Arts and Minds

Time Is Our Event Horizon

We stand at the edge of time, onlookers and participants in a swirling cosmos that we have neither understood or imagined. It is our illusion that we look ahead at tomorrow or next year. This moment is our event horizon. We cannot see beyond it. We cannot anticipate if our passage in this solar system will either continue or end. We do not know if what we view is a beginning or an ending. Because all moments mark the end of now, all moments are finite singular end points. Restricted to such a foreshortened view, what business do we have causing destruction? All we can achieve in this mode is to restrict and narrow the course of the future, essentially contributing only to entropy, not to life.

The Mind Behind The Wheel

Psychodynamics Of High-Risk Drivers

Road rage is a misleading term for pathological violence while driving. Rage is rage, anywhere. violence while driving. We enjoy our new crush-cage cars with air-bags. But they cannot protect us from ourselves. And each of us, sometimes, is a danger to ourselves and to others, especially while we are driving. Some of the danger is preventable by high-level driver training, but that training is not offered in ordinary driving schools, nor is it affordable in the defensive driving schools that do address it.

All drivers are a bit preoccupied some of the time. It is rare to see a driver totally focused who is commuting in traffic. Professional drivers like ambulance, police and fire-truck drivers responding to a call, and race-car drivers, and some accident-wise and wary motor-cycle riders tend to keep their attention more focused on the act of driving.

The rest of us, who are not professional drivers, relax, listen to music or talk shows, talk on cell-phones (rarely using speaker-phones), talk to passengers, consult the tiny print on the GPS or map. Some eat, brush hair, put on makeup, shave, and even read the newspaper. We discipline the kids in the back seat, argue with our spouse in the passenger seat, or search on the floor of the car for dropped cigarettes. Often without realizing it, we daydream.

INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENTS

Fear, isolation, and a sense of numbing helplessness characterize the nursing home, the mental hospital and other institutional experiences for the majority of inmates. To enter a hospital, especially a mental hospital or a nursing home, either as a visitor or a patient, is to encounter an environment that has no equal in barrenness anywhere in our culture except for the prisoner's cell.

These environments may be described as dis-integrated or degraded because they lack wholeness; they are incomplete. Because the ordinary everyday settings for behavior are missing, they cannot adequately support the great range of human activities and behaviors that are associated with everyday life and particularly with the recovery process. Most institutions force inmates to ‘kill time’ without purpose. More typically and destructively, institutional environments may further impair the patients' faith in their own competence to take care of themselves and live normal independent lives. Prolonged institutionalization or hospitalization, especially in a mental hospital, nursing home, or prison may seriously impair the inmate’s mental health, as individual’s responsibilities and social behaviors fall away.

Psychiatry and psychology in particular, and medicine in general, all lack a clear vision or theory of mental health and ‘wellness’, as distinct from illness, that could inform and enrich the lives of patients in their care. Since the earliest records of institutional mental health treatment there have been relatively few reform revolutions during which the quality of the patients' experience, their environment, and their care were given enriching humane attention.

Anger With Denial Yields Violence

V = (a)d2

A Discussion of the Social Consequences and Individual Psychodynamics Within The Violence Cycle

The social and personal processes of abuse, anger and denial fuel a psychological chain reaction— the violence cycle. Our psychological defense process of anger-denial promotes and maintains this violence cycle by further denying that violent events are cyclic phenomena, and denying that they are endemic to our culture. We hide their presence in nearly every family, so that the painful or violent events experienced by nearly everyone from earliest childhood onward must be systematically suppressed. This denial uses the building blocks of suppressed childhood anger to produce adult rage that is too often expressed as violence.

This personal and social process of denial serves both the individual's neurotic psychological needs and the needs of society by identifying and punishing only the most recent perpetrator of violence, exonerating ourselves and our parents. Most protected are the particular parents (and/or others) who aimed the original and causative and determining violent painful experiences at the helpless, powerless and once innocent, child who has now become the latest violent actor in this millennial drama.

School Shootings—What Was The Motive?

>School Shootings—What Was The Motive?
© Mayer Spivack 10/10/2006
Permission to reproduce this work is freely granted for educational, non-commercial purposes. I would appreciate notification.

We see it every week, nearly every evening on the news. Another violent crime in a school is discovered. The victims relatives and friends and sometimes the whole community or nation is saddened, outraged and frightened. The life of the suspect, already in custody, is examined. ‘He was always such a nice quiet guy— so good to his family and kids in the neighborhood’, or— ‘She kept to herself, didn’t bother anybody, no one expected that she would kill kids. “How could she (or he) do that?”

Quietness in extremes in an indicator of suppressed expression and of depression. We should become especially aware of children who have a severely narrowed emotional repertoire. These children need help now. By helping them we may prevent a violent future.

Their crimes all seem senseless because we cannot sense their causes using only our unexamined but still popular premises. The sense of these crimes eludes us. We search clues for a motive— which we mistakenly equate with— a reason. But motives are not reasons. We confuse the idea of reasons (with it’s whiff of reasonableness) with the idea of causality. The kinds of motives that satisfy the police and the courts may be probable causes but they are not reasonable causes, they are usually only thetriggering circumstances (literally and figuratively) of a particular act of violence. They are the immediate causes, the formative determinant causes causes are far older, and predate perhaps by decades the recent circumstance of motive. Facts as they are quoted and discovered by the press and the police cannot and do not explain the action to our satisfaction. We hear neighbors left pondering an image of ‘human nature’ presented as a mysterious and unfathomable dark (animalistic, wicked, sinful) horror. Yet there remains some sense to be discovered. Were we to use the right questions with more reflective, and self-reflective intentions we might pull straight the psychodynamic thread that runs through all this violence and killing.

Guns Have Three Ends

Guns Have Three Ends
© Mayer Spivack 10/10/2006
Permission to reproduce this work is freely granted for educational, non-commercial purposes. I would appreciate notification.

We all know that guns have two ends, the pointy end, the one with the hole in it and the blunt end where the shooter is. There is really a third end on every gun, and that is what I want to point out. But to do that I will have to discuss a bit of psychology.

The person on the pointy end is scared, and in mortal danger. The person on the blunt end, the one who is aiming the gun, the would-be-shooter, may be nervous, may be terrified if he or she feels that his or her life is in danger were it not for the power of the gun, or may be enraged and mentally ill. But when a gun is aimed by someone who is enraged, or slightly angry, or mentally ill, the third end of the gun comes into gun-play; that is the psychological end, where the shooter feels insulated from harm by being at the powerful end of the gun. This kind of shooter is not sane, nor mentally healthy—and these terms do not mean the same thing. This shooter is mentally ill, and insane—both. In school shootings all three ends of the gun are involved.

Bird Flu Virus H5N1 Planning

The problem of bird flu virus H5N1 is brewing, quite literally, in a biological soup in Asia and now on the European continent. It is a time-bomb. We will all be fortunate if it ticks for a few more years before detonating everywhere at the same time (within a week). Isolationist plans are worthless. Post-crisis-planning, as in Katrina, is worse than useless, it is inexcusable. Incompetence and ignorance of science an public health techniques round out a lethal combination for probably many millions worldwide. None of us has any familiarity with calamities of this sort. The death rate from infections of this flu epidemics in humans is around 50%, some predict worse outcome. Those who are not killed would be so ill as to be unable to care for each other. Downstream and later, the effects of this great human trauma would be felt for a century. It horrifies me to personalize this, but should the pandemic occur, about half of us, family, freinds, and strangers might die, at home, together.

Must all governments fail us?

All institutions will eventually fail because institutions comprise gatherings of fallible people. Any institution can only be as successful as the combined strengths and weaknesses in each individual member as described and moderated by the set of the strengths and weakness of their belief systems, mental health, and power within the institutional process. Great institutions of government may fail more spectacularly, and with more severe consequences than small institutions because the kinds of individuals attracted to the greater power and influential positions of high office carry their personal needs for power, entitlement, mental illness and greed along with them into official positions. As an institution grows it gathers like-minded powerful cronies to it’s bosom, As it grows the probability for failure increases proportionally because if is also gathering the flaws, illnesses and weaknesses of all into the process of the institution. It follows from this that the more powerful the institution, the greater will be the probability that it will fail dangerously and do harm to all of us just when it is needed most.

Make a mental list of institutions in your city or town, your state and region and your national government. Try to think of an exception to the rule of eventual catastrophic failure, or at the minimum, nearly ruinous scandal. These are about half of the events comprising what we call history.

Now a further caution: individuals who seek or demand great power (and who are sometimes referred to as ‘an institution unto [himself/herself])’are apparently likely to display greater rates of mental illness as ‘ordinary’ people. But among the power-seekers we may reflect upon the high number of individuals even within living memory who have demonstrated tragic psychotic or psychopathic personal characteristics. It they had worked as gardeners their destructive influence would have had less catastrophic impact.

A-B-C's Of Violence

We, the people of the world, teach violence to children by our actions. I offer this phonetic alphabet, the 'A-B-C's Of Violence, as evidence.

A Alfa > Afghanistan
B Bravo > Beirut
C Charlie > Cambodia
D Delta > Dunkirk
E Echo > Eritrea
F Foxtrot > Fallujah
G Golf > Guadalcanal
H Hotel > Hiroshima
I India > Iraq
J Juliett > Japan
K Kilo > Korea
L Lima > Louisiana
M Mike > Mogadishu
N November > New York
O Oscar > Okinawa
P Papa > Philippines
Q Quebec > Qatar
R Romeo > Republic of Armenia
S Sierra > Stalingrad
T Tango > Texas
U Uniform > Us, USA
V Victor > Vietnam
W Whiskey > Washington
X X-ray > Xiangyang
Y Yankee > Yorktown
Z Zulu > Zambia

Satellite Telephones and Neighborhood Disaster Planning

“The crisis you plan for is not the crisis you get. We learned that even the most basic of assumptions can be violated. In a crisis, failure of phones lines should be expected, but not even cell phones worked consistently on 9/11. Transportation modes can and did cease. We may be unable to count on the public safety agencies that otherwise are reliable day and night,…”

“We learned that even the most basic of assumptions can be violated. In a crisis, failure of phones lines should be expected, but not even cell phones worked consistently on 9/11. Transportation modes can and did cease. We may be unable to count on the public safety agencies that otherwise are reliable day and night… the crisis you plan for is not the crisis you get.” — Marilyn McMillan

“From paper, pens and tape to mutual aid agreements, and sophisticated communications and data back-up, the planning was key to dealing with whatever crisis unfolded.” — John Curry, Executive Vice President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The above quotes are taken From a report titled:
Learning History
The Boston Consortium for Higher Education
150 Great Plain Ave
November 2002
Available online: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:bj250eW9FLAJ:web.mit.edu/community/resources/learning_history.pdf+social+unrest+disaster+plan&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

These cautions are truly warnings. We can learn from the experiences of populations and responders under severest stress. In New Orleans (and the Asian Tsunami, the recent floods and earthquakes) almost nothing worked—except for simple things improvised at the local level. For the most part nearby neighbors tried to help each other sharing what they could improvise.