The Runaway Society

¡Hola! Everybody...
Take a moment and imagine you could affect the outcome of an election. Imagine, just for a moment, that your words could impact another individual; that you have more power than you give yourself credit for...

Imagine that.

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-=[ The Runaway Society]=-

I don't give a damn about semi-radicals...
This is not a time of gentleness.
It is not a time of lukewarm beginnings.
It's a time for open speech and fearless thinking.
-- Helen Keller

Towards the end of Emile Zola’s Beast of Man, an engineer and a fireman are quarreling in the locomotive of a passenger train. In his rage, the fireman has stoked the engine’s fire into an inferno. They grab at each other’s throats, each trying to force the other through the open door. Losing their balance, both fall out and perish. The train rumbles on at breakneck speed. The passengers, soldiers en route to the war front, are sleeping or drunkenly unaware of the impending disaster.

Zola’s story has been seen as a parable of modern runaway societies. Those supposedly in charge, embroiled in their own personal dramas, paralyzed with performance anxiety, or caught up in their ambitions, have left the driver’s seat. Meanwhile we, their oblivious passengers, are about to pay the price.

A common conservative strategy is setting up government agencies for failure (via taking away funding, for example) and then blaming any failure, not on deregulation, but the very agencies they set up to fail. We ignore the fact that a gun endows people -- many unstable -- the power to inflict destruction like no other instrument. Sure pencils don’t cause people misspell words, but let me see how many people you can shred with one pencil as opposed to an assault weapon.

The genius of the conservative movement lies in how they have convinced you that a regressive rather than a progressive tax structure is better for you (they call it “tax relief”). It’s how they convinced a number of you to go along with trickle-down economics -- an economic theory no real economist has ever backed.

In any case, our opinions are most often driven by the beliefs -- or better put: by the metaphors -- we live by. Conservatives have known this for some time and that’s partly why you voted for Bush and why you vote against your own economic interests, or find some identification with something called a teabagger. Conservative operatives discovered long ago that people vote their values, not on the issues. Therefore, if you can frame, say, “family values” in a conservative way, you have co-opted the most important metaphor we all live by -- families.

Progressives have labored under the false notion that reason or issues should come first. Yes, issues are important, but people vote on values (frames) and if you can’t connect with people on values, you will never get your agenda on board. Let’s take the following facts as an example:

On the Iraq War, an overwhelming majority of Americans want a timetable for pulling out our troops. On economic policy, most Americans support stronger government regulations to protect citizens. On trade, polls consistently show the public is very suspicious of the free trade agreements that have hurt the middle class. On health care, surveys consistently show that about two-thirds of those asked desire a government-guaranteed universal health-insurance system -- even if that means higher taxes.

If the mainstream is more left of center, then why aren’t these issues on the table for public discourse? Why? Because they haven’t been framed adequately. One of the ways issues are framed is through repetition. Jon Stewart from The Daily Show has made a career highlighting hilarious video clips of the right-wing noise machine using the same words over and over on the same day. This is a very effective way to express and embed an idea. The words come with frames of reference attached. Those frames in turn latch on to and activate deeper, subconscious frames. When repeated over and over, the words serve to reinforce deep frames by actually strengthening neural connections in listeners.

In that way, I can stand up on a stump and yell out catch phrases like “family values!” or “tough on crime!” and immediately in your brain a barrage of conservative-framed issues appear. I can blurt out, “tax and spend” and immediately conservative frames come to your mind. “Tough on crime!” “Traditional marriage!” “Choice!” For the last 40 years, a vast media network of think tanks, newspapers, radio and TV shows have embedded these values into the mind of unsuspecting or apathetic Americans, creating a passive mindset. Shit, people in France, who are taking to the streets to fight for their equal share are wondering, “Have the Americans fallen asleep?” Sadly, we have, and the train is hurtling towards sure disaster...

Love,

Eddie

Moral Reasoning

¡Hola! Everybody...
One can tease out political differences quite simply -- how individuals view the role of government, freedom, and a just society is directly related to their level of moral reasoning...

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-=[ Consciousness Unfolding ]=-

Not too long ago, I participated as part of a college panel with a woman. We were addressing college students, and what struck me about this particular woman was the extent of her self-centeredness. I found it interesting because she sought me out before we spoke and mentioned that she too was a “practicing Buddhist.” Her version of Buddhism, it seemed to me, was simply meditation. I had a teacher who once joked that practicing Buddhism without ethics was like trying to row a boat without first untying it from the pier.

From what I gathered her whole existence centered on her and she was oblivious to how she was connected to her environment; how her actions reverberated and caused ripples. In her world, what mattered was the conscious cultivation of her ego. In fact she could actually see the “logic” in the needless death of an infant. This is what happens when you mix Ayn Rand with meditation! LOL Nothing could be further from my vision of Buddhist practice.

Two people, two different worlds.

This got me to thinking and I have come to realization that “practicing meditation” or any set of practices isn’t enough. I have come to realize that we create our world according to our level of consciousness/ awareness. It’s the same with love. For some people, love’s reason is the satisfaction of the individual. Love is something that you go “out there” to get in order to satisfy a hunger for connection. Similarly, religion and everything else is filtered -- distilled -- according to where you stand in terms of growth.

I’ll explain. Let’s look at moral development as a starting off point. Let’s say, for the sake of this post, that moral development has three distinct stages. At birth an infant hasn’t been socialized into its culture’s ethics, standards, and conventions; let’s call this the preconventional stage. It’s also known as the egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely consumed with self -- self-absorbed. But as the young child begins to learn its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also known as ethnocentric, in that it’s focused on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands to include care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also known as worldcentric.

If you’re still with me, you can see that moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us” (ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric). This is an example of unfolding waves of consciousness.

Using this consciousness “map” one can see how religion (or love) will manifest itself differently in a person who’s at the egocentric stage than a person who’s at a worldcentric stage. Both people can be just as devout (or “in love”), but spiritual practice will evolve according to any one individual’s level of moral development.

To further illustrate, imagine love from a morally egocentric perspective. Love at this stage resembles a yearning -- something like an addict's need for a fix -- an ego boost. Same thing with almost anything you look at in life: perception and meaning changes according to what level you are engaging the world. Religion from an egocentric perspective resembles the global wave of fundamentalism currently threatening our existence. And I mention fundamentalism in all its manifestations -- including our own home-grown Christian fundamentalism.

I find all this quite interesting because a lot of my work involves helping people move from one stage to another. But it’s also interesting because it helps me tease out the idiosyncrasies when someone says, “I love you.” Perhaps we need to know a little more about others and ourselves as we travel on our journey. For what may sound like “I love you” may in actuality mean “I love me.”

What would our national or global dialog resemble as people moved up the ladder of the stages of moral reasoning?

Love,

Eddie

Obedience to Authority

¡Hola! Everybody…
I’m running late. As usual, I’ll be in prison selling liberation for most of the day.

With the passage of the racist Arizona immigration law aka as SB 1070, I thought the following post on obedience studies was relevant. I realize that comparisons to Nazi Germany often kills an argument -- everybody does it. However, there are instances where the comparisons are not only well-deserved, but especially relevant. As I highlighted recently (click here), Arizona is now suffering the consequences of some of the most pathetic, ill-advised economic measures in recent memory. Today, the state of Arizona has codified the scapegoating of Latino/as, regardless of legal status, for those mistakes. That's how it starts...

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-=[ Obedience ]=-

Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.

-- Martin Buber (1878–1965)

I sometimes work as a motivational speaker. Most of this work involves other professionals, but oftentimes, I’m asked to address young people. A colleague once asked me to substitute for her at an elementary school. The topic was substance abuse and she had a plan all worked out.

Of course, I discarded her curriculum and proceeded to wing it. LOL!

I’ve always been interested in group behavior and the following is how I “teach” about peer pressure.

Please do not try this at home, you’re not trained, and you can do more harm than good if you practice without a license.

Normally, I wait until students file into the class, and those that are “late” (as defined by me) are asked to wait right outside the door. Before all this, I have taken the liberty of drawing three lines on the blackboard. One line is obviously shorter than the rest. It’s not blatantly shorter, but short enough to notice upon inspection.

Before I allow the “late” students in, I address the class and tell them that they will be my co-conspirators in an experiment on social behavior. I point to the lines and ask, “Which of these lines is the shortest?” Of course, a few students raise their hands and correctly identify the shorter line. Once a consensus has been reached, I tell the students that I am now going to allow the “late” students in and ask them the same question. However, I instruct the class to agree that the shortest line is not the shortest line, that it is, in fact, the same size as the other lines.

At this point, I allow the “late” students in and proceed to ask them the same question. Again, the late students are all in agreement as to which is the shortest line. Then I ask my co-conspirators and one by one, they all say that none of the lines is shortest, that they all are, in fact, the same size.

I ask the late students once again, “Are you sure this line is the shortest?” What often happens is that one by one, the late students experience pressure to fall in line with the consensus of the majority. Some will stick to their guns, but most will fall under the pressure of the power of the group. At this point, I disclose our little conspiracy and then turn to the class and say, “This is what peer pressure feels like.”

The rest of the workshop is dedicated to exploring those feelings, and how that pressure can be used as a way to do almost anything against our will -- drugs, sex, violence, voting for idiots, using immigrants or those we perceive as different as scapegoats, etc.

It’s a powerful way to illustrate the power of the group. If you ask, most people will tell you that they would never succumb to the group. However, studies show that the vast majority of you will obey authority. Even to the point of murder.

Obedience to Authority

I work with currently and formerly or currently incarcerated men and women. I came about this work more through flow than an actual conscious decision. In fact, I was initially reluctant to work with this population because 1) It’s an extremely challenging group to work with, and 2) even those motivated to change face huge systemic obstacles to successful social reintegration. Nowhere is this issue of obedience to authority more clearly illustrated than in prison settings. One experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment (click here), led by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, had to be abandoned within a couple of days because, normal college students role playing corrections officers were abusing the students role playing the inmates, and the students role-playing the inmates were plotting a prison breakout. It’s a totally engrossing study.

However, the study which I have found the most interesting is one you may have heard about. Anyone who has taken any psych 101 course will have heard of Stanley Milgram, who shocked the world in the early 1960s with his discoveries at Yale while conducting what became known as The Obedience Experiments (click here). In brief, he found that average, presumably normal, groups of residents of New Haven, Connecticut, would readily inflict very painful, and probably deadly, electric shocks on an innocent victim whose actions did not merit such harsh treatment.

The experiment, supposedly dealing with the effects of punishment on learning, required that the subjects shock a learner every time he made an error on a verbal learning task, and to increase the intensity of the shock in 15-volt steps, from 15 to 450 volts, on each subsequent error. The results: 65% of the subjects continued to obey the experimenter to the end, simply because they were commanded to.

Groundbreaking and controversial, these experiments have had enduring relevance, because they demonstrated with stunning clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced by an authority figure to act destructively, even in the absence of physical force, and that it didn’t take evil or aberrant individuals to carry out mass actions that were immoral and inhumane.

Milgram’s findings have had the effect of making us more aware of our vulnerability to manipulation in the face of social pressure, in the process making us reshape our individual morality. While I’m sure most of you reading this would like to think that when confronted with a moral dilemma we would act in line with our conscience, Milgram’s experiments taught us -- with shocking, irrefutable detail -- that, in a concrete situation containing powerful social pressures, our moral sense can get trampled underfoot.

And this is how evil happens; we allow it to happen through acquiescence, obedience, and not wanting to “rock the boat.” This how that Iraqi child today is killed through no fault of his own, it’s how some of us defend a law that targets people based on skin color; how the twin Black and Jewish holocausts come to be…

Love

Eddie

Morality and Social Policy

¡Hola! Everybody...
I have said it before and I’ll say it again: the fRight-Wing Morans really pose a profound challenge to my spiritual practice. It’s hard for me to muster compassion for bullies. Case in point is the historic health reform bill passed last night. Among the immediate impacts: Children can remain on their parents’ HMO until age 26; small business can get up to 50% of their insurance premiums as tax credits; people who have been denied coverage by their insurance company can appeal to the government; seniors not covered by Medicare Part D drug benefit will get $250 to pay for scripts; Insurance companies will not be allowed to set coverage caps for major illnesses. Put simply, lives will be saved -- literally.

Yet, visit any fRight-Wing site, or talk to that goober right wing friend/ relative and you are immediately bombarded with ridiculously unbelievable hatred and ignorance...

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-=[ Reason, Morality, Social Policy ]=-

I don't give a damn about semi-radicals... This is not a time of gentleness. It is not a time for lukewarm feelings. It is a time for open speech and fearless thinking.
-- Helen Keller

For some people society’s ultimate reason for existence is to serve the individual. Government, religion, and everything else is filtered according to where you stand in terms of personal growth.

Let’s take moral development as a starting off point. Let’s assume for the sake of argument moral development has three distinct stages. An infant at birth hasn’t been socialized into its culture’s ethics, standards, and conventions; let’s call this the preconventional stage. It’s also known as egocentric, in that the individual’s awareness is largely concerned (consumed) with self -- self-absorbed. As the child begins to assimilate culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also known as ethnocentric, in that this level of moral reasoning is focused on the individual’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. At the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands to include care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also known as worldcentric.

If you’re still with me, you can see that moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us” (ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric). This is an example of unfolding waves of consciousness.

Using this consciousness “map” one can see how a vision of society will manifest itself differently in a person who’s at the egocentric stage than a person who’s at a worldcentric stage. Both people can be “nice” people, but their vision will manifest itself in accordance to their level of moral development. In addition, their worldview has divergent consequences.

Imagine a society from an egocentric or ethnocentric perspective. Society from a lower level stage perspective resembles much of the world today. It certainly conforms to what America looks like. Such a society would be concerned with the individual at the expense of the larger society. It’s the same with almost anything you look at in life: it changes according to what level you’re able to engage the world. Religion from an egocentric perspective probably resembles the scary wave of fundamentalism currently threatening our existence. And I mention fundamentalism in all its manifestations -- including our own home-grown Christian fundamentalism.

I find all this quite interesting because a lot of my work involves helping people move from one stage to another. But it’s also interesting because it helps me tease out the idiosyncrasies when someone speaks about civil liberties. Freedom, from an egocentric perspective, looks a lot different from freedom from a worldcentric level of moral reasoning, for example.

Last night, the US legislature did more than pass a lukewarm health reform bill. Yes the bill is an ugly stepchild of too much compromise and too little real reform. To say it needs work is an understatement. But more important than the actual law, is the shift from seeing health as a privilege to recognizing it as a fundamental human right. It’s something even some third world nations take for granted. We’re not there yet, but this legislation is a first step toward moving from an egocentric/ ethnocentric level of moral reasoning to developing a collective and enlightened view that care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, or creed is what is needed if we’re going to survive as a species.

And in a real way, that is what happened last night as you were distracted by something else on TV.

Love,

Eddie

Generosity

¡Hola! Everybody...
We live in a time where good is bad and bad is good. Toxic waste is good for you and corporations that bilk the taxpayers for billions of dollars continue living off the public teat while organizations that fight for a living wage and to register poor people to vote are marginalized.

Interesting times we live in...

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-=[ Religion and Altruism ]=-

Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

-- Luke 6:38 (New International Version)

The following will not win me many friends... LOL!

In a society that can only think of morality in religious terms, it would be easy to assume that there’s a strong connection between religion and good. For example, many Christians, often with tears in their eyes, demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. Of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom?

“Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon?

The sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity, like most spiritual disciplines, contain potent reminders to be compassionate and charitable.

These admonitions, however, have not been sufficient to prevent a wide range of horrors under the justification of one religion or another. From the Hebrews, whose jealous God compelled them to destroy innocent men, women and children, to the barbaric Christian crusaders, to contemporary fanatics killing in Allah’s or Jesus’ name. Less known, but just as disturbing are the plethora of studies demonstrating that churchgoers are more intolerant of ethnic minorities than non-churchgoers.

When we turn to the topic of altruism, we discover that there is almost no connection between religious affiliation and caring or helping behavior. This conclusion has emerged with remarkable consistency from many types of research spanning many years. One study of about 2,000 Episcopalians in the 1950s showed no discernible relationship between church involvement and charitable acts. In another questionnaire-based study of altruism involving several hundred male college students in 1960, there was only a slight correlation between altruism and a belief in God, and none at all between altruism and of religious participation. In a random study of adults in 1965, the non-religious were as frequently rated as being a good Samaritan, possessing love and compassion for their fellow human being, as well as being humble, as the most devout and religious of the group that was studied.

Two experiments with undergraduates during the 1970s found essentially the same findings: In one, students who believed in the Bible’s accuracy were no more likely than others to come to the aid of someone in the next room who seemed to have fallen off a ladder. In the other study, students were assessed as being “Jesus People” (born again Christians), conventionally religious, nonreligious, or atheist. There was no statistical difference among these groups in their willingness to volunteer time with developmentally delayed children or to resist the temptation to cheat on a test (the only group in which the majority did not cheat: the atheists).

In 1984, a researcher who surveyed more than 700 people from different neighborhoods in a medium-sized city expected to find that religious people were especially sociable, helpful to their neighbors, and likely to participate in neighborhood organizations. Instead, she reported, religious involvement was unrelated to these activities. Finally, a study of people who risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazis found that “rescuers did not differ significantly from bystanders or all non-rescuers with respect to their religious identification, religious education, and their own religiosity or that of their parents.”

It seems, then, that religious affiliation by itself has nothing to do with an evolved level of moral reasoning or altruism.

Love,

Eddie

Moral Politics

¡Hola! Everybody…
Freakin’ Mets broke my heart… AGAIN

On another note, one former CEO of the failure formerly known as Shearson/ Lehman received something like $20 million compensation package after heading the company for 18 days! And will people please stop calling this a “bailout” and call it for what is -- Corporate Welfare?

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-=[ Moral Politics ]=-

“When confronted with evidence disproving a cherished belief, most people will throw away the evidence and keep the belief.”

Most of my readers know how much I detest overly simplistic explanations. Take these for example:

An idiot was voted into office twice? Must be the people are stupid.

The subprime meltdown was the consequence of clueless borrowers.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

I could go on and on with a list of the foolish and narrow-minded shit people pull out of their arses in their quest to form opinions. I believe that the greatest postmodern danger facing us is our inability to apply our sociological imagination. That is, our inability to view issues from a wider perspective -- inclusive of divergent points of view -- is what’s creating our greatest crisis.

We blame “a nation of idiots” on the election of an idiot; conveniently ignoring the massive propaganda machine that idiot is tied to. We blame borrowers in what is the greatest financial scam in our nation’s history, ignoring the decades of deregulation and dismantling of government insight that paved the way, not just for the subprime meltdown, but also Enron and every other corporate malfeasance, since McCain’s involvement in the S&L catastrophe in the 80s.

In fact, it is a common practice of conservatives to set up government agencies for failure (via taking away funding) and then blame any failure, not on deregulation, but the very agencies they set up to fail. We ignore the fact that a gun gives people -- many unstable -- a power to inflict destruction like no other instrument. Sure pencils don’t make people misspell words, but let me see how many people you can shred with one pencil as opposed to an automatic rifle.

::blank stare::

The genius of the conservative movement lies in how they have convinced you that a regressive rather than a progressive tax structure is better for you (they call it “tax relief”). It’s how they convinced a number of you to go along with trickle-down economics -- an economic theory no real economist has ever backed.

In any case, our opinions are most often driven by the beliefs -- or better put -- by the metaphors -- we live by. Conservatives have known this for some time and that’s partly why you voted for Bush and why you vote against your own economic interests. Conservative operatives discovered that people vote their values, not on the issues. Therefore, if you can frame, say, “family values” in a conservative way, you have co-opted the most important metaphor we all live by -- families.

Progressives have labored under the false notion that reason or issues should come first. Yes, issues are important, but people vote on values (frames) and if you can’t connect with people on values, you will never get your agenda on board. Let’s take the following facts as an example:

On the Iraq War, an overwhelming majority of Americans want a timetable for pulling out our troops. On economic policy, most Americans support stronger government regulations to protect citizens. On trade, polls consistently show the public is very suspicious of the free trade agreements that have hurt the middle class. On health care, surveys consistently show that about two-thirds of those asked desire a government-guaranteed universal health-insurance system -- even if that means higher taxes.

If the mainstream is more left of center, then why aren’t these issues on the tale for public discourse? Why? Because they haven’t been framed adequately. One of the ways issues are framed is through repetition. Jon Stewart from The Daily Show has made a career showing hilarious video clips of right-wing leaders using the same words over and over on the same day. McCain used this technique during the last debate. He kept repeating his belief (frame) that Obama is not prepared to lead. His key words included “reckless,” and “dangerous.” This is a very effective way to express and embed an idea. The words come with frames of reference attached. Those frames in turn latch on to and activate deeper, subconscious frames. When repeated over and over, the words serve to reinforce deep frames by actually strengthening neural connections in listeners.

In that way, I can stand up on a stump and yell out catch phrases like “family values!” or “tough on crime!” and immediately in your brain a barrage of conservative-framed issues appear. I can blurt out, “tax and spend” and immediately conservative frames come to your mind.

In the coming days, I’m going to write on how progressives can take back the values game.

Love,

Eddie