Category: Psychology

An existential threat, and our responsibility.

Putin’s One Weapon: The ‘Intelligence State’ ,
Russia’s leader has restored the role its intelligence agencies had in the Soviet era — keep citizens in check and destabilize foreign adversaries.
By John Sipher
Mr. Sipher, a former chief of station for the C.I.A., worked for more than 27 years in Russia and other parts of Europe and Asia.

Build Central America, Not a Wall
Help fix these broken countries so fleeing north won’t seem so urgent.
By The Editorial Board

Both of these stories appeared in today’s (Feb. 25th) New York Times. It’s important to note that each of these articles deals with one of the biggest threats to global peace (and yes, even prosperity) in the 21st Century: instability. Political, economic, and social stability are absolutely necessary for achieving and maintaining a functioning democracy. Any threat to stability is an existential threat, and we need to deal with it swiftly and wisely. And creating stability were none exists, should be high on the list of any democracy’s responsibilities.


Food for thought. There will be a lot more ahead of us. We need to pay attention.

“This planet will not be secure or peaceful when so few have so much, and so many have so little — and when we advance day after day into an oligarchic form of society where a small number of extraordinarily powerful special interests exert enormous influence over the economic and political life of the world . . . Inequality, corruption, oligarchy and authoritarianism are inseparable.”

I’ve left off the attribution for the above quote for the moment. Before you know who said it, ask yourself: Do I believe this? If I do, how do I believe that we, in this nation, should go about remedying this unjust imbalance? This is a daunting question. I’m firmly convinced that a large part of the answer involves you and me–personally, beginning with our will to be a part of that change. We can’t leave it up to someone else and expect that change to happen. The will of the people is the heart of Democracy. This is OUR challenge.

Who said the above statement? Bernie Sanders. He was quoted in this Opinion column by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times. During the next year and a half we’ll be taking the measure of the men and women who say they want to lead this country as the next President of the United States. There will be a lot of quotations ahead of us to mull over.

The Sadness in Human Nature

As I watch Donald Trump sow confusion and chaos in a nation that heretofore has been known to the world as a standard in all that is good in human nature, and as I watch his own political party stand aside in silence in the face of his selfish and destructive behavior, I am reminded of two quotations that say a lot about Trump’s enablers.

“. . . in obedience to figures they see as ‘authoritative,’ people will do to ‘others’ what they would otherwise do to nobody.”

Seven Theories of Human Nature, p.140, Leslie Stevenson

And this quotation I’ve already used recently, but in this instance is worth repeating.

“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

Albert Einstein

A Moral Disaster

An hour after putting up my previous post, this story was published by the Associated Press: The Trump Administration is Holding Thousands of Migrant Kids in Mass Shelters. This is a prime example of what I was talking about. 

Dr. Jack Shonkoff, who, heads Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child said of the 14,000 migrant children separated from their parents and held in detention centers: “This is not a perplexing scientific puzzle. This is a moral disaster.”

Why aren’t more members of Congress decrying this “policy”? What happened to the “compassionate conservative?” Certainly, our two Texas Senators as well as our representatives in Congress ought to be publicly vocal against what is happening in the Texas institutions holding these adolescents. And they should be actively pursuing a more compassionate solution to this heartless problem that their President has created. There’s no way they can avoid being responsible for what is happening to these children in their state.

Their Silence is Their Consent

While reading of our current American Chaos in the morning’s paper (yes, actual newsprint), I was reminded of a phrase and a quotation that seem apt considerations for our national dilemma.

The first is the Latin phrase “cui bono”, which means “to whose profit?” or “to whose benefit?” It is most often used today as a forensic question in law enforcement or legal circumstances in which the object is to find out who has the motive for a particular crime or misdeed to have been done. Often, too, it is applied to a situation where there is a hidden motive or where the party responsible for it happening is hidden or not apparent.

So when I think of Donald Trump’s presidency, with all of it’s moral darkness and it’s venal corruption, I wonder, how can this be allowed to happen? I look to his party. Don’t they benefit from being “in power” because he is in power? A few of them do speak up, but often they are headed out of office, and have nothing to loose. But for those who hold positions of influence in the party of the President, we hear mostly silence. Even though they may also find his Presidency abhorrent, they don’t want him removed from office lest it threaten their own power and the profit that comes with it.

And then I came across this quotation by Albert Einstein:

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

 There’s no escaping the fact that those of the President’s own party who remain silent, and hide behind that silence while the President sows chaos and harm across the globe in the name of this nation, are as deserving of our disdain as Donald Trump himself. Their silence is their consent.

The Chiaroscuro of Life

Carl Jung

“Evil needs to be pondered just as much as good, for good and evil are ultimately nothing but ideal extensions and abstractions of doing, and both belong to the chiaroscuro of life. In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil, and no evil that cannot produce good.”

Collected Works, Vol. 12, p.31, paragraph 36

The Facebook Dilemma

The following is from an NPR Frontline notice I received as a subscriber. I know I’ve got a lot of posts recently hammering Facebook, but it seems that finally a lot of people are waking up to the platform’s dangers. There are good things about FB, undeniably. But nothing is ALL good. Facebook’s dark side has been at work far too long without any questioning from anyone. Now the time for asking questions has come. And it’s long overdue. 

The promise of Facebook was to create a more open and connected world. But from the company’s failure to protect millions of users’ data, to the proliferation of so-called “fake news” and disinformation in the U.S.and across the world, mounting crises have raised the question: How has Facebook’s historic success as a social network brought about real-world harm?

With Facebook under continued scrutiny, we’re releasing the newest installment of The FRONTLINE Transparency Project: An interactive version of our acclaimed, two-hour investigation, The Facebook Dilemma, that allows you to experience the film in a different way and explore extended, in-depth, on-the-record interviews with nearly 30 sources from the making of the documentary.

Those sources include 13 current or former Facebook employees — all speaking on the record. Among them are: 

What they and the other Facebook insiders we interviewed have to say constitutes one of the most in-depth collections to date of what it’s like inside Facebook. And, our interactive enables you to click, see, save, and share scores of key quotes from sources like these in their original context – and to share direct links to any quote within an extended interview by highlighting the text.

In addition to Facebook insiders, this new installment of The FRONTLINE Transparency Project includes extended interviews with other key figures, including: President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, who says, “I mean, it’s kind of like a gift” of recent changes to Facebook’s political advertising policies; and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who tells us, “I think there does need to besome oversight of what’s out there on social media.”

This project is the latest example of FRONTLINE’s ongoing commitment to journalistic transparency, and is an interactive window into how the company has handled challenges over the years — as well as into how our documentary itself took shape. We’re opening up our reporting, and making the source material that goes into building our journalism not just available, but easily navigable and sharable.

We hope you’ll check out the interactive version of The FacebookDilemma today — and tell us what you think. Send a note to frontline@pbs.org to share your feedback.

Thank you for exploring our journalism .

It’s the End of News as We Know it (and Facebook is Feeling Fine)

This article in Mother Jones is an important summary of recent issues confronting Facebook, and how they’ve manipulated their response to the public and their users. I first saw this mentioned in a tweet by James Fallows. It’ll set your hair on fire. We can thank the British Guardian and the New York Times, for bringing this story to the public’s attention. Mark Zuckerberg tried to cover it up.

A Common Sense Website and Movement

I recently came across this website (Freedom From Facebook) and looked into its mission and organizers. I think it’s a worthy organization to pay attention to if you’re concerned at all about your data on the Internet. Don’t take your privacy for granted. It’s YOUR data Facebook is monetizing, and we need to be informed about what they’re harvesting, and how they’re using it. How else can we judge if the trade-off is worth it?

Also, you should go to this page on the website for a step-by-step guide for getting the maximum privacy from your Facebook use. You don’t have to give them everything!

By the way, the New York Times has been doing an admirable job of exposing the egregious misuse of power by Facebook.

A Theory and a Story

Here’s an article by Michael Tomasky that makes an argument that I whole-heartedly embrace. It’s about how, of the two major American political parties, the Republicans’ messaging in the last 30 or 40 years has steam-rolled the Democrats, who seem to be utterly incapable of refuting it or offering something better.

The main reason the Republicans have been so successful: they have a theory and a story and they’re sticking to it. It’s supply-side economics: Cutting taxes, especially for the rich, and decreasing regulation, they say, will unleash so much innovation and economic activity that tax revenues will actually increase and the entire economy will benefit.

But now the Republicans have a problem with their theory and story: they haven’t worked. During the same 30 or 40 years they’ve been flogging that mantra, the middle class has all but disappeared, while the wealth of the upper 5% has exploded. Now, it seems, the people are finally catching on to the Republican shell game.

Tomasky’s argument is that the Democrats are long overdue for a theory and a story of their own, one that will clearly convey to the voters what they stand for, and how they want to respond to the Republican deception . And he has some answers to that. I urge you to read the article.

Democrats need to hear and heed Tomasky’s message. Then do it.

Side by side headlines, dramatically different stories.

I’m occasionally struck by the media’s juxtaposition of stories with startlingly different headlines. You wonder why editorial chose to put such jarring stories side by side. I came across this one last week: the cruelty of poverty and war . . . and the unabashed abundance of a wealthy nation.

The day before yesterday the New York times posted this image again . . . and said the little girl had died.

“I’m a Child of Immigrants. And I Have a Plan to Fix Immigration”

“Neither Democrats nor Republicans will like it. But it would be humane, it would adhere to the rule of law, and it would work.”

Sonia Nazario is the author of Enrique’s Journey, is a graduate of Williams College and holds a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She received an honorary doctorate in 2010 from Mount St. Mary’s College. She has twice made the same journey those in “the caravan” are making, traveling the length of Mexico with Central American migrants.

Ms. Nazario’s fix, as she outlines in her article (same title as this post) is, finally, an adult, compassionate, and common sensical approach to the “immigration problem” as we’ve come to call it. It’s a problem of our own making, and we will have to be the people who “fix” it. We need to listen to what she has to say.

“The greatest liar hath his believers . . .”

This morning’s New York Times editorial page carried this article by Jennifer Finney Boylan of Banard College, Colombia University in which she quotes Jonathan Swift (1667-1745):

“The greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.”

The article was about the destructive power of lies, and the shocking potential destruction that can be wrought by “deep fakes,” a unique production of our digital age. Deep fakes are lies that deceive the eye and ears via digital manipulation of photos, videos, and documents so that they appear to deliver a message other than what the original intended. Donald J. Trump and his minions are adept at this, and they are continually taking advanced courses from the true masters of deception and lies, the Russians.

All of this is to say, that today, more than ever (the lies of Swift’s era over 300 years ago took weeks to travel to their targeted ears and eyes) when a lie travels a global course in seconds, a believed lie can be acted upon to disastrous results, before truth can be ferreted out. To that point, here’s the rest of Swift’s quote, the sentence immediately following the one Boylan cited above:

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect . . . .”

More than ever, all of us today need always apply “critical thinking” to all we hear and see.  In a world where lies are so convincingly presented, citizens who cherish their democracy need to be educated, and involved, and vote. If we aren’t and don’t, there’s no certainty we’ll have our democracy long, and no reason to believe we deserve it.

Beauty and insight in a fragment of a forgotten sentence.

I’ve kept journals for decades, and recently while going through one nearly twenty years old, I came across this splinter from a forgotten sentence I’d jotted down, source unrecorded. There was only this penciled note: “I think from a newspaper article, or magazine article . . . an unexpected phrase of poetic beauty.”

“. . . the bitter precision of life’s small heartbreaks.”

It seems to me, that in the grand scheme of things, whatever it is, it’s no mistake this phrase survived for us to think about.

How the “ruling class” frame their assets to the rest of us.

We’re all familiar now with Mark Zuckerberg’s unceasing and hypocritical paen to the sacred interactions of loyal Face Book users, and how their interactions on his platform will make their lives so much better. Well, I recently came across the following tweet, it’s origin long-lost to repetition, that gives the lie to Zuck’s magnanimity:

“‘Community’ is a hell of a euphemism for his database.”

For further reading on this subject of “the ruling class”, here’s an article/transcript of a podcast interview with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

APHORISM

aph·o·rism  [ˈafəˌrizəm]

NOUN
a pithy observation that contains a general truth, a statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words. Examples:

 “The child is father to the man.”  (William Wadsworth)

 

“Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” (George Orwell)

 

  “Sure he [Astaire] was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did … backwards and in high heels” (Bob Thaves)

Straying afield from ourselves . . . what could we learn if we would?

Years ago, in the spring of 1989, I was reading a new book I’d just bought  by one of my favorite historians, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and scholar of Late Antiquity. I was reading, The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, and I’d just begun the book, still in the introduction, when I came upon the following lines:

“After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain knowingness . . . and not, in one way or another, . . . in the knower’s straying afield from himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on thinking and reflecting at all.”

The quotation is from the philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, whose writings and theories addressed, in part, the relationship between power and knowledge.

At that time in 1989 I’d just finished my novel, Mercy, which would come out the next year, and I was taking a breather from work, catching up on neglected reading which always piles up when I’m in the middle of writing a book. The entire quotation leaped off the page. I underlined it. I put an asterisk by it. And I wrote it in my journal.

Over the years, I’ve come back to it again and again. I use it to question and re-examine my prejudices. To question the way I think about everything, and as I get older, to wonder if I am still capable of “thinking differently than I think”. This is important to me, because I’ve often wished others did, and if I wish it for them, I can not avoid wanting it for myself as well.

In our present era of polarization in politics and culture, when all of us seem to be gnashing out at each other from our lairs of dark and selfish prejudices, wouldn’t it be valuable for us to learn to think differently than we do, to perceive differently than we see? Wouldn’t it be valuable for us to TRY, at least?