You Can't Change Just the One Part You Don't Like
A marriage counseling session is improv: the plot is developed by the characters in real time. Note that the only skill the therapist needs is curiosity.
Chris: We think our lack of communication is ruining our marriage.
T: {to Stacy} You agree? Does Chris speak for both of you?
Stacy: Um, I guess so.
T: Why are you guessing?
Stacy: Well, Chris thinks so.
T: And Chris may be right but maybe not?
Stacy: Sorta
T: {to Chris} Can you be more specific how a lack of communication is ruining your marriage?
Chris: We don’t talk enough.
T: Is there something specific you think you should be talking about that you don’t talk about?
Chris: Lots of stuff.
T: Can you give me an example?
Chris: Stacy gets taken advantage of at work!
T: How so?
Chris: Everyone at work likes Stacy so much, and why not? Stacy helps others when they run into problems and never asks for anything in return. But Stacy gets passed over for promotions.
T: So everyone likes Stacy so much, but Stacy’s boss doesn’t or doesn’t think Stacy’s work rates promotions?
Chris: Stacy doesn’t even apply for promotions!
T: Oh. Not applying is different from being passed over, isn’t it?
Chris: So, why doesn’t Stacy apply?
T: You’re asking me?
Chris: I’m just exasperated. I’m asking the universe.
T: Why are you asking the universe? Stacy is right here.
Chris: {to Stacy} Why don’t you apply?
Stacy: We’ve been over this a million times. You know why.
T: {raises hand} Do I get to know?
Stacy: {exasperated} Because I don’t want to. I love my job. I love the people I work with. I don’t want that to change.
T: {to Chris} Oooh, you want Stacy to get a promotion because it would bring in more money to your household?
Chris: That’s one reason, but it’s not so much about the money. We don’t really need it. I make three times what Stacy makes, and we’re definitely not hurting. Maybe, after a tax hike, it wouldn’t make much difference.
T: {to both} Then what’s this all about?
Chris: I think Stacy should get fair value for Stacy’s work. If nothing else, it would be good for Stacy’s self esteem.
T: {thinking}
T: Let’s hold off on that for now.
T: {to both} You’ve been married for… {checks the intake form}
Chris and Stacy: Seven years.
T: Who wants to tell me how you met?
Stacy: A friend of a friend introduced us.
T: And how did the budding romance happen?
Chris: I had been doing the dating apps thing and was tired of it. I was getting to the point where I wanted to settle down, but with only the right person.
T: What was wrong with the dating apps thing?
Chris: The dating apps matched interests and preferences, but that didn’t translate to I want to be with this person. It was more, this could be a good friend, if that’s what I was looking for. I had enough friends. I was discouraged, I guess.
Stacy: I had just gone a long time between having more than a date or two with the same person. Just didn’t find anyone who I clicked with, until Chris, that is.
T: You clicked because?
Stacy: It was just comfortable. I could be myself.
Chris: Yeah, same.
T: When did you learn that Stacy made a third of what you made?
Chris: It became obvious, early on. Stacy didn’t want to go to fancy restaurants and lived a more modest lifestyle than I did, in general.
T: Did that bother you then?
Chris: I was so happy to be with someone like Stacy, I didn’t give it a thought. And, as I said, if we were going to be together, I make plenty of money.
T: You hadn’t met anyone before who you thought a lot of and also made a lot of money?
Chris: Yeah, but there were other issues. They weren’t interested in a life mate at the time, or maybe I didn’t find them attractive. It’s not easy to find a life partner fit.
T: {joking} Some find it easy enough that they find a life partner multiple times. {no one laughs} I was joking in my way of agreeing with you.
{as the joke hits them, both Chris and Stacy smile}
So, if I understand you, Stacy was your first or best potential life partner. Do you see that differently, now?
Chris: God no!
T: How would you explain your current dissatisfaction of what brought you to see a marraige counselor?
Chris: I don’t want Stacy to change. I just want Stacy to value what Stacy contributes at work and be promoted.
T: And you don’t see that as Stacy changing?
{quiet}
T: Can you explain in more detail what you fell for in Stacy?
Chris: Stacy was … is just kinder, more thoughtful, and more fun, than anyone else I’ve met. Stacy’s got a bunch of friends who adore Stacy, and I can see why. Stacy is good with kids—I hope we’ll have kids eventually—and is just a great person.
T: Why do you think Stacy doesn’t apply for promotions?
Chris: I think Stacy’s afraid of being turned down—doesn’t want to put Stacy’s accomplishments on the line for potential criticism.
T: And you’ve asked Stacy, and this is what Stacy tells you?
Chris: Stacy just shrugs and says, “I dunno, I guess I like my job.”
T: And you don’t believe Stacy? Why don’t you ask Stacy right now.
Chris: Why don’t you apply for promotions?
Stacy: {quiet for a couple of minutes}
T: What’s keeping you from answering?
Stacy: Chris will think it’s dumb.
T: What makes you think that?
Stacy: Because maybe it is. I dunno. I tell Chris, I like my job, and that doesn’t seem to mean anything to Chris.
T: Maybe if you elaborated.
Stacy: I like the work I do. I like the people I work with. I like my boss, who gives me complete latitude. I like the office building, the coffee vendor down below, the exercise club next door. If I was promoted, I have no idea where I’d have to work, who my boss would be, who my co-workers would be. I would have more responsibility, but not the kind of responsibility that I’d like, which is working independently. I don’t want to supervise subordinates. I’d bring in a little more money, but after the effect on our taxes, it wouldn’t be much more, and as Chris says, we don’t really need it. So if I applied for a promotion merely to satisfy my ego, and got a position I liked a whole lot less, how would that better my life. And if I made my life worse to satisfy Chris, I’d probably be resentful, and how would that make our marriage better?
{quiet}
Chris: I don’t know what I was thinking. I assumed that what I would like for my career would be what you would like for yours. Obviously, that’s not true.
T: And Stacy would be a different person if Stacy got a job Stacy didn’t want. And you may not like that new version as much as the old version.
Chris: {thoughtful} Probably not.
People aren’t fixer-uppers. Be wary of going into a relationship that you believe will be just one change away in your mate that will make the relationship work. You probably won’t be successful in facilitating that change, or if you are, your mate won’t be the same in all the ways you liked beforehand.
Recursion in Therapy
(For the sole purpose of amusing myself, I gave my website a title.)
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates
Get over yourself.
—Thousands of people who aren’t Socrates
Because my wife keeps asking me to define recursion, which is tricky because it’s originally a mathematical concept, then borrowed by computer programmers, and eventually, by scientists.
Recursion is a different way of looking at the feedback loop. An abundance of carbon monoxide is feedback that the body needs to take a fresh breath. A recursive explanation considers that the whole body has been updated to its present state that includes the abundance of carbon monoxide in the lungs. The effect is the same but it’s a description of how the whole body updates rather than just looking at a change in a part of the body. A focus on a single change ignores the changes that are conditioned on taking that breath, in this case the other bodily functions and changes in the consequences that are dependent on oxygen (such as remaining alive). Change in a living being is not a single change while the rest remains exactly as before.
Below, I describe each change in the client as the whole of the client being the feedback for the therapist. The following is a caricature, that is, not based on a particular client and I attempt to give only the flavor of sessions. Think of the collection as an interview with all the “ums” and “you knows" deleted.
T: What brings you here?
C: I’m afraid to go outside.
T: How did you get to my office?
C: I drove.
T: You have a garage where you have your car, and can enter your car without going outside?
C: No, my car is at the curb.
T: So you walked to your car on the street and got in and drove?
C: Yes.
T: So you do go outside on occasion.
C: I guess so.
T: On what other recent occasions have you gone outside?
C: I needed groceries, so I went to the store.
T: There’s no one at home to get the groceries?
C: I live alone.
T: So you go outside when you absolutely have to?
C: I guess so.
T: On what other recent occasions have you had to go outside?
C: I work. I have to go to an office.
T: Like five days a week?
C: Yeah.
T: So, you’re afraid to go outside, but you do go outside?
C: I guess so.
T: You go outside regularly, in fact.
C: Yeah.
T: So you’re afraid, but you face your fears by necessity.
C: Yeah.
The client entered the office as someone who identified as afraid to go outside, but now identifies as afraid to go outside but does so when necessary. He is a slightly different person than when he entered.
T: You live alone. Do you have friends or family who visit you?
C: I don’t have friends. I have a sister who visits about once a month and brings her toddler.
T: You work in an office as what?
C: I’m an accountant.
T: How many people work in your office?
C: Maybe 20 or so. Six CPAs, the rest support staff.
T: Half are men, half are women or…?
C: Umm… probably about right; I don’t count them, offhand.
T: I assume you talk to your fellow workers, as needed.
C: Of course.
T: How about, besides as needed? Like, in the break room where you might say, “Did you watch that comedy about accountants?”
C: Not much [shrug].
T: Because you’re shy?
C: Yeah.
[Quiet for a couple of minutes…]
T: Do you have neighbors?
C: Yeah.
T: You talk to them ever?
C: We nod.
T: They’re shy too, or not friendly?
C: No they’re friendly. Guess they gave up.
T: Trying to strike up a conversation?
C: [shrug]
T: When you say you’re afraid of going outside, is it outside or worried about running into people?
C: Little of both, I guess.
The client now identifies as someone who is afraid of running into other people, perhaps more than being afraid of going outside. He is a slightly different person than when he entered.
T: You say you don’t have friends. Did you have friends when you were younger? In college? Or before that, in school?
C: I had one friend. He moved away when I was eleven.
T: How long was he your friend?
C: About five years.
T: And no friends since. What was it about him that you could be friends with and no one since?
C: Well, I guess we met before being cool was a thing and just liked doing stuff together.
T: Such as?
C: At first, just playing with toys together; mostly just hanging out at each other’s house, having snacks, and playing video games.
T: Before being cool; you didn’t have to pretend to be different from how you felt.
C: Yeah.
Session 2:
T: Anything different for you this week?
C: I waved to my neighbor.
T: Did the neighbor respond?
C: Yeah; took him a few seconds, then he waved back.
C: {laughs} Guess he was surprised.
T: Could be. That’s cool; anything else different this week?
C: I sat in the break room for a few minutes while drinking my coffee.
T: Did anyone come in?
C: Yeah, a couple of people. They said, “Hey.” I said, “Hey.”
Unlike, many therapists I don’t respond to these answers with, “How did that make you feel?” My bent is not to make explicit commentary on feelings because it reinforces focus on oneself, which shy people have more than a sufficient supply. An abundance of focus on oneself is a remnant of adolescence and its accompanying anxiety. Developing a habit of outward focus, curiosity about others, is a better strategy for shy people (and for most people).
Yet, again, the client is a slightly different person from who he was when he first came to see me and after the initial session. He’s no longer someone who’s afraid to go outside. He’s now someone who is experimenting with social interaction.
Session 3:
T: Anything different for you this week?
C: I walked around the block, as you suggested
T: [waiting]
C: I waived at someone mowing the lawn.
T: [waiting]
C: He just looked at me, then went back to his mowing.
T: [waiting]
C: I felt like an idiot.
T: You have a theory about why he didn’t respond to your wave?
C: Only idiots wave to a stranger.
T: Your one theory was he thought you were an idiot for waving at him? Did you have any other theories?
C: What do you mean?
T: Did you have any other theories why he might not have returned your wave with a wave or some such?
C: No.
T: Can you think of any now?
C: Um…
T: Can you think of any theories why he might not have returned your wave with a wave or some such that had nothing to do with you?
C: Oh…um… argument with his wife?
T: Or?
C: Guess there can be a lot of reasons…
T: …that had nothing to do with you.
C: Yeah.
The client entered the office as someone who identified as afraid to go outside, then identified as afraid to go outside but does so when necessary. He entered the latest session, miffed that my suggestion that he walk around the block resulted in him feeling like an idiot when his greeting gesture was ignored. (When you have few interactions with others, each interaction takes on great significance.) However, he’s now a person who is slightly less self conscious. He is a slightly different person than when he entered the first, second, and third sessions. This presentation of a slightly different person is recursive feedback for the therapist.
Session 4:
T: Anything different for you this last week?
C: You always ask me the same thing.
T: I guess I do.
T: [waiting]
T: Is there something you’d like me to ask you instead?
C: I dunno, seems you could be more creative.
T: Maybe I’m not that creative, but I’m open to suggestions.
C: I’ll think about it and let you know.
T: Ok. Does that mean you don’t want to answer my question—“Anything different for you this last week?"—today?
C:
T: Care to explain, or rather not?
C: I don’t want to, at least, not now.
I don’t know why the client wasn’t in the mood to answer my regular opening gambit. Anything I can come up with is an inference that has less of a chance of being accurate and more of a chance of creating something that wasn’t there until I suggested it into existence.
Session 5:
T: [I’m quiet.]
C: [Snickers] You’re not going to ask me what you always ask me? Did I hurt your feelings?
T: [I chuckle] Maybe a little. Mostly, I’m just trying something different.
I think it’s good he knows he can affect me, that he knows he can affect anyone at all. It’s the opposite of realizing the guy who was mowing his lawn was not personally snubbing the client; that the mower has his own life and is not a character in the client’s life. The client is learning he can affect other people, including me.
Session 6:
C: I thought of something different you could ask me.
T: Cool. [waiting]
C: You could ask me whether I did anything new this week.
T: I see, more specific. Did you do anything new this week?
C: I talked to three people in the break room.
T: How was that for you?
C: It was ok.
T: Anything in particular that was ok?
C: Not really, I guess because nothing bad happened.
T: Nothing that made you regret it like with the guy in the yard.
C: Yeah.
Since my early years as a therapist, I’ve had a theory that the client will nudge the therapist in some way, as needed, in the same spirit that the therapist nudges the client. This is mutual recursion. The therapist is also changing in relationship to the client over the sessions. In other words, the relationship between the therapist and client is the same as any other. The one difference is it’s the therapist’s role to be the change agent. Except, because of the mutually recursive feedback, they become each other’s change agent. The client’s change is specific in that he’s becoming someone who can change the therapist to change him.
Session 7:
T: Did you do anything new this week?
C: [Chuckles] You learn fast.
T: I know, right?
C: Not really, new, I would say. More talking to people in the break room.
T: Anyone in particular?
C: Just whoever came in.
T: Tell me about someone who came into the break room who you talked to. What is the person like?
C: [Puzzled] I dunno know. She’s ok, I guess.
T: Is there anyone who you talked to that you know more about? Are they with someone? Have kids, maybe? Do they like music; any particular kind of music? Or sports? Or whatever? Good dressers or causal?
C: Not really; I don’t know those things.
I’m putting out a couple of suggestions: (1) the way to overcome shyness is to show interest in others (as opposed to focus on oneself), and tips how to specifically show interest in others.
I liked that he had the confidence to tease me at the top of the session. We’re not friends; I get paid to talk to him, to help him in how he wants to be helped. However, a relationship is a relationship. It’s not as different from other relationships as many therapists believe. Yes, there’s “projection” in that a therapist may remind you of a significant figure in your life, for example, a mother, father, sibling, etc., and respond at some level as if you were that figure, but that’s true in all relationships. Therapists needn’t make a big fucking deal out of it by bringing up transference.
To reiterate: unless the therapist lacks the behavioral repertoire to respond to the behavior of another, we are mutually responding to each other. Therapy is recursive in that we are constant changing each other and those changes are feedback to each other.
Session 8:
T: Did you do anything new this week?
C: I learned a couple of things about a co-worker.
T: Did you ask a co-worker questions?
C: No; I just listened to when the person was talking to someone else in the break room.
T: Another way of learning about others. You can observe them.
C: Yeah.
Two ways the client is a different person from when he started therapy: he realized he could learn about others without feeling invasive, and he is less attentive to himself and more attentive to others.
Inference, Repertoire, Acceptance
This replaces the last two essays. While Skinner's Folly is much the same, Part 1, Inference is mostly new.
Thanks to Joan and Adam for their help.
The essay is for Denise, because she complains that my writing does not include enough sports examples.
Part 1, Inference
…the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, a bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
—G. Spencer-Brown, from the Laws of Form
B.F. Skinner's behaviorism is now an over-the-hill band playing oldies at state fairs, but in the sixties, his theories climbed to the top of the charts of academic psychology.1 In place of personality theories, such as those from Freud and Jung where inner drives explain behavior, Skinner believed that all human behavior was shaped by reinforcement from behavioral conditioning. Influences were external, not internal.
Skinner's premise and that of the behavioralists that preceded him, that we can't see inside the mind of another, can't be denied. Theories of personality are, (as I keep insisting) just stories, maybe closer to just-so stories, Rudyard Kipling's famous fictional explanations for how characteristics of specific animals came to be. In theories of human behavior, the stories are in the mind of the theorists, not of their subjects. Freud, Jung, and other famous personality theorists were writing "dear diary" and calling their entries, science.2
We can't see inside the mind of another, because if you look inside a brain, you see neurons and connections among the neurons, but the complexity of how that translates to human thought is elusive, and despite future strides in understanding, will always be elusive because of the paradox that the (scientist's) mind is studying the (subject's) mind, with all the limitations inherent in cognitive filters (neurological plus psychological filters equals cognition).3
The scientific study of how we think is akin to Zeno's Paradox of Motion, which is explained simply: no matter how fast you run, each moment you can get only halfway closer to the finish line, and no matter how close that gets you to the finish line, each moment you can still get only halfway closer to the finish line, and so on.
From Wikipedia:
The paradox of neurobiology is that even as we get closer to understanding neurobiology, because a mind is studying the mind, we’ll never get to the finish line. Your neural and psychological cognitive filters don’t get suspended when you receive your research grant. No matter how much science jargon you sprinkle over your thoughts, you can never think or observe outside your story.
This essay attempts to convey that inferences about others are harmful, and the way to get beyond harmful inferences is to expand our behavioral repertoire.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard Feynman
Sid Meier, a famous computer game designer,4 once explained that, because of his development experience, when he plays a computer game, he can't help but see the algorithms—the underlying software processes that create the action. Experts in a domain can envision the below-the-surface complexity of how determinants form the system in action. When doctors press a stethoscope to your chest, they can translate your heartbeat to the status of your cardiovascular system. Domain experts don't have Superman's x-ray vision, but they make do with training and experience.
A computer game, as Sid Meier might explain, is assembled with data and with formulas to define the relationships among the data. An animation layer acts as public relations for the hidden software processes. With either a game controller or a keyboard and mouse, the game player interacts with the animation layer, and if the player isn’t the all-knowing Sid Meier, the player suspends disbelief to regard the continuous animated updates as a simulated world.
The corporate strategist, costumed in dull business attire rather than the gamer’s hoodie, uses the spreadsheet—which is also assembled with data and with formulas to define the relationships among the data—to engage in imaginary play similar to that of the gamer. But unlike game players, corporate strategists interact with their imaginary worlds directly by modifying the data and formulas. These strategists call their spreadsheets "projections" to make them sound businesslike and rational, but they’re just stories, with numbers as the characters and the formulas to define the relationships among the characters. A possible plot might be, “What if we buy another company to incorporate their product or their intellectual property?” Or, “What if we reduce the price of our widget to expand our potential market?” The spreadsheet and game are distinct approaches to a similar goal: to play in a fantasy world without the risks found in the concrete world.5
The spreadsheet creates a simulation that you directly manipulate (by changing data and formulas in the cells) to look at possible outcomes. The game, in contrast, is a pre-made simulation that you indirectly manipulate via the interface to experiment with possible outcomes that are implicit in the design of the data and formulas.
In short, with a spreadsheet, you explore and experiment by changing the parts from within the skin of the virtual world. In a game, you explore and experiment by changing the whole from outside the skin of the virtual world.
The parts and wholes of spreadsheets and games belong to abstraction, but it works similarly in the concrete world. An engineer designs the parts of a car, and then the parts are assembled to test how the whole performs on the road. A football coach selects, conditions, and trains players, plugs them into defined positions, and tests how the whole performs on game days.
Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
— Lewis Carrol, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Without even a hand wave, I made the job of the auto engineer and of the coach sound the same, but that's only accurate from the descriptive distance that ignores the complexity of living creatures.
Much of the auto engineer's task is to keep as much rubber on the road as possible under all circumstances while keeping, for example, a 225-pound passenger comfortable and safe. To that engineer, it doesn't matter if that passenger is Tom Brady or Tom Brady's cousin, but the coach knows the difference. The engineer designs and fits parts together from a technical specification, and after the prototype passes its on-the-road tests, the engineer's work is reduced to fixing glitches discovered when the car is driven by the masses. Those cars already on the road won't be affected if the engineer has a salary dispute with the company. The coach, on the other hand, designs the team, but the parts are from the living where the difference between Tom Brady and Tom Brady's cousin are seven Super Bowl championships.
Unlike car parts, living individuals have their own agenda, and equally physically-gifted athletes have motivations that don't always coincide with that of their coach. There are athletes who outperform their physical attributes, such as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who dominated the NBA in the 1980s, and there are forgettable athletes—I forgot their names already—who underperform their physical attributes. Psychology matters.
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Red Queen wanted to play a game of croquet, but every "part" of the game, including the balls, wickets, and mallets were living creatures with minds of their own, and the game dissolved into pandemonium.6 The frustrated Red Queen finally yelled, "Off with their heads." I'm sure many coaches suppress a similar sentiment.
Neither the view from inside (studying the parts of the nervous system) nor the view from the outside (observing and experimenting with behavior) expose the determinants of human behavior. No one has lived inside another’s mind. And yet, when academics do research in human behavior, which depends on cognitive interpretation, they neglect the level of inference that's required to call the results, “conclusions.” Worse: both amateur psychologists (sports pundits and fans) and behavioral scientists with fancy degrees use circular explanations to stretch inferences with the strength of Arnold Schwarzenegger.7 Brady won seven Super Bowls because of his "will to win." Does that mean on the days he lost three Super Bowls he left his will to win in his other pants? Or more sciency, during his winning Super Bowl games, could scientists have located the will-to-win in a Brady brain MRI?
Inference as influence
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. —Mike Tyson
When I faced a counseling situation that was particularly difficult (for me), I would often create a pre-session elaborate plan for an intervention. That was an interesting exercise but proved to be only that. I would abandon my plan within minutes of the beginning of a session. My clients were authors of their stories. They were not characters in mine.
After my father died, my mother made an offhand remark that divulged that I fell far below their (career) expectations for me. That wasn't news, as they left similar hints throughout my adulthood. I wasn't offended because their motivations for my work differed from mine. But I was offended when she attributed my "failures" to a personality flaw.8 While I'm not short of personality flaws (in fact, I have a personality-flaw subscription), I believe my parents were 180 degrees off in their inference about why I didn’t meet their expectations. If you can be that far off about those you've known all your life, how accurate can you be about anyone else?9
You can't understand someone until you walk a mile in his shoes
—Unknown
Unknown? I wouldn't want to be known for the above aphorism either. It doesn’t work in the concrete because it's unlikely that you’ll wear the same size shoe, but more to its intention, it doesn’t work as a metaphor because all experience is unique to the person. We treat others as characters in our stories because our only reference point is our own minds.
I’ve learned from my daughter and from her infant daughter the influence of subtle interactions with a child. Our daughter has been persistent in nurturing the autonomy of her little one from day one—to do only the absolute minimum of coercion necessary for her daughter’s health and safety. Watching our daughter in just how she changes a diaper or puts Nova in her stroller is a model in patience and non-coercion.
Inference as an affront
Our little granddaughter knows only a few words,10 so when she attempts to convey something beyond those words or her made-up sign language, we play guess-what-she’s-telling-us. Harmless most of the time, but that guessing may contribute to a habit of making inferences about her thought processes–inferences we have no way of checking. But our inferences don't really stem from our granddaughter's undeveloped language faculty. My parents had access to a language-developed me for all but the first couple of years of my life and their (negative) inferences about me went undisturbed.
I’ve begun to wonder whether the inferences we make about our granddaughter can create unspoken expectations? And whether these unspoken expectations may in the future contribute to her being torn between our desires for her and her desires for herself?
When my brother and I were little, my parents would ask what we wished to be when we grew up. At the time, if we were to answer honestly, we would have both said we wished to play for our favorite sports teams, the Chicago Bears or the Chicago Cubs. Instead, we both answered, “doctor.”
Inference and tribalism
Inference about others—which started with, are they friend or foe?—must have predated all relationships for any species to have survived. In ancient times, when a stranger or wild animal might have been a threat, our habit of inference helped keep us alive. Now the habit of inference is a chief contributor to tribalism in the form of racism, religious wars, and other identity-grounded conflicts. When threatened emotionally, our behavior gets funneled towards the well-known fight-or-flight response that can turn into a war of words with strangers over the Internet or even with a loved one in your home.
I can’t solve pernicious tribalism, but I can aspire to better personal behavior. I can become more observant of how my inferences can affect my relationships, and especially, how inferences can affect my grandchildren.
To quote myself from my essay on privacy and democracy:
Bria Bloom (our daughter) recently posted an essay with a description of her witnessing an interaction between a mother and the mother’s (about) ten year-old-daughter. The mother is playing with her daughter’s hair, treating it as if it belonged to a doll while ignoring her daughter’s repeated requests to stop. The daughter and mother both persist until her mother finally stops and calls her daughter a brat.
If you stop reading Bria’s essay at this point, you’d probably think nothing of the incident — children and parents will be children and parents. But if you read further, Bria makes an unexpected connection: the insistent (pardon) manhandling of the daughter, despite the daughter's protests, is inadvertently training the daughter to accept that her body is not her own, that without consent, she should allow her body to be invaded by another’s behavior.
Our progeny, and to a lesser but still significant extent, all those over whom we have a period of authority or influence, will not be (mal)formed by an incident or two, but incidents, as described above, can describe a behavioral pattern of authority figures who are loving and well-meaning but disregard the developing autonomy of their charge.
This is not meant as a criticism, but as an observation of how we well-meaning parents and other life mentors don’t know when to back the hell off. Our two adult children are many-years independent in all important ways, and I still nag, and (I'm sure) they still roll their eyes metaphorically or actually. Ideally, we go from caring for our children’s every need to backing away in just the right increments so they can live without our care. Backing away doesn’t mean not caring, it means recognizing of the maturity of your dependent or no-longer dependent.
In one of the tribal cultures she studied, the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, witnesses a young child learning to close a door. She concludes that in this culture, children are given the minimum of assistance to achieve a task. Contrast that with today’s helicopter parents who never let go.11
The neurobiologist, Humberto Maturana describes an example of how we can nurture confidence:
One winter day, my little five-year-old grandson came to visit me. Due to his very poor vision, he has to wear thick glasses. That day, he was also packed in many clothes to keep him warm. While playing in the garden, he slipped into the deep part of my pool. He went under but was pushed to the surface again because a lot of air had collected in his clothes. He desperately grabbed the pool edge and started to scream for help. I ran to the edge of the pool, pulled him out, and said to him: “Congratulations – you have saved yourself!”
When his sister came to see me in the evening he ran up to her – and told her, beaming with joy and swollen with pride: “I fell in the pool, and I saved myself!” He did not feel guilty, he had developed no fear of the water, and he had not lost his self-confidence.
And you do not react according to your fear or anger, but according to your perception and positive appreciation of the particular situation of the child.12
Bria Bloom, from whom I've learned to be more sensitive to how habitual treatment of children conditions them for a lifetime in unintended ways as well as intended ways, has shown me that it's never too early to consider the subtle influences of personal and institutional childcare (by childcare, I mean all the means of raising children), no matter how well-intentioned.
Part 2, Repertoire
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
—Arthur Ashe13
Repertoire in competition
… the "law of requisite complexity", … holds that, to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts.14
In 1967, Wilson introduced the first metal tennis racket, the T-2000, and with it, Billie Jean King won the U.S. Open Women's title without dropping a set. But the T-2000 was like taming a lion, difficult to control, and Jimmy Connors became the only player to tame it over time. With that racket, Conners was among a handful of players who dominated men’s professional tennis in the mid-70s. Of average size, (five feet, ten inches, and 160 pounds), Conners made the ball explode off the metal head. Conners’s mastery of the T-2000 encouraged him to entrust it as the hammer, where every opponent is just a nail. (I apologize for the hammer cliché, but it fits.)15
In Conners’ era, three of the big four tournaments (All England at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open) were still played on grass, the fastest tennis surface. Unlike other top players of the time, who when playing on grass hit a big serve and raced to the net to volley (hit the ball before it bounced), Conners usually stayed back and relied on his powerful flat ground strokes that darted low over the net.
In 1974, Conners dominated his finals opponent, Ken Rosewell, at the two most prestigious tennis tournaments, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Rosewell was known for his perfect backhand slice, a ball hit with the racket moving downward and under the ball, which would skid on the hard surface on his opponent’s side of the net, rather than a topspin stroke hit upwards on the ball, which bounced high and deep. The Rosewell slice that troubled other players was an easy pitch for Conners to bash deep on his opponent’s side.
The following year, in the Wimbledon finals, Connors was a huge betting favorite over the older veteran Arthur Ashe, but Ashe beat Connors easily. Rather than futilely attempting to match Connors power game, Ashe used Judo as a strategy, using Connors’s aggression against him with geometry as a tactic.
Whereas Rosewell hit his slices deep, Ashe hit shallow slices that landed on the other side closer to the net and in the middle of the court. While Rosewell's deep hits allowed Conners to wind up and bash the return deep, Ashe's shallow slices meant Conners had to hit up to make the ball clear the net, but with Connor’s powerful swing, the ball would sail past the back line. Or, if Conner’s didn't hit it upwards, the ball wouldn't clear the net. Geometry was Ashe’s friend.
In sports, the best players don't always win if they have weaknesses that can be exploited and a limited ability to change behavior that isn't working. Conners and his unique racket formed a partnership that had carried him to dominance as long as his environment (his opponent) was static. In sports, in work, in any skill, and even in relationships, an extraordinary competence works until it doesn't. And then what?
We've all been Jimmy Connors, sharing the court with Arthur Ashe. It could be as teacher, therapist, engineer, negotiator, lawyer, coach, plumber, gardener, or even Bill Murray's character in Caddyshack who takes on and loses to the golf-course gophers. Some who practice these vocations carry a tool box, and some just whack everything with a hammer. The hammer might work most of the time. Connors beat all the other players who carried only a hammer because he had a better hammer. But as much as a wide repertoire matters in the confines of finite rules and boundaries of a game, it matters far more when dealing with challenges of infinite complexity.
Repertoire and submissiveness
There is no evolutionary scenario, where children sitting in chairs for five or more hours a day, much of that time, being talked at, is an obvious learning environment. Children who can't adapt are labeled and drugged—punished for not submitting. While those children are sometimes reported as happier because they can now focus at school, that's easily explained by Stockholm Syndrome, where identifying with your abuser occurs. Why would children not act pleased when those who truly care for them, parents, teachers, and school counselors are pleased.
While learning to parent is sprinkled with cultural guidance and pressure, most learn from their own experience as children. They raise their offspring either the way they were raised or the way they wish they were raised. (The fortunate are the few where the two ways are the same.) No one is to blame; everyone involved—educators, doctors, school counselors, and parents want what's best for the child. But all the generational lessons stem from the culture that's influenced by governmental and commercial institutions where submissiveness is learned. Again, I point to my Privacy — an essential habit of democracy.
Repertoire in relationships
As with Jimmy Conners’s match with Arthur Ashe, a lack of repertoire can lead to an inability to deal with what's currently in front of us, no matter how successful we've been with a strategy in the past. Conners, like all competitive athletes, was not isolated from his mistakes. But counselors and teachers can be ineffective without affecting their careers by blaming their clients and students.
Side Box:
*I conflate teaching and counseling, first, because I believe they're both forms of helping individuals expand their behavioral and life-skills repertoire so they'll have more choices in life, and second, because along with marriage and child-rearing, they're the most intense relationships from which I've had personal experience to learn.
A more respectful and effective path for counselors and instructors is to view working with clients and students as a game, but not a game we can beat, but a game that teaches how to play it. We make our moves and see how the game responds. Rather than attempting to impose our will, we learn from trial and error and change our strategy. To learn to play a game is to widen your repertoire—acquire skills, such as when (apology for another tennis analogy) Björn Borg learned the serve-and-volley skill necessary at the time to win on grass, and won five consecutive Wimbledons.
Sports give us concrete examples, but there are more complex examples in interpersonal interactions.
To quote from myself from Coupling:
Sometimes I don’t sleep well. If my wife says you’ve been grumpy all morning, whether I have or have not been grumpy, I’ll usually become grumpy in response to her spoken observation. If, on the other hand, she says, sorry you didn’t sleep well, I’m likely to say, “I’m okay,” and feel okay. She didn’t make me behave one way or the other. She accessed something within my repertoire. If I were a more even-tempered person, perhaps I wouldn’t have responded with grumpiness, no matter what she said. If she were conscious and desirous of accessing my more pleasant response, she’d have gone with the “sorry you didn’t sleep well.” All behavior stems from one entity accessing a behavior of another entity within that entity’s repertoire.
As I explain further in Coupling, your ability to access a behavior within the repertoire of another depends on your behavioral repertoire. And broadening your interpersonal repertoire is the key to interacting with others with grace.
Good Will Hunting, a film about an angry and resentful genius, Will Hunting, is an illustration of how three people who entered Hunting's life were able to form a relationship with him that expanded his behavioral repertoire: the distinguished math professor who discovered the genius of an MIT janitor, a determined clinical psychologist, and a new girlfriend who fended off Hunting's anger and cynicism until Hunting allowed himself to trust. It was the behavioral repertoire of the three that accessed Hunting's narrow but present behavioral repertoire. Because Hunting had one close friend since childhood, he had some capacity to learn to trust others.
Part 3, Acceptance
Acceptance in action
You can’t read the code you have to do experiments on the system
—John Carmack (graphics programmer for the legendary game, Doom, and often considered the greatest programmer)
Carmack was referring to computer software that has evolved to be so complex that, unlike, for instance, with a James Joyce novel, no one can even pretend to understand the source.
Me:
Compare the intelligence of ChatGPT to a robot vacuum
ChatGPT: Comparing the intelligence of ChatGPT to a robot vacuum is like comparing a library to a broom. ChatGPT, as an AI language model, is designed for understanding and generating human-like text across a wide range of topics. It can comprehend language, generate responses, answer questions, and even engage in conversations on various subjects.
On the other hand, a robot vacuum, while it may possess some level of automation and sensor-based navigation, is primarily designed for a specific task: cleaning floors. It operates based on predefined algorithms and sensor inputs to navigate and clean spaces efficiently.
In terms of cognitive abilities and versatility, ChatGPT far surpasses a robot vacuum. ChatGPT can understand complex language structures, learn from vast amounts of textual data, and generate contextually relevant responses. It can engage in meaningful interactions and adapt its responses based on the input it receives.
While a robot vacuum may excel in its specific task of cleaning floors autonomously, its intelligence is limited to that domain. It lacks the cognitive flexibility and broad knowledge base of ChatGPT, which can handle a much wider range of tasks and interactions.
Me:
Compare ChatGPT to human intelligence
ChatGPT:
Comparing ChatGPT to human intelligence is like comparing a tool to a mind. ChatGPT is a sophisticated language model designed to understand and generate human-like text based on patterns in data it was trained on. It can process and generate responses to text input, answer questions, provide information, and engage in conversations on a wide range of topics.
However, ChatGPT's intelligence is fundamentally different from human intelligence. While it can mimic human-like responses and understand language to a certain extent, it lacks true consciousness, self-awareness, emotions, and the ability to understand context in the same way humans do. ChatGPT operates based on statistical patterns and algorithms, without subjective experiences or understanding of the world.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, is incredibly complex and multifaceted. It involves not only linguistic abilities but also sensory perception, emotions, creativity, problem-solving, social interaction, and many other cognitive skills. Humans have consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to understand abstract concepts and moral reasoning.
In summary, while ChatGPT can simulate aspects of human-like intelligence in its language processing capabilities, it falls far short of the rich and nuanced intelligence exhibited by humans.
Let me translate the above without ChatGPT’s self-serving smugness:
ChatGPT is smart, that is, smart enough to gloss over that, like a robot vacuum, it may excel in its specific task to examine and reconstitute the text it robo-vacuumed from the Internet and excrete answers that may or may not be true.
The best programmer, John Carmack, admits that the software he creates is so complex even he can’t understand it. He can only poke at it to get a reaction. But the software he creates is not nearly as complex as ChatGPT. And ChatGPT software is not nearly as complex as a human being. Why do cognitive psychologists, neurologists, educators, and politicians think that you can know how an individual child learns, a child with her own genetic makeup and developmental experiences? Should we not do experiments on the system, the system being the mind of an individual child. And, given, what I stated above about the limits to a mind studying a mind, should we not remain humble regarding the results of the experiments?
When Arthur Ashe played Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon, he did an experiment. Hypothesis: Connors wins with one dominant tennis skill, his powerful groundstrokes. I can’t compete with his groundstrokes, but if I can neutralize his main weapon, he has nothing to fall back on.
To beat Conners, Ashe needed both his hypothesis to be correct and to have the skills to exploit Connors’ weakness. His hypothesis proved correct and Ashe did have the skill to make his experiment work. If his hypothesis proved incorrect, Ashe needn’t have been locked into a failed plan, he could have attempted alternate experiments, as many as necessary.
Flipping the switch
From Louise Penny's novel, The Brutal Telling:
Agent Morin had changed. His loose-limbed awkward body contorted perfectly for the violin, as though created and designed for this purpose. To play. To produce this music. His eyes were closed and he looked the way Gamache felt. Filled with joy. Rapture even. Such was the power of this music. This instrument. And watching his agent the Chief Inspector suddenly realized what Morin reminded him of. A musical note. The large head and the thin body. He was a walking note, awaiting an instrument. And this was it. The violin might be a masterpiece, but Agent Paul Morin certainly was. After a minute he stopped and the music faded, absorbed by the logs, the books, the tapestries. The people. “That was beautiful,” said Superintendent Brunel. He handed the violin to her. “It’s called ‘Colm Quigley.’ My favorite.” As soon as the violin left his hand he went back to being the gangly, awkward young man. Though never again totally that for the people who had heard him play. “Merci,”
Before Louise Penny (the author excerpted, above) became a best-selling author, she was a radio and TV journalist. She had no training in writing fiction. Her college degree was in media journalism.
Penny met her husband-to-be in her late-thirties and expressed that she'd like to try writing a novel. Her fiancé supported Penny to quit media journalism and give the novel a try.
Penny's enormous latent talent was a good bet to remain latent. She spent five years failing to write an historical novel and even lied to her husband about her (lack of) progress. It wasn’t until she gave up on the historical novel and took up writing the kind of novels she loved to read that she succeeded.
The excerpt above about agent Morin is an example of how the chief detective and hero of Penny's novels, Gamache, plucks nondescript figures who later become major contributors to his crime-solving team. Penny creates characters who, like her, go on to thrive when the inferences of doubters, which even once included herself, are suppressed.
What if I flipped the anecdote regarding the match between Ashe and Conners upside down. What if Ashe was coaching Conners, in an attempt to perturbate growth in Conners's game? Ashe, as with the fictional Gamache would exploit, in a good way, the proclivities—what we call strengths—of his student? Conners obvious strength was his dedication, You don’t rise to his level without it. As his mentor, Ashe would suggest Conners learn to serve and volley on the hard tennis surfaces that reward that strategy. He would encourage Conners to add finesse to his power game. That is, Ashe would work with Conners to expand the repertoire of his tennis tool set.
Though pouring knowledge into students is still a mainstay of modern schooling, it should be obvious it doesn't work. To learn, you must reach from your current level understanding, your scaffold. If a mentor is going to help, it's going to be to help students find their scaffold. Less obvious but just as true, one student's scaffold isn't necessarily every student's scaffold. Mr. Miyagi might have been successful with many of his students teaching muscle memory with his "wax-on, wax-off" gambit,16 17 but what if Daniel did not learn from that and got an F for his failure with Miyagi's movie-famous scaffold? This happens all the time in school, and young people are blamed and shamed (with grades) for their inability to mesh with their instructor's mindset.
You can't change another, you can change only yourself. Arthur Ashe could not change Jimmy Connors. Ashe had no control over Connors's behavior. Ashe could only use his own repertoire—in this case, a repertoire in strategy rather than in athletic tennis skills—to expose Connors’s lack of both a broader strategic or athletic repertoire.
And how you can change yourself comes from your repertoire. You can only run through your repertoire to see if another's repertoire responds in kind with yours. And accepting that you can't change another is not just the root of acceptance, it’s the meaning.
Acceptance of children
The Child is father of the Man
—William Wordsworth
I discussed repertoire in sports competition with Connors and Ashe, and in coupling, with how Joan's different responses to my grumpiness brought out different responses from me. I discussed how the subtle and unsubtle behavior of authorities, individually and in institutions, shape children in ways we regret, such as their submissiveness to those who peddle superficial qualities of attractiveness and peer approval.
The most obvious thing I can say is that people vary and children are people. And yet, we in authority treat children as if they're identical. The important business of childhood is learning—learning to be a good citizen, a (if desired) good mate and provider of child nurturance, a good friend and neighbor, and to learn to be equipped for a vocation suited to one’s skill and wellbeing. Ideally, young people will grow to balance their needs with the needs of those with whom they have an emotional bond along with the needs of their culture. I submit that the key to all of the above is acceptance—acceptance by others to the young person, and the young person learn acceptance of others.
What does acceptance look like? We no longer assume we know what goes inside another. We can’t change another, we can change only ourself. We accept our responsibility to model what we expect from our children (practice what we preach). We park our psychological and cognitive theories outside and if they get towed, maybe it's for the better. We do away with educational approaches that are past their pull dates.
I’m going to add one more level of acceptance that’s maybe hardest to accept: aside from issues of health and safety, we allow our children to be ten percent more stubborn than we are as their parents. If you’re too strict, you’re liable to turn your children into sneaks, and without practice at self-discipline, your children might be rudderless when they leave the nest.
Acceptance of children isn't just about acceptance of children. The lack of encouragement and acceptance to develop our way of being in the world contributes to our eventual vulnerability to pernicious bots on social media, websites devoted to conspiracy theories, authoritarian politicians, and all the ills we blame on outside forces.
If you have any influence on children, directly or indirectly, and I submit that includes nearly everyone, and if you're dissatisfied in the direction of our current culture, maybe reconsider the decision to stay the course.
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Skinner's influence was swept away by sophisticated theories of language acquisition and by the cognitive revolution in psychology. ↩︎
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I'm not discounting the ideas of Freud, Jung, and other famous personality theorists, just their certitude. More annoying, their followers are more strident than the founders. ↩︎
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My preferred sources for these ideas are Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson, Heinz Von Forester, G. Spencer-Brown, Gordon Pask, Karl Pribram, George Miller, Ross Ashby, Margaret Mead, Paul Watzlawick, Norbert Wiener, Kenneth Craik, Kurt Gödel, and Douglas Hofstadter. ↩︎
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Meier is best known for the Civilization series, but he has designed or supervised the design of many games. ↩︎
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I got this idea from the great computer scientist, Alan Kay, who called the personal computer a fantasy amplifier and the spreadsheet a fantasy world. ↩︎
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That Carroll was pointing out that the living can’t be controlled comes from Gregory Bateson. ↩︎
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The most tired example of a circular explanation is old aphorism, [he did it because] boys will be boys. ↩︎
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I don’t think my mother meant harm. I think she lacked the confidence she could hurt my feelings. And I can’t know that she accurately conveyed the thoughts of my father. ↩︎
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Many would rightly state that the closer you are to someone, the more you are motivated to project your story onto them. That just furthers my point about the minefields of inference. ↩︎
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That was written months ago. She knows hundreds of words now and has started to use short sentences. By the time I finish this article, she'll be writing the sequel to Moby Dick (but it will be about a friendly dolphin). ↩︎
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From Wikipedia: “The Chronicle of Higher Education* reported that helicopter parents continued advocating for their adult children at the graduate school level as well, such as advocating for their adult child's admission to law school or business school. ↩︎
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From Being to Doing Humberto R Maturana & Bernhard Pörksen ↩︎
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The quote by the late tennis star was referenced by the computer scientist and journalist, John Naughton. ↩︎
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The Law of Requisite Complexity is both a technical and general concept originated by the psychiatrist and pioneer in cybernetics, W. Ross. Ashby. While cybernetics is commonly associated with computers, it's the study of organic systems (ecosystems are cybernetic), as well as machines that are controlled through feedback mechanisms. I discussed cybernetic systems earlier here. ↩︎
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At the time, every professional player but Connors used a wooden racket (King abandoned the T-2000), which were better at controlling the ball as it hit the strings. (The lone exception was Arthur Ashe who was testing a new type of racket made from aluminum, carbon, and fiberglass.) ↩︎
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Miyagi began his instruction with his teen student, Daniel, by having Daniel perform repetitive tasks such as painting a fence with up and down and side-to-side strokes. When Daniel finally objected, Miyagi showed that the painting motions were karate blocks, now part of Daniel's muscle memory. ↩︎
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Traditional training uses kata forms to teach muscle memory, but kata training would have killed the drama and made for just another instruction video. ↩︎
Hard Fun
The phrase “pleasure of writing” makes me pause. At this very moment, writing is not altogether pleasurable. The ticking of the clock telling me that the deadline is coming close frustrates me. I am stinging from the pain of having to throw out a whole paragraph because “it wasn’t going to work” even though it had a phrase with which I had fallen in love. So maybe “pleasure” isn’t quite the right word. Nor is “fun.” We need a better word for it and maybe that first grader in San Jose provided the best one. We are talking here about a special kind of fun … “hard fun."
—Seymour Papert (founder of the AI, MIT lab and researcher in cognition)
A girl is growing up in a rural American town in the middle of the twentieth century. She hits her teens and begins to notice that some of her classmates are wearing cooler dresses than can be found in the local department store or the Sears Catalog. She asks around and learns these girls are sewing their own dresses.
While the girls started on mother’s machine, most eventually save for or receive a gift of the trendy model that is simpler and cheaper, and they send away for catalogs of sewing patterns and cotton and wool fabrics. The girls begin to share patterns and catalogs and start a school club to talk about their hobby.
The local sewing enthusiasts discover a national club that’s sponsored by the manufacturer of the now ubiquitous machine. The club creates contests for best-sewn products and for sewing patterns invented by the girls. As amateur pattern design takes off, budding entrepreneurs launch commercial journals targeted to the hobbyists.
Manufacturers notice the personal sewing boom and launch both more expensive and cheaper machines, but they sell poorly because the sewing hobby is identified with the machine that launched the boom. While this low-to-medium priced machine eventually breaks down, they’re simple to fix and third-party businesses jump in to create fix-it manuals and spare parts. The sewing machines are kept alive well past the time the engineers who developed them would have guessed. Newer, more expensive machines are undoubtedly superior—more sophisticated, more robust—and eventually become favorites of those who start their own pattern-design business, but the masses stay loyal to their first machines because they alone retain the most important element—the community of creativity.
The oldest and geekiest of readers might realize that the hobbyist sewing boom I describe is a parable of the Apple II computer and the community that formed around it. (I know nothing about sewing.) First issued in 1977, Apple continued the model until late 1993, nearly a decade after the far more sophisticated Apple Macintosh, its intended replacement, was introduced and a dozen years after the more expensive and business-oriented IBM PC, the ancestor of the modern Windows computer, was released.
Why did the Apple II persist despite its inferior engineering and its own company’s attempts to lay it to rest in favor of the Mac? Because the Apple II became the foundation for the greatest modern example of creating a community of creativity and a community of learning. Let me summarize the points made in the sewing example: while the technology came from the top, the manufacturers,1 the community came from the bottom, the enthusiastic Apple II users. As they went on to design games and design business and home software, many of these early users became the driving force of modern personal computing. The hobby also hatched journalists, publishers, hardware add-on designers, and authors of how-to books and journals.2
Meow
My son and his younger sister were homeschooled,3 but when they hit ages eleven and seven, the “homeschool resource center” run by the school system opened.4 Our daughter, at the time our socially interested child, engaged enthusiastically in learning Spanish and American Sign Language and more enthusiastically in the musical theatre class.
Musical theatre became fashionable in the 90s, even hatching hit TV shows and movies. High schools had sponsored competitions, and parents of means got involved by supplementing the costs of production.
At the homeschool resource center, aside from the contracted theatre instructor, the kids were on their own. When they decided to put on the then-famous musical, Cats, they knew their involvement would have to go beyond rehearsing and performing. They constructed the sets and the complex feline costumes (no doubt sewed on the machines from the parable above). Not only did they pull it off, they became finalists in the school musical competition chosen by Seattle’s professional Fifth Avenue Theatre, going against schools with professionally made sets and costumes. The homeschoolers didn’t win, but they carried the satisfaction that the performance was all their doing.
My communities
I’m an introvert, not part of a religious community, rarely felt a kinship with fellow counselors, and know no one who shares my intellectual interests. My idea of a tribe is rooting for the Seahawks. Since I began at age forty-eight, any community engagement I’ve had has been in a martial arts dojo.
I believe a good martial arts dojo can be a model for a learning community, and all it takes to create one are instructors (the sensei) who have devotion to their art and care for their students. I’ve been lucky to find that three times.
Why a martial arts dojo? First, while the instructor says do it like this, any instructor with ten minutes of experience means do it like this according to your physical and mental ability; they don’t expect every student to move with equal grace. Second, martial arts sensei like to tell as much as the next teacher, but as they’re teaching a kinesthetic skill, their focus is on show, that is, modeling, which is more effective for all instruction. Third, while there is competition—explicit ranking, and in sport martial arts, organized competition—the tacit if not always explicit message is you’re competing against only yourself. In other words, you’re training to be better than you were the day before. Fourth, martial arts creates a we’ve-got-each-other’s-back camaraderie. Despite what you believe from TV and movie dramas, the most dangerous aspect of a well-run martial arts school is the car trip to the dojo. Still, even if restrained, martial arts is physical combat, so there’s always potential for injury. And you can learn only if you consistently face what my Aikido sensei called a “sincere attack.” That potential for causing injury and for assisting others to learn makes you aware of your responsibility to your fellow students. Aware students help others and don’t hurt others.
Last, martial arts tacitly gives responsibility for students to understand and fill the holes in their learning. While instructors can point to problems, I reach back to the limitations of human communication and cognition to point out there’s no way instruction can be fielded completely. I think that’s a good thing. Individual understanding evolves art and skill.
Hard fun
Seymour Papert was the cofounder at MIT of the first official artificial intelligence (AI) lab. Unlike the modern tech-bro culture, which is absorbed with self-interest, early AI culture was dedicated to learning, inventing, and sharing. To that end, Papert studied with the pioneering cognitive psychologist, Jean Piaget, for five years because he wished to contribute to the education of young children. He and fellow computer scientists designed a children’s version of the dominant AI computer language, Logo, and its accompanying “object to think with,” a turtle-shaped tethered mechanical robot that Logo could control.
The goal was to start a child as young as six to use turtle graphics to learn geometry. To begin, they’d walk the child through the steps the mechanical turtle would take to draw a square:
forward 10 (paces)
right 90 (degrees)
`forward 10 `
`right 90`
`forward 10`
`right 90
`forward 10`
`right 90
The child would then type on the computer keyboard to give the same instructions to the mechanical turtle. The child was introduced to abstraction, the domain of math.
With the invention of personal computers, a version of Logo with virtual turtles that drew lines on the screen soon made their way to the Apple II and later personal computers.5
Using Logo, young children were among the first to experience computer graphics, but soon advanced graphics would make their way to video and computer games.6 Papert never had children, but he spent significant time with his nieces and nephews and watched them play video games on consoles, which were introduced after he created Logo. He realized, if you look past the surface of cute animation, the games are difficult puzzles, and he was impressed that the reward for beating a level was a more difficult level. Papert concluded that the attraction of these games was not because they were frivolous fun, as we old folks may have believed, but “hard fun,” intellectual challenges that exceeded the dull lessons of the classroom.7 8
Seymour Papert was prescient in recognizing computer games as hard fun. While there was a time the rightful descendant of the Apple II learning community was amateur web site development, that has become too complex for hobbyists. Games have become increasingly difficult as well but are still accessible to the determined, and users turn to forums, wikis (a Wikipedia for a single game), messaging platforms, and YouTube and other video channels, to gather playing advice. The most ambitious add their own content to games (called “modding”)—harder hard fun.
I’ve described various forms of learning communities and there are countless others: book clubs, writing groups, music jams, collecting, rock climbing, fan fiction, pet interests, role-playing, and many I’ve never heard of. What they have in common is the pursuit of hard fun, participation from members of various levels of competence, and sharing and mentoring. Contrast that with an increasingly common community, the tribe.
Learning communities versus tribalism
What largely separates learning communities from those defined by ethnicity, politics, religion, nationality, and the like is that the identity within the learning community is earned and the dominant part of that earning is what you give away as a mentor. Learning communities are also inclusive: anyone who shares the interest is welcome. Contrast with communities that are based solely on my tribe is better than your tribe or my tribe hates your tribe. Which community would you prefer to be part of, a community based on hard feelings or a community based on hard fun?
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Unlike the sewing machine, the Apple II began (in the form of the Apple I) as a pure hobbyist invention by Steve Wozniak. ↩︎
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Unfortunately, unlike the mythical sewing hobby, which could even save money when the girls made their clothes, the Apple II, initially, was expensive (I couldn’t afford one) and got its initial sales boost from businesses because it had the first personal computer spreadsheet. Cheaper computers that came along to fill the low-price gap became primarily game machines because they didn’t have the creative community of the Apple II. Ideally, bottom-up passions would come at bottom-up prices, that is, not become another path for socio-economic divide. ↩︎
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I use the term “homeschool” for convenience; home-mentored is more accurate. We required a minimum of book learning, pointed out various activities they might like, and otherwise left them alone. Our son did the so-called required work. Our daughter required that we leave her alone. ↩︎
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The school district created the resource center so they could count the users as regular students for which they got funded. ↩︎
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My sole reason for buying my first computer (at the age of 37) was its potential as a learning device for children and adults. I was not even aware of word processors or spreadsheets. My chief interest in computers is still as a learning device. ↩︎
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Often used interchangeably, video games are played on dedicated game consoles, such as the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. Computer games are played on general purpose computers, such as the Windows PC or Apple Macintosh. ↩︎
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I had a similar experience: During the educational software boom in the late 80s and early 90s, I published a journal where I wrote lengthy reviews comparing the software in each category, for example, math or biology. Out of dozens of programs, I found two that were worth using. I took a look at games and discovered they were far better learning environments than “educational software.” Fortunately, educational software is dead. ↩︎
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Those who don’t play games may believe most gamers are still ten-year–old boys. On the contrary, children who grew up with games are still playing them decades later, so the average age of a gamer is mid-thirties. And though they tend to play different genres, the percentage of females who play games is equal to that of males. ↩︎
Communication and Its Discontents, Coupling
Despite how unappealing it would be to the average person, there’s an advantage to earning your living doing colonoscopies: other than in politics and social media, assholes don’t talk. Another choice for healthcare professionals who wish to avoid conversation is dentistry. It’s hard to talk with instruments camping in your oral opinion factory. But once in a while, bedside manner and all that, your dentist will ask a question, and they’ll pretend to listen for moments before they cram another instrument in your mouth. My new Portland dentist had that moment and asked the classic, “What do you do?”
“I’m retired; I was a marriage counselor.”
“What’s the secret to a lasting marriage?”
“Most marriage counselors will say, ‘communication and understanding,’ but that’s bullshit. It’s acceptance.”
The dentist shoves an instrument into my mouth.
The dentist’s assistant seems to like my answer (but he’s about twelve years old and unmarried): “Yeah, compassion.”
Good try, but by acceptance, I mean neither compassion nor how it may sound, resignation. I mean, it’s the only way long-term relationships—any long-term relationship—can sustain.
As I’ve stated previously, communication, as most understand it, is either biologically impossible (as professed by neuroscientist Humberto Maturana and those influenced by his work) or psychologically and cognitively unreliable (as supported by numerous theories in psychology and cognition). In either case, this means it’s the receiver, not the sender who determines the meaning of a message. Yet, since the sixties, better communication has been the Holy Grail of reducing conflict between spouses, parents and their children, business associates, and more currently, the polarized extremes in modern domestic politics.
How communication became the solution to conflict
In the first half of the twentieth century, pioneering psychotherapist Sigmund Freud and his followers focused on treating emotional problems that (he believed) stemmed from cultural sexual repression during the Victorian era. In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, neuroses developed from internal conflicts—animal instincts (the id) versus culture (the super-ego) in an intra-psychic cage match, with the ego as the referee.
Several cultural changes shrunk Freud’s influence: the birth control pill and subsequent relaxation of cultural sexual repression; the leap in both propaganda used in war, and in advertising, that led to the study of communication to deceive;1 the evolution of marriage; and psychotherapy moving from a focus on individuals in internal conflict to individuals in relational conflict.
If the fifties in America was the “silent generation,” the sixties was the generation that would not stop expressing itself. Articles about psychology and relationships escaped from magazines targeted at women to newspapers and magazines meant for all. A new magazine, Psychology Today, dispensed relationships research in popular language.
Interest in communication began to generate scientific research. The social scientist Gregory Bateson attended the 40s–50s Macy conferences on cybernetics (“control and communication in the animal and machine”) and related fields—subjects previously tied to either the interests of war or to basic brain research.
After the conferences, Bateson received a grant to study communication. A trained anthropologist, Bateson hired researchers for his team to study the utterances of schizophrenics in the Veterans Hospital of Palo Alto. When Bateson’s grant ended after ten years, he went on to study communication elsewhere, but his team and consultants stayed in Palo Alto to found the Mental Research Institute (MRI), and MRI became the most influential and prestigious center to train therapists to deal with relationship issues. With books, conferences, and trainings, their ideas spread internationally, and the problem of communication among family members became the central theme of psychotherapy. In retrospect, this change in emphasis in psychotherapy was inevitable. In Western cultures, marriage had evolved from practical alliances of tribal, national, or household to romantic, and eventually, to best friend. Marriages, once dictatorships, became partnerships, and partnerships need agreements, (largely implicit in marriage), and agreements need communication.
As if marriage didn’t have enough cultural responsibility—its stated and unstated rules and regulations for the right kind of coupling—in modern Western culture, marriage has become a prototype for all types of relationships, even business. We’re supposed to relate to everyone as if we’re raising children together.
If not communication, what?
My articles have laid down my belief that because all realities are local to individuals, all incoming signals to our mind must get past border crossing agents so suspicious that little intended meaning is allowed through. Even your most devoted listener isn’t going to understand you. The good news is, regardless, some of us get along well enough to be friends, relatives on good terms, and intimate companions. The bad news is we believe we should get the good stuff in relationships without the conflicts, and that if we only communicated better, we’d understand each other better, and the conflicts could be tossed into the recycling bin and remanufactured into fluffy stuffed animals and Disney animated movies.
Marriage counseling2
It’s common wisdom that generals are always fighting the last war. Nowhere was this better illustrated than when the Polish Calvary—that’s right, soldiers riding horses—attempted to beat back Hitler’s tanks in 1939.3 Not many years after the end of World War II, pioneering marriage and family therapists were still riding their theories designed to treat individuals into the mire of marriage and family therapy. Previously, because adult relationship problems were viewed as the manifestation of neuroses based in childhood,4 a couple asking for marital help would have been referred to separate individual psychotherapists. Marriage counseling was primarily the domain of the church minister. That era was not far in the rearview mirror when I began my graduate internship in family therapy. I was at best on my own, or worse, doing battle with my supervisors.
My first experience in private practice (that is, working under my own license) was with a man and a woman, unmarried but living together. I don’t recall much about the counseling other than the sessions were directionless. My lack of training in marriage counseling meant I had no agenda. The three of us talked and after several months, the members of the couple felt resolved, set a wedding date, and we ended the sessions.
The expression goes, fish don’t know they live in water. They also don’t know when their water is polluted and that their health is deteriorating. To couples living in discontent, the discontent pollutes everything in their relationship, conscious or not. By talking together, it’s not hard to remind those who love each other but are going through a bad patch that they still love each other. Any reasonably competent counselor can tip the conversation towards bringing out what got them together in the first place. Eventually, they’re swimming in the reminder of what they like in each other.
Gettin’ some education
Over the next few years, I read nearly every book that came out about marriage and family therapy. I experimented with the ideas, implemented some well and some badly, retained the ones that worked and discarded the ones that didn’t. You’d think after my book knowledge and later experience, I’d speak with authority on how couple counseling works and doesn’t work. Limited authority, anyway. But I don’t. I do, however, have some ideas about how couples work, or don’t, and who benefits from couple counseling and who doesn’t (at least with an unexceptional marriage counselor as I am)5.
The following is likely to be disbelieved by many if not most marriage counselors. They can write their own articles.
I note three types of couples who make it to counseling. 6 The first two come with one or both of them immunized against success in marriage counseling. First, when one of the members has already left the marriage but is coming to sessions to demonstrate that he or she tried. I find it cruel to extend these sessions beyond when the soon-to-be-left partner realizes that he or she is the only one trying to better their relationship. Second, when the members of the couple don’t like each other (let alone love each other) but don’t want to be alone. They are the type of couple most likely to end the sessions, quickly. If they stayed, they’d have to face that they don’t want to be together. Last, the couple who love each other but encounter problems when they must adapt to change, typically around job, money, children, and their living situation.
I believe it is nearly impossible for a counselor to have success extending a marriage with the first two types of couples, and the futility of the process is quickly discovered.7 On the other hand, it takes practiced incompetence to not help the third type of couple.
Whether consciously or subconsciously, experts can’t observe behavior in their domain of expertise without getting drawn in. What I observe is that couples who’ve managed to stay together for decades are not particularly good at listening to or understanding each other, and I can’t assign the success I had in marriage counseling to improvement in what we refer to as communication.
Doc Martin
(Spoiler alerts ahead) What I believe creates a lasting coupling is best illustrated by the TV series, Doc Martin. Martin Ellingham is a noted London surgeon who moves to a small fishing village to work as a general practitioner. During the series' ten seasons, his personality ranges from brusque and aloof to Asberger’s8. (Either the show’s writers don’t know the difference or I don’t.) On the other hand, he’s a brilliant physician who becomes full-on heroic and caring during medical emergencies.
Into the seasons, despite Martin’s best efforts to subvert his happiness and his romance with his wife-to-be, Louisa, marriage and child come to the couple, but not for long as Martin continues to be Martin. His insensitivities grate on Louisa, and she becomes fed up and leaves him. Martin and Louisa make a final attempt to rescue their marriage with sessions with a so-called expert psychotherapist, but the counseling fails miserably.9
(Spoiler alerts ahead, really!) The last episode of the seventh Doc Martin season has the most illustrative moment of what defines a successful coupling. Martin and Louisa, are currently separated. Martin is held under gunpoint on a rural farm because a patient’s wife demands Martin come up with a miraculous cure for her terminally ill husband. After the bumbling sheriff fails, Louisa rescues Martin. In the final scene, they’re sitting and talking on a hilltop on the farm. Louisa realizes she wants to be with Martin regardless of his insensitivities.
Acceptance
You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone. —Joni Mitchell
Louisa apparently concludes that (in my words) coupling is not about communication and understanding; it’s about acceptance, acceptance of differences, and even differences in how love and caring are expressed. Because our cognitive system can’t grasp another’s version of reality, no matter how much we care for that person, we can’t communicate; we can’t understand. What we can do is accept the differences between ourselves and others.
In sessions with couples, I believe the counselor’s main role is to maintain harmony but leave the lyrics to the couple.10 In the case of the marriage counseling described above, I did not observe increased communication or increased understanding between the partners. I observed a process—being together in words and body language that created acceptance.
(Groom’s name), do you take (Bride’s name) to be your wedded wife, to live together in marriage? Do you promise to love her, comfort her, honor and keep her for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, and forsaking all others, be faithful only to her, for as long as you both shall live?
Do you take this person you found on the Tinder dating app to be your wedded spouse, to live together in marriage (in a four-bedroom house and three-car garage)? Do you promise to love this person, comfort this person, honor and keep this person for better or worse, for richer or poorer, (but define “poorer”) in sickness and health (as long as we meditate together), and forsaking all others, be faithful only to each other (except we each get a free one), until you realize you don’t get just the parts you like about your spouse?
The first version is the traditional marriage vow from the groom side’s from the Book of Common Prayer. The second version is from the book How to Do Your Own Divorce or Find the Right Lawyer.11 The second version is because those Disney movies you watched as a kid never show the after-the-wedding Prince throwing his dirty underwear on the floor and spending the weekend drinking beer and watching TV.
The difference between the two vows: in the second one, you’re unhappy that you don’t get just the parts you like about your spouse. In the first, you’re making a vow of acceptance. Five centuries ago, someone had coupling right.
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Propaganda was a big part of pre-World War II and WWII itself and was major ammunition in the Cold War between the Western allies and the Soviet Union block. Advertising took off, care of Edward Bernays who exploited his knowledge of subconscious processes, thanks to his Uncle Sigmund Freud (his mother was Freud’s sister). ↩︎
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I use “marriage” as shorthand for any category of intimate couples. ↩︎
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Despite the myth, the Polish Calvary did not attack the tanks with swords, but they might as well have. ↩︎
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While that may be true, it doesn’t mean that a marital rift will be healed from dealing with individual issues. ↩︎
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My comfort zone is one-on-one. Marriage and family therapy is conducting and refereeing. I don’t like conducting or refereeing. ↩︎
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I’m not referring to troubled couples who don’t come to counseling. For various reasons, usually trust-related from their history, many individuals have one foot out the door during the entire relationship. ↩︎
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The main clues for one or both not being interested in making the marriage work are either petty arguments (with me or their partner) about the details of homework I assign or failing to do the homework at all. “When we were about to start the homework, the phone range.” ↩︎
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Asperger’s Syndrome is out of use in favor of Autism, which is a category too broad without going into clinical detail. ↩︎
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I wrote my version of what should have happened. Nevertheless, the failure of the counseling was necessary for the plot. ↩︎
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How the harmony is maintained depends on the approach of each therapist. I’m not teaching couple counseling here. ↩︎
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There are similar books, but I invented that one.# Communication and Its Discontents, Part 1, Coupling ↩︎
Mastery
Can I move? I’m better when I move.
Last year, my wife and I moved from Edmonds, Washington to Portland, Oregon to help with our newborn grandchild. At least that’s the explanation I put out. The real reason? I was scared to go out at night in Edmonds. I was afraid I’d run into the notorious gangs of dentists, lawyers, accountants, and the most chilling of all, the “lords of Edmonds mean streets,” the financial advisors. How else can I explain my continued practice in martial arts that I took up at age forty-eight? Yet, even with martial arts training,1 I was still intimidated by the ravenous hoards pushing their way to an eighty-dollar filet mignon. Hence: to Portland.
In truth, statistically, the most dangerous thing in my life would become the drive to the dojo, but after watching a documentary on the grace of Aikido,2 I wanted some of that. Unlike the Sundance Kid, I’m not better when I move, but I wished to become better when I move. Seven years in Aikido ended when the dojo closed. Two years in karate ended when my daughter could drive herself to the dojo. For the last fifteen years, my wife and I have pursued the more gentle-on-the body art of Tai Chi.
Speed thrills
“Oh, my-my, what a sensation”
—the Beach Boys
In a nearby Portland park, we initiated our then ten-month-old granddaughter into a new sensation. Nana (Joan) sits Nova on her lap, arranges the infant’s extremities for safety, and wheeee down the park slide. The one-second adventure is Nova’s first thrill of speed.
At my age of ten (years, not months), we visited the relatives we left behind in Chicago. My family took our first ride on a commercial jet. The acceleration on takeoff was so thrilling that for years I anticipated another jet ride for just those seconds.
As thrilling as those rides are for Nova and were for me, it’s more fun when you’re the driver not the passenger, that is, when you get to control the speed that gives you thrills, such as when I learned to ski (badly), and when I pretended I was a race-car driver in the sports cars I owned in my early adulthood.
In infancy, our caretakers tend to our needs and fulfill our desires. But they fulfill our desires only as they see fit. Nova’s smile informs us that she likes the ride down the slide. Her kicking and screaming as we put her back in her stroller informs us she’s displeased that she has no control over when the sliding fun ends.
When Nova gets a little older, she’ll get to go down the slide by herself, and she’ll get to speed down the sidewalk on her trike. The older she gets, the more control she’ll have over speed and other sensuous thrills. Perhaps, she’ll take up a team sport such as soccer or an individual sport such as her big brother’s rock climbing or her mother’s martial arts.
Calvin and Hobbs
When our kids were ready for chapter books, Joan and I created our own bedtime-story habits. I read our son adult books and his younger sister, young-adult books. Joan read our daughter newspaper comics and our son, from Calvin and Hobbs books.3
One day, we found Adam sitting on the couch reading through a Calvin and Hobbs book on his own. He had realized he had learned to read by following the words in the book. Could he read, or did he just memorize the words in the one book? The answer came when he picked up the nearest novel in sight and began to read Jurassic Park.
The yearning for “mastery,” and by that, I mean attaining and maintaining a skill that brings independence4 starts at the breast (or substitute)—the umbilical cord has been severed, and I’m hungry—and lasts throughout life.
We associate learning with school, and school with children, and we associate learning with practical needs such as reading. But most learning has no obvious utility, and we could go about our lives just fine without. To pay the bills, we could learn law or plumbing and spend the rest of our time watching Netflix. If I cared to acquire only practical knowledge, I’d forget training in Tai Chi and study the manual that came with our new computer disguised as a washing machine.5
But there’s no difference between baby Nova and me. She didn’t recently learn to walk because she foresaw soccer in her future, and I don’t train in martial arts for self-defense or for the health advantages promoted in the Harvard Medical Journal. We both pursue mastery for its own sake because we’re humans and that’s how our species evolved.
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Despite the years of training, I’m not good at martial arts, but I think I could hold my own against the older accountants and financial advisors. ↩︎
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I saw the documentary seventeen years before I started to train in Aikido but my intention persisted. ↩︎
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When she learned to read, our daughter read the Calvin and Hobbs books on her own. ↩︎
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Mastery is used in two ways: competence, which is how I’m using it, and excellence. ↩︎
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Seriously, I doubt a Google engineer could understand the Miele manual. ↩︎
Learning-Introduction
On a flight, seated behind a teenage girl, a novelist was having a get-off-my-lawn moment. With the click sound enabled, the girl tapped away on her iPhone. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap… The nonstop cadence of the taps meant she could not be texting back and forth with friends. As the girl tapped away the entire flight, the novelist’s irritation dissolved into admiration and, finally, revelation. The girl was writing a novel.
I enjoy reading about how authors write and their opinions on the correct creative process. There’s no end of advice on how it should be done, which varies from “write every single day at the same time in a quiet space set up for only writing” to “write when the baby’s napping” or “take advantage of when you’re standing in line at Starbucks.” Or, if you’re on a jet at cruising altitude, stuffed into a tiny seat with no leg room, thumb tap on your iPhone.
Outlines and Notecards
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
—Mark Twain
I have a hunch my “dumbbell English” 1 class teachers felt the same way about me as Twain felt about the Parisians. Two attempts to pass a remedial English class at my community college resulted in grade F.
The goal of the class was to teach essay writing. We were instructed to begin our essay by making an outline and to take notes from our research on lined notecards. To produce the essay, we were to create an outline on which our notes would be distributed and transformed into prose. Voila (I know one more French word than Mark Twain did)—your essay.
Does anyone write this way? When I attempted an outline, I lasted as long as I would in the ring against Mike Tyson in his prime (or even on his deathbed). In retrospect, I believe most students created the outline after they wrote their essays, but at the time, I blamed myself for my failure.
Long motivated to become a licensed counselor, but aware of my academic deficits, I negotiated an academic path so I had to produce just two essays to get a master’s in clinical psychology. My undergrad degree was in applied art (which I’m terrible at), and my master’s was ninety-percent counseling internships with the “classroom” devoted to supervision. The downside? My writing woes plagued me well beyond those remedial English classes. My insecurities about writing contributed to my failure to complete my PhD.
My academic days ended long ago. In the meantime, computers and word processors came along to minimize my deficiencies in organizing and maximize my enjoyment of thinking on a screen and illustrating those thoughts with wordplay.
I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
—Flannery O’Connor
When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen.
—Haruki Murakami
So much for the expert writing advice to “have a plan.” My teachers’ instructions on how to write an essay presumed there was one best way (or, perhaps, just one way, as we were given no alternatives) to approach a writing project. And these instructions assumed that my brain works the same as theirs. There has to be a better way to nurture the abilities of a varied group of learners. Flannery O’Connor wrote before there were word processors, but some of us need more help.
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Those classes were colloquially known as “dumbbell English,” and I failed my first two attempts. Four years later, at a different community college, I finally passed English 1A, so I could enter my junior college year. ↩︎
The Psychotherapy of Doc Martin, by Dr. Rachel Timoney
(This is a form of fan fiction, intended solely for educational purposes, that combines events from the Doc Martin TV show, Season 7, with stuff I make up.)
Dr. Rachel Timoney was looking forward to her first session with the eminent Dr. Martin Ellingham. She didn’t know much about him, apart from he was rumored to have abruptly resigned his prestigious position as head of vascular medicine at Imperial College, London. Chance would bring them together for an initial psychotherapy session. Dr. Ellingham (Doc Martin, to the locals) had taken a position in Portwenn, an isolated fishing village on the Celtic Sea. And she was spending a few months in Portwenn, writing and seeing a few patients.
Rachel Timoney was once considered a prodigy in her field. Nine years ago, at age 23, she was granted a doctorate in psychotherapeutic theory. Her research had gained a moderate bit of fame, even getting into a few newspapers at the time. Even she knew that being highly regarded as a psychotherapy expert at age 23 would be beyond stupid. Mathematicians do breakthrough work at 23. Physicists do breakthrough work at 23. Even those in the arts do breakthrough work at 23. Counselors do not do breakthrough work at 23. There are certain things you can learn through experience, only, and if anything, those gifted in academia have typically sacrificed life experiences to excel in studies. There’s an age between infancy and senility that someone can become a good therapist, and it ain’t 23.
In the years following receiving her doctorate, Timoney has worked on living up to her reputation. She’s done well, but from what she knew of him, she believed that having Dr. Martin Ellingham in therapy would be a novel challenge. It proved to be that.
Doc Martin
Seconds after he sits for their initial session, Martin informs Timoney that he expects she’d diagnose him as having attachment disorder. (Timoney notes silently that Martin describes himself as if he were a third party.) Martin explains that he was “an unwanted, unloved child” and gives a brief account of his upbringing by his cold and self-centered parents. (Later, Timoney would recount to her mentor that if Harry Potter had Doc Martin’s parents, rather than sacrifice their lives for his, they would have swapped him to Voldemort for a MacDonald’s breakfast coupon.)
Martin makes it clear that he is aware of his interpersonal shortcomings. In discussing his marital difficulties, he accepts the entire blame. Responding to Martin’s depiction of his life, Timoney comments that he is as blunt with himself as he is with others. Martin had never considered that and feels his body relax into the thought.
At the close of the session, Timoney suggests that it’s rare that one member of a couple is the sole source of conflict and asks that his wife Louisa come for an appointment.
Louisa
Dr. Timoney learns from their session that Louisa is an accomplished, articulate Portwenn schoolteacher. What Louisa is not, is eager to be in the session. She makes cracks about Timoney’s youth, implying that Timoney is inexperienced and naïve. Louisa contends that her marital problems are entirely due to Martin’s deficits in sensitivity, and that he should (as the English say) get them sorted without her involvement.
Responding to Dr. Timoney’s questions, Louisa states that her parents were “fine, normal as you like,” moments later adding that her mother abandoned the family when she was 12, but “I didn’t really need a mother by then.” And, by the way, her father “spent some time in prison” when she was a young child. After listening to herself describe her childhood as normal as you like, with reluctance, Louisa agrees to attend couple counseling.
Initial sessions
In Martin and Louisa’s first couples session, Louisa begins with an account of their relationship. Louisa describes their awkward courtship: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy marries girl, girl has baby, boy loses girl. If it were a TV show, Louisa explains, it’d be the usual get-them-to-watch-the-next-season stuff. But it’s not a TV show.1 Martin and Louisa don’t stay apart because of contrivances. They don’t miss a reconciliation because one of them is seen hugging an attractive stranger who turns out to be a sibling, while viewers yell explanations at the TV screen. Their problem is straightforward and never-changing. As much as Louisa wants to be with Martin, she’s constantly frustrated by his interpersonal limitations.
Experiments
As Timoney has learned through her training, struggling couples often have repetitive interactional patterns that result in seemingly irresolvable conflicts. Commonly used interventions or experiments (as she prefers to think of them) can be used successfully with many couples. For example, have them experiment with a small (but designed to interrupt) behavioral change in the middle of a pattern of conflict. Or, if one or both members of the couple believes that conflict is bad, and have no way to deal with anger and resentment other than to withdraw (after all, avoiding conflict worked for their parents, right up to the divorce), the therapist can design a practice for successful conflict resolution.
As we shall see, commonly used interventions don’t work for everyone. And they do not for Martin and Louisa. Their pasts have left Martin with a limited repertoire of behavior and Louisa with small boundaries of trust. Their situation calls for a specialist, not a general practitioner. Timoney attempts three homework experiments that fail:
(1) Homework: Timoney has figured that Martin and Louisa have problems with physical intimacy, they are told to hug three times a day, while stating something nice about each other.
Failure: While it’s true that Martin is not a toucher, he does like holding Louisa. In this case, the not touching was an effect, not a cause of their psychological distance, and the homework just creates additional awkwardness. To add to the awkwardness, Louisa never thinks of anything positive to say to Martin.
(2) Homework: Because Martin is a control freak (affirmed by both Martin and Louisa), they are told to have an outing in which Louisa is in total charge. In theory, this will help balance their relationship.
Failure: Louisa decides on a picnic to the beach, where Martin is uncomfortable with the random elements of a beach and a picnic, but sets out to give Louisa a normal family outing. The outing is eventually interrupted by a medical emergency that Martin must attend to.
(3) Homework: Martin and Louisa did not have a typical courtship, that is, they didn’t date. Timoney suggests some conventional courtship outings. Martin and Louisa plan a restaurant date.
Failure: In just minutes spent at the restaurant (because of yet another medical emergency that requires Martin), Martin and Louisa experience the whole of their relationship awkwardness.
There’s a smorgasbord of reasons why these homework assignments were doomed. Leave room for dessert:
First, two of the assignments were exercises to get Martin and Louisa to engage more. That’s more, not better. More, not different. There wasn’t anything in these exercises that would help them engage better.
Second, each assignment was bound to make Martin feel even more awkward and more vulnerable. Martin’s increased awkwardness exacerbated the very things that Louisa finds unattractive in her husband. That is not a recipe to increase intimacy.
Third, characterizing Martin as a control freak is simplistic. He’s compulsive — habitual and tidy, beyond what most consider practical. But he’s not trying to control the behavior of others; he’s trying to control his environment in which other humans happen to be present. Being habitual and tidy is a common adaptation for those who have dealt with psychologically chaotic circumstances, especially in childhood. Even more significant, as Martin desperately wants to be with Louisa, she has the most meaningful control, control over his happiness. Martin is in control of nothing beyond his medical practice; he’s the most psychologically fragile person in Portwenn.
Fourth, Timoney misses an opportunity (which I’ll explain below) to cast Martin in a more positive light, which could have contributed to a major improvement in their relationship.
In Timoney’s mind, if her tried-and-true conflict-resolution schemes don’t work, it can’t be her fault. She salves her shrinking-ego (pun intended) through the time-tested technique of blaming her clients. After Martin and Louisa inform Timoney that they won’t be returning, she tells them that they’re “one of the most challenging cases I have ever come across.”
Dr. Timoney gets a Mulligan (in golf, a do-over)
(Up to this point, I was following the TV script. The rest is my contribution.) After Martin and Louisa decide to end counseling, Rachel Timoney feels relief, guilt, and regret — relief that she won’t have to watch herself struggle with her work, guilt that she feels that way, and regret that she did not help her clients. Timoney decides to confer with her old professor. Sure, he’s past his prime. He babbles too much, repeats himself, but now and then, he still conjures some inventive advice.2 But before she calls him, Timoney has a WTF moment. She knows what he’d say. Instead of calling her professor, Timoney contacts Martin and Louisa, apologizes for her last remarks, and states that she has some fresh ideas. Surprised by the apology, they agree to give counseling another try.
Anticipating the call to her professor, the conversation Timoney had with herself exposed that her interventions reeked of this worked in the past, so why be creative? She was being lazy: the experiments were designed with the relationship in mind, but not with the people in the relationship in mind. While couple counseling can counter interactional patterns that lead to relationship problems, that doesn’t mean you can ignore the distinctiveness that individuals bring to relationships.
Couples Therapy: it’s not just for couples anymore
Timoney notes that Louisa was right; she should have started with Martin. But not because he’s the one who needs to get his problems sorted. Despite the notoriety that Timoney got for her research, she forgot to implement her own hard-won knowledge. What her research yielded3 is that, when engaging in couple counseling, confronting a resistant client is rowing upstream.
Due to the influences of substance-abuse treatment and early family therapy, confronting clients became fashionable in the 1970s. When parents brought a child for treatment, they were told that the child’s behavior was usually a symptom of a dysfunctional marriage and poor parenting. A child client became labeled as the identified patient; the real patient, the parents were told, was the dysfunctional family, with the unspoken (and sometimes spoken) message that the parents were at fault. While confrontation made for dramatic teaching videos — therapist as action hero — the approach too often chased away the clients.4 After all, if the clients were willing to face their own problems, there wouldn’t have been all those identified-patient children in the first place.
Given the above, Timoney decides that the best course is to hold off on working directly with the relationship. As both Martin and Louisa feel that the major relationship problems lie with Martin, to avoid needless friction, Timoney opts for one-person couple therapy, the other leg of Timoney’s research.
Timoney (as have many before her) found that a change in one member of a couple can have a profound and positive effect on the relationship. Timoney knew that therapists have been practicing one-person couples therapy for decades, but have been intimidated against stating so by the family therapy mafia, who define family therapy by who comes to the session. That’s silly and never should have happened. Many family therapists apparently never moved past Piaget’s concrete-operational stage of development: once family therapy moved from the psychodynamic model to systems theory, it should have been obvious that if the client lives in a family, all therapy is family therapy.
Therapy with Martin
In discussing goals with Martin, he agrees that he would like to become more comfortable — fluid is the word agreed on — in his interactions with Louisa and with his infant son. He wants to make sure that he doesn’t recreate the relationships his parents had with him and with each other.
The experiments with Martin commence:
If you live in a cosmopolitan area where men commonly wear business suits, or you have watched episodes of Mad Men, you’ll notice that the men always unbutton their jackets when they sit and button them when they stand. A well-tailored suit jacket has no give, so a buttoned jacket pulls at the waist when the wearer is seated. Timoney jots this in her memory because it provides an inroad into a subtle experiment.
From the time he rises to when he retires for the night, Martin dresses precisely the same, in a suit with the top two buttons fastened on his three-button jacket. And you’ll observe that he never unfastens his suit jacket buttons, even when building a sandcastle with his son on the beach. A change in dress will give Martin the experience that nothing catastrophic will happen if he changes one habit.
In order, over several weeks:
To help Martin have the experience of overcoming a compulsive habit: (1) Timoney asks Martin to unbutton his jacket whenever he sits. (2) Next, she has him leave his jacket unbuttoned all day. (3) Last, she asks Martin to buy and wear casual clothes on his non-office days (presumably, the weekend). While change in one habit may seem trivial, the experience of that change can be a dramatic confidence builder.
To help Martin expand his repertoire of interpersonal responses and range of affect, Timoney exploits Martin’s desire for an enhanced relationship with his son: As stated, above, it’s obvious that Martin wishes to be involved with his son’s upbringing in a manner that sharply contrasts with how he (Martin) was raised. But he needs instruction and encouragement. While Martin gladly holds and bathes James, he does not exchange facial or noise expressions. We can assume that Martin’s deficit is a result of being neglected in infancy, that no facial expression mirroring took place between Martin and his parents.
(1) Timoney asks Martin to exchange facial and noise expressions with James. As James has learned to smile from his mother, Martin has the opportunity to both initiate and respond. (2) Rather than exchange hugs (as above), Timoney asks that Martin and Louisa trade smiles. (3) Timoney asks Martin to progressively expand his gestures of relationship beyond his son and wife. First, smile at his aunt (the one other person for whom he has affection), then his receptionist, then patients. This mildest demonstration of affect can teach him to better interact with others.
Marital grad school
After the above experiments, Timoney asks Martin and Louisa to come in together, once more. The experiments yielded a larger shift in their relationship than expected. To Timoney’s surprise, Louisa discloses that when she first met Martin, he was more outgoing and considerate. While never the life of the party, he was sensitive and generous to many in Portwenn and is acting that way again.5 Timoney realizes that she had made an assumption that Martin had always been this inhibited in his mood, sensitivity, and affect. Not learning otherwise was a rookie mistake.
Many couples have trouble in their relationship because they had no models of a good marriage. As both Martin and Louisa had parents with poor marriages, this could describe the experiences of both. However, some react the opposite of what you’d expect. Rather than stay away from marriage because they experienced poor models, they idealize what a good marriage would be like. Timoney asks each of them what a normal marriage is like. After some discussion, both admit that, while they have fantasies of a normal marriage, they guess that no such thing exists. Timoney states that fantasies of the extreme, positive or negative, usually get in the way.
Wrapping up: In their solo session, Timoney had suggested to Louisa that, given her background of abandonment by her parents, she (purposely) married someone who would leave her. As we find out, Louisa believes the exact opposite, that Martin is the most dependable and loyal man she’d ever meet. Given her background of abandonment, it’s easy to see that she picked Martin, not because he would leave her, but because he wouldn’t. If in early sessions, Timoney had made a better effort to bring this to light, it could have changed the context of their marital relationship. If every time Louisa glances at Martin and sees not someone who has a limited range of sensitivity and affect, but someone who loves her without reservation and will always be there for her and their children, Louisa’s entire attitude towards their marriage could shift.6
In the final session, Dr. Timoney, Louisa, and Martin discuss the wide variety of successful marriages. They conclude that Louisa chose Martin for his loyalty, and Martin chose Louisa because he saw in her that he could get the warmth and connection he desired.
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Well, yeah, it is. ↩︎
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A counselor friend guessed I was modeling the old professor after myself. She was right. ↩︎
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↩︎I'm making this up. The specifics of Timoney's research were never brought up in the TV show.
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Reminds me of the old joke: the operation was a success, but the patient died. ↩︎
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In early episodes, Martin comes off as a fish out of water, like Dr. Joel Fleischman from Northern Exposure. In later seasons, he comes off as a fish swimming in the Aspergers tank. ↩︎
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This change in point of view is a cornerstone of approaches influenced by the famous hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson, and in various cognitive-behavior approaches. ↩︎
Privacy — an essential habit of democracy
Bria Bloom recently posted an essay of her witnessing an interaction between a mother and the mother’s (about) ten year-old-daughter. The mother is playing with her daughter’s hair, treating it as if it belonged to a doll, while ignoring her daughter’s repeated requests to stop. The daughter and mother both persist, until her mother finally stops and calls her daughter a brat.
If you stop reading Bria’s essay at this point (because Facebook beckons), you’d probably think nothing of the incident — children and parents will be children and parents. But if you read further, Bria makes an unexpected connection: the insistent (pardon) manhandling of the daughter, despite her protests, is inadvertently training the daughter to accept that her body is not her own, that without consent, she should allow her body to be invaded by another’s behavior.
Bria’s interpretation startled me. When the above “training” is practiced by a sexual predator, it’s called something really creepy, “grooming,” getting a child used to accepting physical invasion — sexual invasion.
The Grooming of Americans
Without a huge conceptual jump, we can see this sort of grooming taking place with our constitutional democracy.1 Compare Bria’s remarks, further on:
This behavior can be especially dangerous when thinking about our society’s absence of a strong culture of consent…
with a phrase from the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
“The U.S. Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!”
The above is attributed to then President George W. Bush, who supposedly uttered it in a meeting with Republican Members of Congress who were concerned about portions of the Patriot Act. It’s unlikely that Bush ever said that, but he would have been right. The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper. Democracy is not what’s on a piece of paper, democracy is a habit of behaving in a manner that expects that as citizens, we have rights, specifically, as designated in the Bill of Rights. Our democracy is in danger, because we are treating our government as if it’s not run by our public servants, but by our rulers. We are absent a strong culture of consent.
How we’ve been groomed to give up consent
What Bria’s essay implies is that changing someone’s behavior, for better or worse, nearly always comes from repetition. So it is with grooming by unwanted invasive behavior.
What happened to consent of the governed? (stories happened)
The easy answer is that we (as citizens) are ready to suspend constitutional rights, quickly and passively, when we’re afraid, which usually occurs in time of war. Obvious examples include the internment of American citizens of Japanese decent, during World War II; the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Cold War red scare; free speech zones during political protests; and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp during the never-ending so-called war on terror.
As the only animal that has a linguistic form of language, and language being the tool of abstraction (communicating about other than what’s in front of us), we primarily think and learn in the form of stories. Want to lose an election? Campaign on policies. Want to win an election? Campaign on anecdotes. Want charitable contributions following a natural disaster or to stop a war? Forget statistics about thousands who’ve died or are suffering, show an injured child. Want to raise money for your state’s government? Forget publishing the cost of keeping a licensing office open on Saturday, show a lottery winner’s new mansion. Finally, you want to run roughshod over the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Make a single event that occurred 16 years ago and counting your nation’s dominant story.2 Nevermind that homegrown terrorists are more common. Nevermind that, while 3000 were killed in the 9/11 attack, since, over 500,000 in the United States were killed in auto accidents. Nevermind that if you want to create worrisome but more effective stories around issues for Americans to change our way of life, consider our causal response to flu season, which should be considered dangerous enough for quarantines, but sick adults still go to work and sick children still go to school; consider gun-related deaths; consider climate change. There are countless perils in our daily lives that are far more common and deadly than the scary, but statistically small, events that make the news such as shark attacks, plane crashes, lightening strikes, and yes, terrorists attacks.
The repetition of the 9/11 story is told implicitly at airports, train stations, and border crossings, as a rationale to treat the entire populace as a herd of suspects, and those that fit a racial profile, even more so. This story is told in the form of security theater, a term coined to identify measures that create the illusion of enhanced security, but have either no effect or have a negative effect of saving lives.
The Costs of Security Theater
Some examples of the cost of security theater. From Wikipedia:
In 2007, the researchers studied the specific effects of a change to security practices instituted by the TSA in late 2002. They concluded that this change reduced the number of air travelers by 6%, and estimated that consequently, 129 more people died in car accidents in the fourth quarter of 2002. Extrapolating this rate of fatalities, New York Times contributor Nate Silver remarked that this is equivalent to “four fully loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.”
The 2007 Cornell study also noted that strict airport security hurts the airline industry; it was estimated that the 6% reduction in the number of passengers in the fourth quarter of 2002 cost the industry $1.1 billion in lost business.
A 2010 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the TSA’s $900 million Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program, a behavioral-detection program introduced in 2007 that is aimed at detecting terrorists, had detected no terrorists and failed to detect at least 16 people who had traveled through airports where the program was in use and were later involved in terrorism cases.
The Ineffectiveness of Security Theater
…TSA agents failed to detect a threat in 67 out of 70 recent trials. Posing as passengers, U.S. Department of Homeland Security “Red Teams” were able to carry weapons and fake explosives (“simulant” threats) through security checkpoints without any trouble. Former TSA Administrator James Loy, who led the agency in its first year, called the leaked results an “abominable failure.”
Government & Corporations — a tag team of grooming us to give up consent
That most of us don’t often travel by jet or train, or cross the border, is irrelevant. The 9/11 story is told less directly but more consistently throughout our daily lives, through a partnership between our government and corporations such as Facebook, Google,3 and Verizon. It’s told as a means of grooming the populace to accept ongoing invasiveness into our private business, beliefs, and behavior. Whether or not some or all of it is intentional does not matter; the effect is the same.
On the intentional side, the NSA and CIA partially funded the Google search engine. Congress gave communications companies such as Verizon and AT&T retroactive immunity for granting the NSA the means to, without a warrant, wiretap all U.S. phone calls for three months. The U.S. government continues to renew laws that extend their reach into our private lives. And they are currently attempting to create regulations that would require, though our most secretive surveillance agencies can’t keep their own data secure, large tech companies to install backdoors (access) into major data platforms in the cloud. If you thought the Equifax data breach was fun, wait until the Russians get a hold of our personal records on DropBox, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (which the U.S. Government is going to use), Google Cloud, and Apple’s iCloud.
On the unintentional side, Google and Facebook, along with numerous smaller entities (Paypal shares your data with 600 companies), have groomed billions of us to be indifferent to constant surveillance, an indifference government agencies increasingly exploit. We shrug at Congress voting retroactive immunity for Verizon and AT&T for selling us out by allowing our entire citizenry to be wiretapped without a warrant. We shrug at the Director of National Intelligence lying to Congress about it. We shrug at the rubber stamp FISA court who, between 1995 and 2015, approved 38,365 FISA warrants while rejecting 12. In a country where a minority segment of the population goes apeshit over any perceived encroachment of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, not many give any shit over the constant encroachments of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Our Future
I recall not many years ago reading that, while we’re all familiar with the FBI and the CIA, our really secretive spy agency was the National Security Agency (NSA). In my former naivety, I was shocked to learn of this, ultra-secretive, U.S. intelligence agency. As it turns out, the U.S. Government has not three, but seventeen intelligence agencies, many of whom operate without the need for warrants to, at least, passively spy on American citizens. Do you believe that any of these agencies will shut done because of overlap and/or irrelevance? The use-by date on their package may have long faded, but don’t expect them to notice the sour smell of their efforts. They will find “important work,” and as intelligence agencies, some of that work will likely include domestic spying.
A new story in the horror genre
Every Jason Bourne movie contains one or more scenes that demonstrate, if the enforcement agencies want to find you, they will. But those movies are old;4 they show surveillance by means of security cameras, cell phone records, and wire taps. Since we’re not disillusioned spies on the run, no one is going to make a similar effort to track us, but they won’t have to if we adopt the surveillance model of China. While I think the facial recognition that unlocks my iPhone X is cool, the Chinese intelligence community thinks that facial recognition to monitor every move of its citizens is cooler.
On the video, a Chinese official explains:
We can match every face with an ID card, and trace all your movements back one week in time. We can match your face with your car and match you with your relatives and the people you’re in touch with. With enough cameras, we know who you frequently meet.
The watchful eyes of those 17 intelligence agencies, the invasiveness of Facebook, Google, and others to learn what’s in our heads, who we’re in touch with, where we go, and what we buy grooms us to accept increasing surveillance until the Chinese model will arrive (if we’re not already there) like the gently-boiled frog in a pot.
Privacy is the cornerstone of democracy
If you didn’t have something to hide, you wouldn’t mind being watched.
Heard that lately? Perhaps, more than once? The premise of that argument is, even if you haven’t broken a law, the state expects to have authority over your private behavior. Unstated is that the authority stems from a concern that you might, in the future, break a law, and under authoritarian government control, that can mean just speaking out against their authority. Since anyone might do anything in the future, that argument can grant the state’s right to unlimited surveillance of its citizens. What should be shocking, but gets a big yawn from most, is that’s the situation we’re now in.
From computer security expert Bruce Schneier:
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
The NRA is smart, the GOP is smart; Apple is stupid, Democrats are stupid
When the National Rife Association (NRA) uses (what many believe are) extreme measures to defend their interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, liberals whine a little, while the NRA gets relentless support from nearly every Republican office holder. Though the NRA claims they’re upholding constitutional gun rights for gun owners, the NRA is really a gun sellers’ organization. Gun manufacturers tout the Second Amendment so they can continue to make large profits.
When Apple makes relatively mild statements about protecting the privacy of their users, they neglect to mention the Fourth Amendment, and they get criticized by Democratic politicians as well as members of the GOP, for interfering with security (theater). Apple also gets criticized by tech pundits and Apple users, because Apple’s privacy statements are a “self-serving” marketing gambit.5 Let me repeat that: The NRAs support of the Second Amendment, primarily a gun-sellers organization, is not self-serving, it’s patriotic. Apple’s indirect support of the Fourth Amendment, because they might benefit from customer buy-in, is not patriotic, it’s self-serving. It’s a mystery why Democrats aren’t all-in behind the NRA. Assault weapons would far more efficient for their perpetual circular firing squad.
If gun manufacturers can give suitcases full of campaign contributions to support their interests, Apple should be giving suitcases full of campaign contributions to support theirs. They should be giving money to organizations who defend privacy rights, such as the ACLU and their geek counterpart, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). If the ACLU, the EFF, and the politicians who actively support our rights to privacy are to be successful, they need the kind of financial, vocal, and habitual support that the NRA gets for gun rights and the ACLU gets for free speech rights.
Why privacy is the most important habit of democracy
First, it’s one that almost uniquely crosses the polar politics that have become the norm. Members of the Senate intelligence Committee, Senators Richard Burr and Diane Feinstein, typically vote opposite on social and economic issues but are two of the strongest proponents of domestic surveillance. Senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden typically vote opposite on social and economic issues but are two of the strongest critics of domestic surveillance. Polls show that a majority of self-identified Republicans support surveillance when a Republican President is in office and are against it when a Democrat is President. The inverse is true for self-identified Democrats. In other words, neither liberals nor conservatives trust the government to surveil for just the good of the country. The protections of the Fourth Amendment is the only issue that roughly half the population from each political affiliation agrees with.6
Second, As Glenn Greenwald7 states in his Ted Talk and in his book, No Place to Hide, surveillance turns non-conformists into people who learn to suppress non-conformist thoughts. This doesn’t just interfere with political opposition to the norm, but chips away at all creative thinking, including art, and novelty in business:
…it is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate. A society in which everyone knows they can be watched by the state—where the private realm is effectively eliminated—is one in which those attributes are lost, at both the societal and the individual level.
Third, surveillance mechanisms, such as computer keystroke monitors (used in many corporations) and employee movement monitors (used in Walmart and Amazon warehouses) not only turns employees into robotic workers, it makes robots their de facto bosses. This demeans them as humans, as thinking individuals. A constant psychological attack on your identity does not create citizens, it creates resentful people looking for scapegoats — looking for victims who have even less control over their lives.8
Some might argue that working a traditional assembly line is no different than my above examples of working in a surveilled warehouse environment. Not in my experience. For a time, I worked on an assembly line that churned out computer wafers that got cut into chips. Twelve-hour graveyard shifts — it sounds like a most tedious job, but weirdly, I enjoyed it. When I started, I worked the computer wafer polishing machine (a kind of fine sanding machine). I had to stick the heavy round metal plates that held the chips onto the rotating lid above my head, then close the lid over the polisher. Though I was often half asleep, it was a great workout that I got paid for.
What I enjoyed was working with others in getting the job done. In the minutes I had during polishing runs, if all was going well with my six machines, I’d help others on the line with their work. It was good while it lasted. The low-level managers apparently had little to do, so they designed a motivational procedure. We were given forms to track our work, designed to monitor each station’s contribution, in speed and quality. We’d be graded and in competion with each other. Kind of silly since our success was primarily dependent on the ability of the machines. Our contributions stemmed from helping each other, a contribution that was rendered self-defeating now that we were being surveilled, if indirectly, with the tracking forms.
Is Jeff Bezos the efficiency genius he thinks he is? In the Amazon warehouse you’re not even supposed to talk to co-workers because it slows you down. That’s how you turn humans into robots. I don’t doubt that these warehouse workers are more efficient for a time, but how long do they stay there? How much time is lost in training new workers? What’s the cost of surveillance?
Checks and balances, indeed, our democracy is structurally vulnerable
Our three branches of government were designed to provide the famous checks and balances. Great in theory — but, who knew? — our government is comprised of people not institutions. Today, we live in a country where, often, a single individual decides what the Bill of Rights and its amendments mean, what individual rights the Constitution protects. The interpreter of individual protections is the lone duty of the Supreme Court, a body of nine, which has morphed from a theoretical separation of powers to two political factions and one swing vote. With a lifetime appointment, as the owner of the swing vote, Anthony Kennedy is often the most influential American. Let me repeat that: all of our so-called guaranteed individual rights are often retained at the opinion (and they are opinions, otherwise, all votes would be unanimous) of a single 82-year-old white male.
So one person, appointed by a partisan president (as are all Supreme Court Justices) has been the deciding vote in extremely important influences on our culture: abortion, gay rights (including the right to marry), lethal injection, guns, and the election of George W.Bush in 2000.
From Wikipedia:
On the Roberts Court, Kennedy often decides the outcome of a case. In the 2008–2009 term, he was in the majority 92 percent of the time. In the 23 decisions in which the justices split 5-to-4, Kennedy was in the majority in all but five. Of those 23 decisions, 16 were strictly along ideological lines, and Kennedy joined the conservative wing of the court 11 times; the liberals, 5.
In the 2010–2011 term, 16 cases were decided by a 5–4 vote, and Kennedy joined the majority in 14 of the decisions.
My point isn’t about Justice Kennedy. That he has so much influence on American culture is an accident of time and place. My point is that the words residing on our most important document means only what nine people, and often one person, says it means at a point in history. Because a president with particular beliefs, and a Senate with particular beliefs, select those nine people, and since citizens elect the president and Senate, the rights of citizens depend on the attitudes of citizens.
Authoritarianism is a language habit
Before George Orwell made Newspeak the symbol of thought control in his famous novel, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, our first president, George Washington understood how democracy can be undone by language habits.
From Wikipedia:
He was aware that everything he did set a precedent, and he attended carefully to the pomp and ceremony of office, making sure that the titles and trappings were suitably republican and never emulated European royal courts. To that end, he preferred the title “Mr. President” to the more majestic names proposed by the Senate.
The rest of us don’t appear sufficiently wary of the trappings of monarchy. I find it odd that not only is our current president called, Mr. President, but all living former presidents (along with other former office holders) are. That level of life-long respect seems out of place in a democracy. If you’re not convinced, think about this: as long as he lives, Donald Trump will be called Mr. President.
Worse is the habit of referring to the president as Commander-in-Chief. The president is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a title that’s relevant for only brief periods during his term, and a title never relevant without ”of the Armed Forces,” and a term never true as regards to the hundreds of millions of us not in the military.
Worst of all from a perspective of promoting authoritarian leadership, is when the president, or any elected official, is referred to as “CEO.” The country, states, cities9 are not businesses, and elected officials are not our bosses, they are our public servants.
How we use language influences how we think and how we create stories about ourselves, our culture, our country.
How change happens
Recently, I listened to a podcast by Preet Bharara, interviewing Jeh Johnson. Bharara served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017. Johnson was General Counsel for the Department of Defense from 2009 to 2012 and followed that with a term as head of Homeland Security. Johnson oversaw the repeal of the U.S. military service’s official policy of ”don’t ask don’t tell,” which prohibited discrimination against gays in the service, while (in a pay no attention to the man behind the curtain gambit) disallowed being openly gay. Johnson believes that the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell, which marked the acceptance of gays in the most conservative institution in the U.S., the Armed Forces, led to the cultural normalization of homosexuality, and subsequently, to the trend towards marriage equality laws.
The above lesson, supposedly, is that cultural leadership matters, but did the military lead or follow? What’s missing from the above explanation is what led to the tolerance that precluded that of the U.S. military. What made that institution more tolerant? Again, from the above podcast: Bharara and Johnson concurred that some of the arguments against the integration of black and white soldiers were similar to the arguments against the integration of gays into the military, arguments that proved false. But there had to be lessons that preceded ethnic integration.10 There is no starting place for change, and there’s no red X that marks a the tipping point, a specific change that breaks the logjam. Changes beget changes, which keeps the change begetting going. Some changes are bigger than others.
Biological evolution moves in homeorhetic trajectories, funneling change along a new path. Likely, cultural evolution moves similarly, funneling down a path. Did washing machines make way for feminism? The pill? World War II (where women took over traditional men’s jobs). Betty Friedan? How about all of those events, and many more, made way for feminism. Similar cultural evolution has occurred with marriage equality laws and the legalization of marijuana — events in my youth, I would have thought impossible.
Looking back to democracy, no single event made way for democratic nations. The Magna Carta, supposedly the document on which the U.S. Constitution was modeled, went through 550 years of evolution before the U.S. Constitution was written.
It’s on us
Many concerned with the movement towards an authoritarian government, and with creeping surveillance, are hoping for government solutions. That’d be nice, but authoritarian politicians aren’t the ones to stem the flow towards authoritarianism, and few politicians have the courage to take a stand against security theater, lest they be blamed for any future incidence of terrorism.
So, should we give up? Only if we believe that politicians lead. I don’t. Politicians seldom lead anything; they follow public sentiment. Their talent lies mostly in jumping in front of the parade. Because half the population are women, politicians contend with women’s rights. Because each of us has a gay relative or friend, we’re moving to marriage equality. Because, illegal or not, so many consume marijuana in some form, we have a legalization movement. Even this guy is on board, literally on a board of directors. From the Washington Post:
John A. Boehner, the former Republican speaker of the House who once said he was “unalterably opposed” to decriminalizing marijuana laws, has joined a board of directors for a cannabis company with an eye on rolling back federal regulations.
The former Ohio congressman has been appointed to the board of advisers of Acreage Holdings, invoking the need for veterans to access the drug legally to explain his change of heart, Boehner said in a statement Wednesday. The company grows and sells legal weed and operates in 11 states.
Boehner’s acceptance of marijuana tracks with evolving beliefs about the drug and its uses among Americans and even Republican lawmakers, Erik Altieri, executive director for the Washington-based marijuana advocacy group NORML, told The Washington Post.
It’s fruitless to wait for a political lone wolf or two to save democracy. It’s up to us as individuals to maintain democracy, and I believe the most important individual action we can take is to discourage both government and corporate surveillance — without which authoritarian governments can’t maintain their hold. That means, take small actions and inform others of your actions, because most people are far more willing to take action when they know they’re not alone. So it’s not enough to take action, you must inform others that you are.
As the above examples illustrate, cultural evolution influences what our politicians support, who gets elected, who gets appointed to the courts, and even how the courts interpret laws. It’s on us.
What to do
No one is going to be successfully nagged to #deleteFacebook and switch their search engine to DuckDuckGo. If you haven’t yet, you’ll probably make that decision if and when there’s a mass exit. And I can count on my law degrees (none) how many I expect to stop carrying their smart phone. While fewer than I had hoped, there are ways to minimize the surveillance. I’ll be suggesting the best Internet privacy-oriented apps and practices. Sign up, below, to be notified.
Bibliography (aside from the links)
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, Bruce Schneier
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technologies That Will Shape Our Future, Kevin Kelly
No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald
The Art of Invisibility, Kevin Mitnick
On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder
Take Control of Your Online Privacy, Joe Kissell
Post Privacy and Democracy, Patrick Held (For some reason, this is only available as an Apple iBook.)
NSA surveillance may be legal — but it’s unconstitutional Laura K. Donohue
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Sticklers will point out that, technically, the USA is a Republic. ↩︎
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Not that we don’t have competing stories, such as the populist story on which Donald Trump won the election — immigrants and unfair trade are running our economy and culture. ↩︎
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The Google corporation is now Alphabet, but I’m going to stick with its popular name. ↩︎
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I’m told that there are most recent movies that depict modern surveillance capabilities. ↩︎
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Because Apple makes most of their money from selling devices, unlike Google and Facebook,, Apple doesn’t need to make all their money off user data. ↩︎
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To me, that this poll is three years old, makes it more reliable, because it’s not about whether or not one supports Trump. ↩︎
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Greenwald takes bizarre political turns in every few years. I advocate his views on only surveillance . ↩︎
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The advice: If you don’t like this job, get another one, ignores the realities of the employment environment. ↩︎
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our Mayor of Edmonds, population 40,000, sometimes gets called “CEO.” ↩︎
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I don’t use the term “race,” because it’s a cultural not scientific term. ↩︎