anything we like so long as it validates us and feels good if we get the chance.

Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this.  Despite initially conferring some significant benefits (civil rights, the sexual revolution, women's rights, etc), it also created many of the forms of denialism we now suffer from in our society (science denialism -- specifically climate change denial, vaccine denial, the organic food movement; economic denialism -- modern conservatism's fetishistic obsession with marginal tax rates over all else; and social denialism -- the Evangelical obsession with sexual morality).  And before you accuse me of making this a political argument, this is a problem that cuts across all spheres of political orientation, though I will concede that I believe it is stronger in some than in others.

This makes Mike a fascinating case study.  Mike wore the mantle of "conservative" like a magic cloak: at once a suit of armor and a protective sword with which he could face the world.  Mike however was not a Christian.  Far from it, in fact.  He was an avowed atheist and a self-proclaimed proponent of science.  The science he believed in, however, was completely beholden to the ideology of his conservatism.  Thus, while he blogged on Facebook about Mars rovers and astronomy, homosexuality was a lifestyle choice, and carbon dioxide was not a greenhouse gas.  If humans are good at another thing, it's selectively ignoring the evidence that faces them to support their beliefs.  This is a real problem.  In order to fully explain it, let's turn our attention back to that video at the top of the post.

I am often praised as being "special" or "unique" or "gifted," etc.  However, I try to take all of these labels with a grain of salt.  I did not always, and I wrapped myself up in them just as Mike wore his conservatism.  So let's follow that logic to its conclusion.  I'm special.  All throughout my childhood I was told that I was going to go on and do great things, like cure cancer or invent a quantum computer.  I still might, but sufficed to say, it hasn't happened yet.  But I'm special.  I just have to cure cancer or invent a quantum computer.  I just have to write a book and get it published.  So what happens when I don't?  Mike was very concerned about this, at least as concerned as I have been at various stages in my life.  But what exactly is success?  Can we even quantify it?  Or define it, for that matter?  If it's a subjective measure, one of two things will happen: either we'll meet our goal (however realistic or unrealistic) and then after the initial high wears off we'll go right back to wanting bigger or brighter things.  That is, unless we fail, in which case we feel incredibly disappointed.  Our disappointment either leaves us bitter, or we counter it by coming up with reasons why, all of which seem only to self-validate us and miss the point.  After all, we deserved it.  The logic begins to break down.  The truth of the matter is, there is nothing that dictates something HAS to happen, at least as far as human life is concerned.  We're born, we grow old, we get sick, and we die.  These are the only certainties in life.  We are beholden to a biological body and a brain that was designed to be a hunter-gatherer, and it trips us up.  So you can call yourself special.  What does it get you?  Just a false expectation.

Now you're probably saying to yourself "Oh, now he's being one of those negative 'get over yourselves' cynics."  That would be true if I were then going on to say that that meant we shouldn't have hopes and dreams, and aspire to greatness.  You'll notice I very carefully did not.  I might become world-famous.  I might not.  Disconnecting yourself from the need allows you to want all you desire.  But there's no expectation or subsequent disappointment or letdown.  Things are what they are, for better or worse.  Really whether you're a conservative, a Christian, a hippie, a Buddhist, old, young, one or more or all of these things, the principle is the same.  Self-acceptance is perhaps the most deceptively simple idea mankind ever came up with.  What good is belief if you can't question it?  What good is self-esteem if you don't truly know yourself?  You'll fall right back into those two traps again and again.

I suppose then that this was Mike's truly fatal flaw.  He couldn't question himself.  There is a lot of talk of people being irrational these days.  I don't think that's entirely accurate.  Most people are perfectly rational on a functional level given what they know.  However, many people are either uninformed or worse yet, misinformed.  Logic and reason are only as good as the evidence that supports them.  But neither is the solution to throw logic out the window.  We make the best decisions we can based upon the information available to us.  Humans crave certainty, but there is very little to go around, save for birth, ageing, sickness, and death.  These are not very palatable for most of us.  So we search for deep and concrete meaning everywhere we look.  This produces both tremendous good and tremendous damage.  I can't label it wrong, because the good and the bad are two sides of the same coin.  One could not exist without the other.  So it becomes the central paradox of life: we were meant to search, but the end of the search is the realization and acceptance that there's nothing to search for.  Most people die still desperately searching.  We do great things in the name of this search, and commit terrible crimes.  The search is who we are.  But like with everything, there's an upside and a downside.

So to bring this back to the beginning, are we special?  Well, if we are, so is everyone else.  But if everyone is special, what does special mean, exactly?  We wear our identities as a way of feeling unique, but if everyone is unique, then we're essentially all the same.  I personally prefer to avoid the argument altogether.  I am what I am.  Trying to assign a label or an expectation to myself only hurt me in the end, and hurt a lot of other people too in the process.  You have to search for a very long time to figure that out.  It can't be taught.  So in conclusion, I'd say keep searching.  It's the journey that makes our lives meaningful.  But try to remember how the search ends, and keep it in mind.  Maybe you won't get what you want, but you'll feel better in the end.

Mike the Broken GI Joe

After a week and a half-long absence, I'm back.  I'd put the blog on hold while I finished up my latest manuscript, which commanded my full attention for the past ten to twelve days.  I have a new arc of posts that I'd like to do here, building off what I've written in the past few months.  I'm going to start by talking about someone specific: a friendship that went terribly, terribly wrong.  But this story, and its moral, are bigger than any one post.  To truly do it justice will take an entire week of blogging.  It covers a lot of ground, and brings up a lot of the themes I've written about thus far.  So, without further ado, I give you Mike the Broken GI Joe.

Mike could have been a great man if his life hadn't intervened.  He was attractive, charismatic, intelligent, articulate, and imaginative.  Some of the most tragic people are the ones who seemed to have all the elements of greatness but for a fatal flaw.  In that sense Mike is an incredible tragedy, the story of a would-be genius done in by insecurity and fear.  For if anybody I ever knew embodied fear and a hopeless insecurity of oneself, it would be Mike.  Mike and I were destined to be great friends for a very long time -- ten years -- but that friendship was ultimately doomed.

Back in 2000 and 2001, Mike ran a music review website that specialized in obscure and underground metal -- the kind you don't hear on the radio, and exactly the kind that I had just begun to listen to en masse.  The number of bands he introduced me to that I still listen to even now is almost too big to list: Opeth, Katatonia, Agalloch, Mercenary, Soilwork, Dark Tranquillity, Evergrey, Sentenced, Theory in Practice, to say nothing of the Children of Bodom and In Flames mix CDs we traded a full decade before they became popular.  It was a prodigious time for me: I was seventeen and coming of age, just starting to figure out my identity.  Mike was in many ways a mentor to that identity: an older brother figure I'd lacked.  Mike embodied a certain kind of machismo and masculinity I still struggle with to this day: aggressive, cynical, and wholly unaware of itself.  He was cool in the way that adolescent boys aspire to be.  Here was one of the cools kids from high school taking me under his wing.  I lacked any self-awareness to perceive his flaws.


Mike was a former Marine, an aggressive clubber and womanizer, and an ardent opponent of illegal immigration despite being a quarter Mexican.  He was tough and mean because he perceived himself to be constantly under attack, whether by real or imagined foe alike.  He worried constantly that he was a failure, a weakling, or socially compromised, even though this was almost never reflected in what he said.  It's always the people whose actions are inconsistent with their words that are the most dangerous, and Mike's thoughts always seemed to reflect his words, not his actions.

Even still, our relationship, though sometimes distant and sometimes more intimate, remained steady.  I wanted his approval.  He was a validator: he told me I was all right.  Two things changed, though as the years went on.  The first was me.  The other was him.  It was to be our undoing.

I have written extensively about a certain kind of cynicism I notice in people who feel insecure and threatened.  I know others like this: uncompromising, rigid, perenially disappointed.  In fact, as far as heterosexual male friends go, I seem irresistably attracted to them.  It's at once a strict form of idealism, and the experience of being crushed under the weight of one's beliefs.  Mike was the living embodiment of that type.  I knew what he wanted to be.  He wanted to be an intellectual.  He wanted to feel smart and respected for his intellect.  But during the critical years when that part of one's identity forms, he lacked the discipline or the financial means.  I've seen so many like him.  The failed intellectual is the most dangerous kind of all.  Without a requisite self-awareness, reason always devolves into misinformation and the worst kinds of self-righteousness.  One need only look to many of history's great revolutions (French, Soviet) for exmaples of this kind of thinking put into practice.  One of my favorite authors, the great religion scholar Stephen Prothero, likes to describe this as the following: "The most dangerous game man ever plays is dividing people into the good guys and bad guys and suggesting that the bad guys be punished."

At some point between 2008 and 2010, the weight of Mike's disappiontment began to finally crush him once and for all.  I saw warning signs: frequent links to Glenn Beck and his radio and television shows; conspiracy theories; paranoid delusions of the government and groups of designated "others" out to get him.  But I still needed him to validate me, so I ignored them.  It was, however, also around this time -- 2010 especially -- that I began to change.  I had gained a level of self-awareness and inner peace that I finally felt comfortable expressing myself outwardly to the greater world, for all my virtues and flaws.  And I was not like Mike at all.  There was a time when Mike and I could share that certain cynicism about the world.  But as I've grown older and up, my own cynicism and disappointment seems only to be diminishing, not increasing.  I was never a pessimist.  A realist, yes, but an optimist to my core.  I do genuinely believe that human beings are basically good.  I don't know when I began publicly asserting this, but it marked the beginning of the end for our friendship.  Neither of us are very good at shutting up, and at least until recent months, I wasn't particularly good at letting go of a fight.  Mike made certain assumptions about the way the world worked.  I made others, and we disagreed.  Our clashes grew more intense by the week, and started getting personal.  As I came to realize, Mike lacked the ability to distinguish attacks on his words and actions, and attacks on his person.  I still do believe that at his core he's a genuinely good person, just terribly misguided.  In many ways, people like him are far more dangerous than the truly malicious and evil.

There was no ultimate confrontation between us.  I simply unfriended him from Facebook and removed any means for him to contact me otherwise.  I think that was for the best.  I don't hate him.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I pity him.  He was in many ways pathetic and broken; a failed person.  Understanding Mike has allowed me to understand so much more about the world.  He was in some respect one of the catalysts to my own self-realization.  And for the better part of a decade, he was a good friend to me.  People have called him a douchebag, and he may have been nasty and tone-deaf to others sensitivies, but that doesn't make him a bad person.  He may have been in the process of flaming out when I knew him, but that doesn't mean I can't learn from him.  The lessons his example has taught me will form the next several parts to this story.  For now, though, I think I'll leave it at Mike the person.  Destruction always saddens me, particularly destruction seemingly without a purpose, and Mike is no different.  It didn't have to be this way.  So I mourn, not only for our friendship, but for his own inability to be happy.  As for me, however, the end of my relationship with Mike would come to be the beginning of a realization on my part of just how wonderful the world truly is.  Stay tuned for the sequel tomorrow.