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On Magritte

9/20/2014

Throughout this summer, the Art Institute of Chicago has hosted an exhibition of my favorite painter, Rene Magritte. There has never yet been a show on the major museum circuit dedicated to the years of Magritte’s evolution from surrealistic tinkerer to symbolist master, and the show, titled “The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” highlights in force how he sought to make “everyday objects shriek aloud.” A few examples:

If you’ve read a few of my posts here, the station Magritte holds for me should be no surprise. I’ve always been drawn to the enigmatic nature of his scenes, which often juxtapose or even merge household items together to evoke some deep revelation, as though scraping at the mystery with a fingernail. Or even a crowbar. To me, he is not the most technically accomplished of the masters: at times his people and scenes seem flat or oddly shaped. But the potency of his work lies in his ideas, which smack your cerebellum like the head of a hammer. Going through the exhibition, it was interesting to see his maturation; he started his career with almost Dali-esque panoramas filled of many different characters and images, leaving the audience straining to piece together a ramshackle story. But by the mid-30’s, he was concentrating on one idea per canvas, like the pieces I’ll go over below, and it’s this focus where he harnessed the full potential of his form.

But in seeing the exhibition and reading about the man, I’ve had a shift in my thinking about him in that his work plunges deeper into the mystery than I realized. I was, of course, drawn to him for semiotic reasons: he’s a field day for someone who enjoys the challenge of making meaning out of the meaningless.

But reading his giant words quoted on a wall of the Art Institute is when I realized that much of the time he is not concerned with meaning. He doesn’t necessarily want his audience to connect the dots. Often, there are no dots--there's just the mystery. It really is just a train sticking out of a fireplace. In his book Magritte, Jacques Meuris asserts that, in many ways Magritte wasn’t a surrealist, he was a realist in that he took the surrealistic images that his mind created and tried to reproduce them on canvas as accurately as possible. He disdained Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland because it presented fantastic scenes in a dreamscape. Magritte's point is that the dreamscape is a very real part of our reality, albeit one that exists in our minds, though this reinforces the thesis that what happens in the mind, as mysterious and unexplainable as it is, is in many ways just as real as the tangible world around us--a powerful idea that not only challenges the way we think about our minds, but how we look at the perspective lenses with which we view the objective world around us.

For many of his works, there was no point other than the experience of the mystery itself. So let’s tour some mysteries…

Time Transfixed, 1938. Coming soon to a living room near you...Modernism! (Whether you want it or not.) Seeing all these live is obviously a completely different experience, and I have to eat my words about his technical skill here. The unique woodgrains on each individual floorboard are as meticulous as nature. First saw this piece in the excellent high-art-auction board game Masterpiece at age 10 or 11, and the real one is housed in Chicago. Here he's clearly trying to grab your relaxed conceptual mind and twist it like taffy.

The Lovers II, 1928. Emotionally universal; intimately anonymous. It must be difficult to breathe in there, and hot, and they don't care. The color of the wall is soft and warm, a wonderful balance to the dress and contrast the the ominously dark background. The stormy blues and blacks behind, as well as the shadow in the back of his head, contrasts with the glow of the soft white cloth to make their passion that much tighter, honest, and urgent.

Clairvoyance, 1936. A self-portrait, an artist's statement, a revelation. Everything simultaneously contains all its history and all its potential. Also a commentary on our ability to choose what to see: the past, the present, the future, the imagined, the inevitable, and maybe even the hoped for, not to mention the work and time and energy needed to see those hopes realized.

The Treachery of Images, 1928-1929. Brief, boring, and profound. Alfred Korzybski's aphorism that "the map is not the territory" appeared not much later. There's been way too much written about this, most of which I haven't read, so this is no real revelation, but I like to think of that quote and this painting as tools used to unhinge some of the restriction that linguistic constructs and images can have on the way we see reality. The pictures, words, and concepts our brains create to interpret our reality are not the things themselves, and since those concepts have a significant effect on the way we see reality, we should look at them an analyze them. This, to me, is semiotics in a nutshell. Because if we can take a step back and see the distance between the symbols of things and the things themselves, we can increase our general skills of discernment, insight, and appreciation.

The Banquet, 1958. This might be my favorite. The burning sunset sky and searing orange dot contrast well with the somber mute of the trees and silence of the stones in the fence. The detail on the fence is both cartoonish and familiar. You can feel the stone on your hands, hear the crickets, see the lightning bug dancing among the trees. Then you get snapped out of it by that dot, right in the middle, screaming, "This is a painting!" Is it the sun, or a sick joke? Does it make you appreciate what surrounds it any less? Magritte was also frustratingly enigmatic with the titles of his paintings. A banquet of what?

And through web of nonsensically subconscious associations, Magritte was still not primarily concerned with meaning. On page 29 of Mueris book, he's quoted as saying, "...what I paint implies no superiority of the invisible over the visible; the latter is sufficiently rich to form the poetic language which evokes the mystery of the invisible and the visible." As the map is not the territory, the painting is not the thing--but the painting is the painting, and it is the interaction that the viewer has with the painting (though those are also two separate things), all us viewers with all our different histories and personalities and mechanisms for conceptualization. And if that's what Magritte endeavored to create each time he set to the canvas, to create the unique mystery for each of us, then maybe his entire oeuvre is a critique of the idea and necessity of conceptualization itself, and by extension, pointing to all the universalities and uniquenesses our conceptual mechanisms share.

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On Arrogance (Or Omitting the Understood "I think...)

9/16/2014

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Everyone has their opinions, myself clearly not excluded, and the proliferation of the interwebs exposes us to more things to be opinionated about, more opinions about those things, more ways to express those opinions.

And this is where arrogance comes in, because arrogance is forgetting when an opinion is an opinion. Dictionary.com says that arrogance is an “offensive display of superiority or self-importance,” and to me, that self-importance is aligning one’s subjective opinion with objective truth such that one is presenting one’s self as an unquestionable arbiter of whatever is going on. Now sure, some opinions are more well-founded, thought out, or researched than others. But the minute a person switches into “I’m right/you’re wrong” mode, it delegitimizes that person’s opinion by automatically showing an ethical blindspot.

Being confident is different than being arrogant. Confident people still solicit others’ opinions; they want to actively listen; they understand their subjectivity may have flaws. That doesn’t mean they aren’t firm in their stance, it means they have the self-knowledge to know that their knowledge isn’t boundless, and listening to other people helps them strengthen and clarify their own viewpoints on reality.

Having authority is different than being arrogant. Authority can be arrogant, but authority must, inherently, command decisions. To the extent that that authority or authorities listens to others’ perspectives and weighs the needs of the many in his or her or their decision making is the mark of authority.

“Just so you know: Iiiiii’m a very humble person.” True humility is a virtue because it recognizes one’s own limitations; it recognizes that one has limitations, even limitations he or she might not be aware of, and is open to hearing and understanding viewpoints that might not yet have been taken into consideration. Humility is confident because it knows it can act justly and accordingly given as much information as possible, and humility can still hold authority by being open to other viewpoints but being clearheaded enough to make decisions that benefit everyone involved, not just the authority-holder.

Arrogance isn’t easy to miss. Arrogance won’t ask you for your opinion, will readily talk over you, will challenge whatever you say (even if you’re right, or even if a point is inconsequential), will overlook credentials or research, will disregard any blatant counterarguments, will rationalize to you why you hold a wrong opinion. In short, true arrogance lives in a solipsistic bubble; it sealed airtight from other opinions and perspectives, often in a narrowly self-serving way. It doesn’t want dialogue. It just wants to impose its viewpoint. It ignorantly aligns its perspective with truth instead of seeing itself as one in a sea of perspectives. Arrogance marginalizes. It cares about your opinion only insofar as it can tell you what is wrong with your opinion.

Arrogance can get a hold of anyone, though some are probably more predisposed. We all need to be en guard, to be more empathetic to other perspectives, to know that all the information we have is not all the information and that whatever we do affects many lives outside our own, often in ways that are secret and obscure to us.

One easy way to spot arrogance (a.k.a. I-know-better-than-youness) is through how often a person wants to declare a truth like "She's not that good looking" or "This country is a disaster" or "That house across the street needs to get some different colored curtains to match those shutters because what they have right now is just not working" without beginning the declaration with an appropriate modifier such as "I think" or "I believe" or "I'm like 99.99999 and 7/8ths percent sure." This is the way by which people conflate opinion with truth, and consequently, how truth gets created, shaped, and potentially mangled beyond recognition. Not that I think it is absolutely necessary to add "I think" to every statement; clearly I haven't used it in this essay prior to this sentence. (Let this parenthetical serve as a blanket "I think" for this whole piece. Cool?) More that we should just be aware that these phrase or its equivalent is operating even when unsaid. If someone says, "This country is a disaster," do we immediately accept that statement on face value? No. Usually we filter the statement through our trustworthiness of that person, what we know of their character and history, and agree or disagree accordingly. The short- and long-term narratives entrenched in our minds both shape and are shaped by these declarations. And in this way, the proliferation of human knowledge crushes onward.

Another obvious signal of arrogance (which I make no bones about using in spades here either) is state-being-verbs, such as "is." The word can be used to express truth OR opinion, but the linguistic construction both looks and sounds the same. When someone says making your bed is a waste of time or that politician is a liar or that it is important that we get tickets to that musical that you've already seen twice, they are expressing a subjective perspective on reality despite those statements seeming similar to a foot is twelve inches or the sky is full of clouds or that musical is selling out on a regular basis. Again, people don't need to change the way they talk; most listeners can tell statement from opinion on a multiple choice test. I don't think it's as easy when you're hearing what you want to hear. Subjectivity and objectivity are often confused (especially because the overwhelming desire for human connection is about the things our individual subjectivities share). And "is" isn't the only linking verb. Many arrogant statements use words like "seems" or "does" among many others to put forth their opinion as fact.

To untangle the word "is" I know you may want me to post a Bill Clinton video, but that's too easy. Instead, in this gem, Robert Anton Wilson discusses why we should do away with the word "is" altogether.

The apostle of subjectivity, preaching it like no one can (I think/feel/believe/experience.)

My short essay here is far more theoretical than specific. If you want specifics, start a discussion about politics or religion or philosophy at the dinner table or a bar or a message board. Or watch a 24-hour news channel for five minutes and think to yourself, “Who’s perspective is being shared? Who's perspective is being left out?” Or maybe just see who's listening. Who wants to learn. Who can keep their mouth shut.

Don't worry, I'll work on this too. I've not often been accused of being arrogant but I have an illogical fear of it. It’s a fine line we walk: trying to speak the truth, and speak our truth, without confusing it with the truth. While also being economical with language. I'm just guessing you don't want to read "I think" in every sentence. That's fine. As long as we're doing regular maintenance on our bullshit detectors.

For some strategies on avoiding arrogance and promoting dialogue, check out Daniel Dennett's rules for constructive criticism over at BrainPickings.org, and let me know if you have others.

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On a Billion

9/14/2014

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I recently fumbled upon the realization that every day, the human race is setting a new world record for the amount of human beings on the planet, despite all the nasty, unfortunate things that happen to us. Seven billion we’re at right now. Just a handful of billion, which isn’t a lot of them, until you think about how unfathomable a billion is.

The word itself—billion—is a beautiful thing. That “b” in the front gives it a special pop, a bursting impact into the conversation that’s followed with “i“’s and “l” in a row like a bright city skyline. Billion is glossy, glitzy, rolling off your tongue like lollipops down a waterslide. A billion.

(Funny enough, there is another word for the natural number 1,000,000,000: a milliard, not to be confused with the fowl you throw bread crust to at the pond. A milliard is a billion, and vice versa, as if to the actual digits (1,000,000,000) it makes a difference.)

A billion, as in, of course, a billion dollars. Cha-ching. But other than currency and people, a billion doesn’t enter the lexicon very often. Because other than for scientists and math nerds, a billion isn’t practical. We never use that number in our day-to-day mathematical interactions (“stir in a billion nanocups of milk and a few billion nanospoons of butter…”), and really, thinking about that much stuff makes my head hurt.

How many plankton are in the sea? Grains of sand on all the beaches? Water molecules in the ocean? Grass blades in the planet’s history? Moments in a second?

Speaking of time, about a billion seconds ago America and Russia were tangled in the Cold War, a billion minutes ago the Roman Empire was entering the height of its power, and a billion hours ago we were inventing the wheel the first time.

Now think about a billion dollars. A billion dollar bills stacked on top of each other would be nearly 70 miles high, and despite each one being printed the same, with a sober President Washington and the all-seeing eye atop the pyramid, no two are exact, varying shades of ink, creases, edges, wear, tear, dirt, amount of times spent, time left in circulation, purchases made, hands passed through.

The idea of a billion people would take more cognitive RAM to process than our brain can fit inside this cranium, and that’s if we’re just thinking of them as clones of each other, not as billions of unique bodies, personalities, perceptions, histories, philosophies, existential drives, favorite desserts. They say the human brain can hold about seven numbers in consciousness at a time, and memory champions can get that to a few hundred. That’s nothing compared to seven billion, or the hundreds of billions of food, water, and air they ingest each day, or the trillions of dollars they spend, or the quadrillions of actions and interactions they enact, and how do you even count an action? Where does one end and other begin? And if there are more than three hundred quadrillion ants crawling through the planet (about 150 lbs. of ant for every human, according to unsubstantiated internet sources, the possible inaccuracy of which reinforces my point here), how many interactions do they go through in a day? And would they even count them the same? How do ants perceive space and time?

All of this, dirt, water, people, and ants, not to mention all the other sealife and landlife and individual atoms of atmosphere, all compacted into one spherical blue rock whizzing through through empty space, itself just infinitesimal in sprawling ocean of billions upon billions of planets and stars.

At this point, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t pay homage to the poet-scientist most famous for his use of and reverence to the number.

It’s all just so big. And it’s all just so small. And it’s all exactly the size that it is.

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On Winning

9/13/2014

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Winning inherently feels good because it is not only the satisfaction of a goal (if you're playing, it's usually to win), it's an elevation of self-worth, a mark of your capability and a demonstration of dominance. Unfortunately, this means there's always going to be a loser, which is something nobody wants to be, because losing is less worth for you, less significance, less being a thing that affects its environment, less a thing that matters.

But no one wins all the time; everyone's a loser at some point. Losing over and over is how you learn to win. and in that lies the trill of competition. Feasably, anyone can win at the beginning of a competition. Every underdog has a shot. Anything can happen in the final minutes (even though a close family member says the first 46 minutes of a basketball game are unnecessary).

We like drama. We're entertain ourselves with it; we distract ourselves with it. Competition is unscripted, livable drama. And whether we're talking professional sports or a battle of the bands or a writing contest or a game of checkers on the porch, we're invested in each moment of it, and the story those moments stitch together when you mix individual/team ability with a rigid set of rules and the chaos of possibility.

Which is why, if you care about winning, you gotta put the time in, the work in, and you can't accept losing. When Lombardi says that "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing," he's equating the whole point of the enterprise with the goal of the enterprise, otherwise we wouldn't put ourselves through the grueling struggle of it. We must exercise and sweat and practice and sweat and self-analyze and sweat and sweat until it hurts. We need to invest the suffering to our bodies and egos to build us into the kind of machine that can win, and then when we do win, we can take that time to indulge our fragile human side by relaxing into the pride of a job well done, ideally with some graciousness to those we defeated.

But to do that, you do have to accept losing, and sometimes a lot of it, albeit in a much different way. I know I'm miserable if my contentment with any enterprise is 100% aligned with the outcome instead of the act itself. Even the gloss of winning always wears off.

There's a self-loathing in losing, a measure of lacking self-worth that is illogical because your competitive performance in chess or hockey is only a measure of how good you are at that one thing--it doesn't spill over into the rest of your life. A standardized test only really measures how well you can do on that standardized test. Because, as per the formula of abilities + rules + possibility, there's only so much you can control yourself. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book Outliers: we equate success with ability and neglect many of the other uncalculable properties that determine what makes someone successful. However much you want to be the best at that one thing and how much you make it your life stirs into a whole cauldron of luck to become how successful you are at it, and even then, a great game you lose is often far more satisfying than a bad game you win.

But still, obviously, no one wants to lose. We want to matter; we want to impact our environment. "I don't want to be a product of my environment," Jack Nicholson states in The Departed (while playing a gangster who killed to win at life), "I want my environment to be a product of me." When you lose, you've become the product. When you win, you stamp your agency on the world around you. You take the deepest part of yourself and use it to manipulate the physical world to your ends. You impress your will upon reality. Most often without hurting people.

But no one can do it all the time. On the field/court/ice/course/track/mat /etc., OR in life. We each make waves in our realities, but we're all also at floating in an ocean of butterfly effects.

And would you even want to win all the time? A thousand winning percentage is like a drug, like those women's college teams who dominate for two or three straight seasons. It's unnatural. So just like all binaries, winning and losing yin-and-yang, they create each other. Don't get my wrong, I'm trying to win every single time. I'll just be happy winning one out of two. Or happy nonetheless.

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On Red

8/13/2014

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Writing about one's favorite color slightly smacks of needing something to write about, but the last time I cracked open a can of Coca-Cola and realized the beautiful can swindled me into a less-than-satisfying taste experience (i.e., my eyes had swindled me), I knew it was time for some analysis. (Not that my eyes haven't swindled me before. Sooner or later, most people find themselves in that relationship...)

Coca-Cola. First aid. The jerseys of the Bulls and Blackhawks. Roses. Ketchup. Strawberries. Santa Claus. A firetruck. A cardinal. A ruby. The Canadian flag. That color--the boldness of it, the fervency--draws my eye and, often, holds it. If we play Sorry! or Settlers of Catan I'm reaching for the red game pieces (and I'm secretly disappointed if I don't get them). But it isn't as though we have a special kinship, me and red. I haven't picked it as a favorite, and I don't even think a favorite color is a thing worthy of thinginess. But I know that it pulls my eye. It interests me, more than the emotional tones of blue, the quirkiness of purple, the nourishing flavor of green, the shocking vibrancy of yellow, or the too-cool-for-school attitude of orange.

Red is a very practical color, mostly for stop signs, stop lights, brake lights, and emergency sirens. Red alerts us to danger. It gets our attention. I think this have something to do with its occurrence in nature. Most of nature is green, brown, or blue. The grass, the dirt, the water, the sky. There are some exceptions to this, like a soothing crimson sunset, a flowering vermilion volcano, or a stunning rusty desert, but the peculiarity of those instances arrest our attention. Mostly, red appears in nature as a detail: a berry on a bush, a bird on a branch, a bug on a begonia.

At this point, I think the responsible blogger would delve into the biology of the eye and the neurology of color experience, but after doing the research (i.e. Wikipedia and four Youtube videos), not only am I not sure it helps me figure out the point or purpose of red, but it makes my pendulum just swing from biology back to phenomenology. I don't care as much how the trick is done as the reasons why I'm dazzled by it.

(That said, the cones in your eyes are the ones that detect color, and 60% of your cones detect only the color red, as opposed to 30% for green and 10% for blue. Every color we see is a combination of these three colors. They send information to the visual cortex in the back of your brain, which then creates the phenomenal experience of color through a process that both neurologists and philosophers are still not entirely sure of and is outside the scope or attention span of this post to dive into, though I warrant it's an interesting question that I'll get to at some point. My focus is the creation of meaning, in particular the meaning the color has when utilized for things like emergency lighting, marketing campaigns, and athletic uniforms, which brings us to...)

There's one other major place red occurs in nature, and that's blood. Bloody blood. Organic petroleum. Whenever you see it it means danger. Something's wrong. That stuff is supposed to stay inside of you. Or red is the tongue, the mouth, and other erogenous zones it would behoove you to pay attention to.

I think it's this association, imprinted upon our brains through millions of years of evolutionary trial and error, that gives red its meaning. Red is urgency, red is vitality, red is passion, love, action. Red is pumping through us. Red seethes; red pulses. Stop signs and brake lights shock us awake, yes, but Valentine's Day cards arouse our hearts and bold sports jerseys incite action. I think it's because we are all blood on the inside, and when it isn't blood, the red we see is food and flowers and fire and flirtations, things that propel nature's animation. Because whether it's hair, lipstick, coals, a flag, a convertible, or a tin can with sugary brown liquid inside, red grabs you. Red grits its teeth. Red stands on the edge of a cliff staring into the sunset with the wind through its hair. And then red hugs you and won't ever let you go

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On X

4/20/2014

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X is deceptively simple. Two lines strategically placed in symmetrical bisection and rotated such to look both perfectly askew and perfectly stable. The 24th letter of the alphabet might have more uses outside of English than any other letter, except maybe its hugs-and-kisses counterpart, O (and as far as symbols go, the circle is difficult to compete with). But in the realm of things that stand for other things, X’s versatility is remarkable.

X-marks-the-spot on a map, making it a designator of precise location. Right. There. It is also the most often used algebraic variable, where it signifies the unknown (until you solve for it) which is, oddly enough, the opposite of designating precision. Consequently, it gets a whole axis named after it on the Cartesian plane, a further testament to the infinite realm of numbers X can be. It’s a mathematical chameleon. Unless we’re talking the Roman system instead of the Arabic. Then it’s just 10.

But it is also a sign of danger, especially when formed from a pair of bones, placed under a smiling skull, and flown atop a canon-armed ship or stickered to a bottle in a laboratory. Other common uses are in the phrase “the X-Factor,” an uncategorizeable exception or unpredictable agent. This is connected to one of X’s shining moments in popular culture, the X-Men, the thrilling superhero team allegorizing the battle between tolerance and intolerance. Which side of this debate does X belong? Well, when we cross our two forefingers in front of us we are warding something away, and if you’re reading this on the computer, then there’s an X in the upper right of whatever program you have open waiting for your command to exit. Want to excise text? CTRL + X. The X-Men may be named for Professor Xavier, but they are branded as the unknowable, unpredictable, unwanted others of society. Every society has its X-Men.

X is mysterious, darkly mystical, unknown, a symbol for symbols. The letter that nets you 8 points in Scrabble means so many things that it almost doesn’t want you to know what it means. It revels in its subversiveness, a smile beneath a shadowy cloak, ready to brandish coin or blade.

This power, I believe (or, as an analyzer of symbols, choose to believe) is derived from X’s shape. Two perfectly diagonal lines bisecting each other in the center has a specific effect on our culture’s visual conventions. First, it is the inverse of a square. While a square is simple and shapely and draws a boundary between what it includes and excludes, X is merely exclusionary. You can’t get inside X; you can’t know X. There’s no space in there, just four disorienting corners.

That awkwardness puts us off. In many Xs, there aren’t right angles but two acute and two obtuse, and even when the angles are right they are positioned awkwardly. In a society of right-angle buildings and intersections, X is defiantly different. It seems to pull from the furthest reaches of its stretch—that corner, and that one, and over there and there—stretching as wide and far as it can, stretching to grab everything if it had the choice, and bringing it all in to a single point. The intersection. Where all the separate entities of everything migrate to commune.

This shape does not just give X practical application at railroad crossings, in bowling alleys, and on game shows, there is a grander architecture to it. It symbolizes one of the great binaries of our reality: the individuals, all out there where those four arms are stretching to grasp, and the collective, where they all meet in the middle. And we don’t every really know what is going to happen when individuals collect in the middle. It’s unknown, unpredictable. Each connection between individuals is as unique as the two people in that connection. We may commune or exclude, meet ally or danger. We may judge each other solely on quantifiables. We may click together with a good handshake or be awkward or misunderstood. Or, not knowing what to do, we may wander in the mystery that is our unsolipsistic sharing of this space. Whatever that mystery is, where the known and unknown forever intersect, that’s the spot that X marks.

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On Comparing Oneself with Others

4/20/2014

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The social phenomenon of one human being comparing himself or herself to others has more ins and outs than an ant farm, but I wanted to address the general topic because the mechanism of comparing ourselves to others is both really important and potentially quite damaging, along with unavoidably ubiquitous.

We compare our bodies to models and make ourselves feel terrible instead of accepting the beauty of nature (flabby or unsixpackly as it may be). We compare our grades to other students, wanting to be as good as her in, like, every subject. We compare careers, wishing we made the money he or she makes or that we climbed as fast. We compare stages of life and want to know why we didn’t get married/buy the house/have the kids at the same ages as our parents or grandparents or friends or enemies or delusionally idolized celebrity.

Before addressing the perils, we should acknowledge that comparing ourselves to other individuals does have valuable function. First, it lets us know where we are. If all of our other high school friends are bagging groceries and selling movie tickets, maybe it’s time for us to pull ourselves off of the couch after school. The same could be said for hitting the gym, learning fiscal responsibility, and taking up extracurriculars. Paying attention to what others are doing gives us suggestions and hints for how to improve our own lives. There are some people who, admittedly, have a chronic habit of this, worrying about their neighbors at the expense of doing something with their own damn lives, and there’s always keeping up with whatever major electronic purchases the Joneses just made. But done healthily, comparing our lives to other’s lives is a key mechanism in the evolution of personal and cultural identity. To varying degrees, we each influence and are influenced by each other. We see this most specifically in professional sports and the capitalist sector, where concrete metrics are used to judge performance. Competition creates greater ingenuity and talent, or so states the main maxim of the market.

But it can turn problematic on both psychological and sociological levels when we take this idea of comparison (and its selfish stepbrother, competition) to aspects of our personal lives that require more active consciousness on our part. Comparisons set unrealistic expectations, whether its wanting a body you’ll never have (no matter how many crunches you do) or hoping for a job outside your talents or ability levels. If you aren’t good with words you shouldn’t go into law; if you don’t have people skills maybe dealing with customers isn’t for you. Some people don’t have the dedication, energy, money, circumstances, or coordination to go to medical school (I have none of those five). Other expectations, like body type or marital status or religious conviction, can be even more tyrannical and lead to eating disorders, early divorce, and moral inferiority.

Interpersonal comparisons don’t account for our individual uniqueness, down to all the dimensions of intricacy for each person. Even if two people have similar skill as a parent, the wealth of other differences between them are going to affect what kinds of parents they actually are, not to mention the uniqueness of the children. The human being is so complex that, very often, we wind up comparing ourselves to others instead of learning how to reach the potential of our own unique selves. These comparisons can damage our self-esteem and lead to further comparisons in a brutal downward spiral like a house of mirrors where you never see your own reflection. Maybe the worst effect is that comparing ourselves to others promotes conformity and suppresses our individuality, which not only weakens the spirit of the individual but also deprives the community of that person’s true gifts.

It’s so easy to slap a categorical label on ourselves or to measure this thing with this metric and use it to define ourselves as this or that (or not this or that). And how often are we bombarded with the trite sales pitch of “Best Service,” “Best Product,” “World’s Best Grandpa.” A few weeks ago I was at a school that claimed that they had the best teachers and services, as if this word “best” means anything. What it really means is that the advertiser isn’t confident enough or clever enough to sell the product on its own merits. It’s the same mentality of the schoolyard bully: pump yourself up by putting someone down. Outside of any quantitative measurements, best is always subjective, and even then sports and stocks aren’t without their arguments and controversies.

In writing this, I saw a father in his mid-40’s with two young children. Not being that age yet, I thought, “That could be me someday.” Bam. Just read an inane article online showing what body parts of what celebrities men and women chose to represent the “perfect” male and female body (as if the idea of such an objectivity weren’t something to politely smile at). Comparison mode engaged. (Who gave that order?)

It’s natural, it’s unavoidable, it’s sometimes quite helpful. It all matters how we do it. When we use other people as a mirror and analyze our reflections, we should do it consciously, with self-awareness and self-love, and—perhaps the greatest challenge here—with a mature intuition for when to tell that comparing inner critic, “Thanks for the comment. You’re good at what you do. In the meantime, I’m gonna go lay on the beach of my life for a while. Check in with you later. Peace!”

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On Resistance

4/3/2014

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There are two types of resistance. That of the romantic revolutionary or the monolithic system of oppression (Viva la resistance! vs. the futility of that resistance), and that of something preventing you from a goal. Like a 4,000-pound boulder in the middle of the road or two young children clinging to your legs. People even give themselves resistance on purpose when they're working out. Even the stretchy home exercise things are called resistance bands. And why do they do people work out? Because resistance makes you grow.

Breaking muscle builds muscle. Hard work is the thunderstorm you must suffer to grow a capability: at the piano, writing, pinball, whatever. Artists go through years of shame at their work not meeting their expectations because they're unrealistic about how much resistance you need to push through to be that good. I know that each broken heart I've had has taught me a new way to love. Resistance is inescapable. In fact, each resistance is an opportunity, despite how tall the hill looks when we first encounter it.

Thank goodness resistance isn't something you can escape. Viva la resistance! is now a phrase that can multitask. Boy do we try though, to escape it I mean, through sleep and booze and yelling at people and opiates of all kinds, not to mention emotional defense mechanisms like denial and projection and rationalizing (which cause more or lessresistance? hmm...). Yep, resistance takes all shapes and sizes, but it's always there. The roots of a tree must grow through the soil, a baker throws away ruined batches, every marriage encounters instability. Even the slickest substance has the slightest friction against ice. Resistance is a byproduct of having more than one object in a single reality: some of them are going to bump into each other. This fact makes it an inherent aspect of being alive. Your life is a story, and every story needs conflict or else it isn't a story. It's stasis. But we can judo-flip resistance by flipping our mind: resistance should not be avoided, but embraced. Our inward resistances are signs pointing to challenges we can accept or decline. The path of least resistance may get you somewhere, but it isn't going to bring you there with many tools to work with.

In the same way an athlete puts on muscle and strengthens their speed and endurance (or maybe the way you are I are happy after ten morning push-ups), we can use non-physical resistance to grow. By that I mean our dislikes, our aversions, our biases. "I haven't tried that, but I don't like it" becomes "I'm going to put myself through it and see who I am on the other side."

Maybe you hate jazz, avoid your mailbox, think Indian food stinks, or can't stand Aunt Mertle. Great. The first step is acknowledging that resistance. The second step is assessing whether or not this is a resistance you could lean in to. The third is deciding whether you actually should lean into it (you know, making a grown-up decision), even if it's only a slight lean, like a drunk guy using tall bushes for balance. Maybe that thing you were resisting wasn't as bad as you thought. You might even like it. On the other hand, some resistances might be too difficult or painful; you lift whatever weight you can. The fourth step is doing the leaning. Work with the resistance when possible and take breaks. Maybe a half hour of listening to Aunt Mertle talk about Joan Rivers and Barbara Streisand is good for you once in a while, but you don't need to stay in her guest bedroom with those six cats all weekend.

Some people practice confronting resistance by doing charitable work, following a routine or code, pushing themselves into unique experiences, or just accepting the commonplace frustrations of life. That stuff's like hitting the gym hard. I'm not always consistent with my physical exercise, though I'm getting better at it. What I will say is that I find it useful to look for similarities between the physical and metaphysical aspects of the human being. At least it makes it easier to talk about this stuff. And maybe I can't do a pull-up (even though I really want to do a pull up), but not many people meet their end because they are unable to pull themselves up off the edge of a cliff. Life doesn't always test those muscles in that way, but there are a different set of muscles that it can work like a masseuse with the hands of a farmer. And it probably will.

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On Whatever a Facebook Like Means

2/23/2014

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My non-Facebooking brother: What's a Facebook Like?
Me: You give it to people on Facebook.
My bro: How do you give it?
Me: You click Like.

This topic has been floating around in my mind when I realized that every time I made a Facebook post, I'd take it down in a few hours if it didn't have any Likes on it. How neurotic is that? So after actually seeing I was doing this (somewhere like 5-10 times in a few months), I got a little self critical and unconsciously resolved to do three things: 1) only post what I thought was the highest quality, 2) not care how many likes I got, and 3) explore deeper what the action of giving or receiving a Facebook Like (or upvote on Reddit, Twitter, etc) really means to figure out why I post and why the Likes feel so good.

As for numero uno, I post less stuff on Facebook now, and only when I really think what I'm offering is either pretty useful or pretty clever. My creative engine is not known for its consistency, so sometimes I'll post thrice in two days and then maybe not for a month. Quality. I've heard that having something published that you really don't like doesn't feel that great.

As for number two, the number of likes I got, let me save that for the end. I know, poor essay planning here, throwing my reader a rope-a-dope. Let's see if it works.

As for the third point, let's see what a Facebook Like is and means and so I can figure out how neurotic I was acting (and by "figure out" I of course mean "harshly self-judge"). And once I realized my neurosis, was I all, "Let's lock this away and forget about it and pretend no one never notices it and I'm perfect now what's on TV?" No. It was whip-out-the-keyboard time.

Years of writing workshops has calloused my capacity for constructive criticism, but it never hurts to channel one's own inner Stuart Smalley:

"I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dog gonnit, people like me in those photos from when I went to Cancun last year."

Clicking Like really is the smallest amount of energy you could possibly put into any internet action. It requires so little energy that you're not actually doing something for someone outside of reading what they wrote or looking at their picture. Maybe you visited a link and got something out of it. You didn't help them move a couch. It even takes far more time to type out a comment then click Like, and people do that all the time. (Whereas I give Likes away like I have an infinite supply of them, which I kinda do "I'm the Like Fairy, sprinkling Likes on all the likety-like-like!).

What you are giving them is the endorsement of your name in the Facebook popularity rankings, and everyone's name means something a little different depending on your relationships and reputation and such. Lending your name and giving them another Like to grow their pile with is, more than anything, a gesture of thought.

And why do people click Like? They want to show support, to recognize you, to praise you for brightening their day a tad. Why do they like things in general? Pleasure, comfort, security, relationships, morals. More often than not, it connects with them emotionally, which is why posting a song usually dies Likeless: music is so emotionally subjective. When I make a post about some random thing like finding a knife on the sidewalk, there are any number of reasons people could click that Like button. And because not everyone on your friends list sees all your posts, it's always a random combination of people viewing them every time. You could get ten likes or zero. And that's not even to get into the whole idea that because Google and Facebook collects all your demographics and gives you content based on that, which may put you into a self-reinforcing ideological tunnel, as discussed by Eli Pariser in this TED Talk:

The way I choose to look at it now is that if someone clicks Like, it meant I either added something to their day or they wanted to support me. Either way, I'll take it. But now, with my revamped posting standards, I'm also doing my part, making sure I'm not throwing slop up there that's not nearly as clever, insightful, or helpful as I thought it was. That was me acting from my ego instead of thinking about the context, which is one of the central issues to being a good writer and why it's important to have trusted readers. They keep your blind spots in check.

A Facebook post is a third-person communication; you're putting a message out there in public for a whole group. This means the validation of a Like is also a public action in a public space. Sometimes everyone sees you make a good joke, sometimes you make a post that dies a sad, hugless death.

And that is painful. You think this comment is good, that it's going to reach people and touch them or make them laugh, and yet it just sits there, friendless, like an echo in a cave, like a voice calling for someone just hoping they'll answer. And when that answer doesn't come, you reflect it upon yourself, you identify with the lack of validation. You become the lonely comment, which is a hell of a lot easier than doing that on stage. Comedians deserve respect for their resolve.

A psychological trick, sure, but one that's easy to get duped by. The key is not needing that validation. Learning how to be happy with getting your writing/pictures/ideas out there simply because you put thought into it and felt like the thought/photo/link should be shared with the world. It doesn't matter who else likes it as long as you like it.

And that brings me back to number two up top: the number of Likes you receive for a given post. I just watched a Frontline where high school students where raving over how many Likes this picture got vs. that picture, as if it really matters (we're pretending this post means I'm above this at this point...). But a friend recently told me that we're responsible for telling people how we feel and what we need, and anything they actually give us should be considered a gift.

So to follow that reasoning, any Facebook Like should be considered a gift. None are necessary, but even getting one is a cool thing. My stupid joke got Liked by one person. If I free myself from expectations, I can be grateful for that. Like.

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On the Unempathetic Comments of the Ultra-Rich

2/17/2014

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Income inequality in America has been a topic of much discussion lately, and not without good reason. This graph shows that the actual distribution of wealth in this country is far more disproportioned than people realize, with the top 20% of the population holding more than 80% of the wealth.

"From left to right: the wealth distribution Norton’s respondents said would be ideal; how they estimated wealth was currently distributed; and the actual distribution of wealth in the United States." Graphic found at http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/what-we-know-about-wealth

This topic can get politically charged rather quickly, but I want to use it to highlight a fundamental human truth about human nature: we often only really care about the things that immediately affect us. We can, eventually, grow past this idea, but this is how human beings begin when we come into this world, and many of us don't grow past it. Some who don't grow past it, the ones with lots of money, do everything they can to keep acquiring money, and because there's only so much to go around that leaves the masses fighting over so much less. To me, that's neither ethical nor practical.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, yearly income has grown "275 percent for the top 1 percent of households" compared to "65 percent for the next 19 percent" and "just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent." This is after Republican efforts to limit food stamps and unemployment benefits, nationwide calls for a higher minimum wage, and a report that the wealthiest 85 people in the world own as much as the 3.5 billion poorest people combined. And I cannot omit the 2008 American American subprime mortgage crisis, which was caused by investors greedily gambling on mortgages they had no right to be gambling on, and which nearly destroyed the economy. No one, as of yet, has been prosecuted for that fiasco, but the banks received a $700 billion bailout because they were, as the oft-repeated line was, "too big to fail."

To be honest, I'm nervous writing about this situation considering the politics and passions involved, but many comments in the last few weeks by some of America's wealthiest people have stirred my ire past the point of biting my tongue. Because these comments, by people who are role models of the financial industry (meaning billionaires), strike me as sad and inhumane. It rings of propaganda that demonstrates a lack of empathy and perspective.

Nicole Miller CEO Ken Bonheim: "We've got a country that the poverty level is wealth in 99% of the rest of the world. So we're talking about woe is me, woe is us, woe is this. ... The guy that's making, oh my God, $35,000 a year. ... Why don't we try that out in India or some country we can't even name ... China, anyplace -- that guy is wealthy."

Venture capitalist Tom Perkins: "The Tom Perkins system is: You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes...But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that?"

Tom Perkins again (with an even more offensive quote): "I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.'"

Sam Zell, chairman of Equity Group Investments: "The 1 percent are getting pummeled because it's politically convenient to do so...[people] should not talk about envy of the 1 percent, they should talk about emulating the 1 percent. The 1 percent work harder, the 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society."

The 1 percent work harder than everyone else? I'm sorry, do they all moonlight as stockboys at Wal-mart? I couldn't believe this quote when I heard it, and it clearly demonstrates that the ability to make money does not require the ability to understand the day-to-day struggles of one's fellow men and women. This comment is a slap in the face to every person in the United States who works retail, who works fast food, who does construction, who teaches our youth, who works in a factory, who struggles to find employment, who has children and works to be a good parent. But most of all, it demonstrates an ingratitude on the part of Mr. Zell for the cosmically lucky financial circumstances he finds himself in, and the financial struggles he will never have to face.

Maybe I'm biased as someone who grew up in a two-bedroom apartment with two working parents and three siblings, but comments like these are infuriating and disgusting amid rising rates of poverty, closing schools, persistent violent crime, a nonexistent mental health infrastructure, record prison populations, record student loan debt, massive pension problems, outsourcing of jobs, and rising health costs that a new health care law may or may not address. Mr. Zell doesn't seem to realize that choosing what and where to invest is not the same "hard work" as standing on an assembly line or working in a stockroom or driving a bobcat or grading papers all night.

This country should be a meritocracy. I'm not against wealth; I'm against wealth's lack of empathy for non-wealth. People should be rewarded for their hard work and held accountable when they try to take advantage of the system. But that's not how it works. Hard work for many people doesn't translate to wealth, especially with so many locked into debt. And this isn't a republic either when politicians are swayed by big money over social well-being. Until we are able to control this behavior--through legislation, voting with our dollars, education, empathy, or sheer human will--then problems like near economic collapse, widening income inequality, and widespread poverty will increase.

The comments by these men do, however, make sense. The idea of making money--or the profit motive, if you will--has always dehumanized people to serve the ends of those with the cash. From slavery to child labor, terrible working conditions to union-busting, organized crime to pay-to-play, poor products to poor service to poor treatment of the environment, the profit motive has always valued making money with little regard for the big-picture effects. It's just so frustrating when those with so much accuse those with so little of inciting class warfare. It's as if the Germans blamed everyone else for starting World War II (which is hopefully a far-more-valid WWII simile).

This also makes sense psychologically. When a child is born, they only care for themselves. They cry when their needs aren't met. They are only aware of their immediate environment. They only really care about the things that immediately affect them. It takes time to learn empathy for those around them, and it takes a much longer time to learn empathy for those not around them, for those different from them, for those affected by the third-person effects of one's actions. This is the process of maturation to adulthood: the ability to take responsibility for what one does and to sacrifice for others, eventually including strangers and animals and people you will never meet.

This quote by Cornel West sums up the differences in perspective pretty well:

"There is a self-indulgent hedonism and self-serving cynicism for those at the top. To simply let it collapse and pull back. Public school, nothing to do with it. Public transportation, nothing to do with it. Public health, nothing to do with it. Privatize them because I have access to resources that allow me to privatize in such a way that I can have quality. The rest, do what you will, make it on your own." From Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times by Cornel West (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.)

The majority of people do not have the luxuries of this perspective; not because they don't work hard, but because of the circumstances of the system. Some people do not mature empathetically as they mature chronologically, which means we'll have people with low levels of empathy and high levels of wealth who will do everything to secure more and more wealth. Not only does that wealth become a defining characteristic of their identity, but the drive for survival and the existential avoidance of death is going to have anyone--ourselves included--trying to gather as many acorns as possible, though most of us don't have tools at our disposal like Swiss bank accounts, low taxes on our capital gains, and political influence to sway legislation in our favor.

These people have become ultra-rich by solely thinking about themselves, so when they acquire tremendous societal power through their wealth, should we be surprised that they continue to act selfishly? When the profit motive is your dogma and your net worth a large measure of your personal identity, why would you stop to think about the kids that can't afford textbooks or parents that work past their kids' bedtime or prisoners whose lives are traded on Wall Street? Like it or not, our market rewards people for being insensitive jerks, so we can't blame them for acting like insensitive jerks when they get to the top. What we can do, at least, is point out the psychological phenomenon of a 65-year-old man that still has the same capacity for empathy and gratitude as a three-year-old. And then maybe us down here can use that wisdom to love each other better while those at the top enjoy all the spiritual fulfillment that have-your-cake-and-gorge-on-it-too materialism offers them.

So these comments, while sad, are not surprising. Despite them, historically we have shown great resiliency and progress as a country and race in furthering all kinds of equality. The end of slavery and fight for worker's rights is proof of that (not to mention civil rights, women's rights, human rights, etc.). We need to believe in the American dream, not just for people in our country, but everywhere. It should be a truth and a right of every human born on this planet to fulfill the goals of their life through hard work and dedication, and hopefully the stars align for as many of us as possible.

Admittedly, that's a nice fuzzy thought that's not going to be true in every situation. But Mr. Zell is right about one thing: the 1% do have a tremendous influence in this society. And with greater empathy on their part, we can steer this Queen Mary in the right direction, one that works to benefit 100% of us. But we aren't going to get there when the ones with the most control only act in their own self-interest.

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Words by Derek Salinas Lazarski

On Magritte

On Arrogance (Or Omitting the Understood "I think...)

On a Billion

On Winning

On Red

On X

On Comparing Oneself with Others

On Resistance

On Whatever a Facebook Like Means

On the Unempathetic Comments of the Ultra-Rich

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