Arts and Minds

Could Information-Projectiles be our Legacy?

The internet, and within it the blogosphere, are not legacy media. The internet races always into the future trailing it’s comet’s tail, a short electric past, while blogs and websites tumble into their own archives and disappear forever. Websites and weblogs if not kept up (and paid up), lapse, leaving only limited traces to be traced in future decades. What wisdoms, without durable printed pages, are we leaving for upcoming generations to contemplate?

Bricks and mortar libraries have tended to last for hundreds of years and sometimes far longer. Digital information and digital storage devices are more fugitive do not survive as well, nor migrate through generations with surety. Desert caves and tombs seem to preserve information best, but let’s not go there.

Should we invent an overview capture system within the internet that sends information-projectiles, skipping-stone time-capsules, that repeatedly revisit our great grandchildren’s computer-thingys to stir things up during their part of the Long Now? Like a benign viral pandemic, it would mysteriously appear into whatever the internet has then become at intervals of twelve years? How would we now know what is worth preserving and set to fast forward? The question begs us to evaluate the worth of what we are doing now. Most Twitter content and Utube afterimages would not make the short list. Lose the spam and the list is over eighty percent shorter with one click. The advertisements would fight for their lives and then be smothered by the mute button. What would remain? What do we really care about?

 

Was It Torture?

Was It Torture that the Bush administration lawyers allowed, within ‘limits’? My first question is how could they have known if it was or was not torture? Had they tried the various techniques on themselves or on each other in a specially equipped legal dungeon with a dispassionate group, twelve of their peers, observing, taking snapshots, and helping to form a decision? It is common to expect experts in any professional discipline to have some direct experience living, or at least working within the niche where they advise or decide.

Now that so many people worldwide are out of jobs, as a nation we may be grateful for the visibility of strong, hands-on famous role-models teaching us how to get and keep a job.

I suggest that any tribunal that seeks to pass judgment on the people who allowed torture, and those who did the torturous acts, make it their goal to give these folks their old jobs back—with slightly altered job descriptions. Put them back to work as evaluators who are in a proper position to decide just where the line is that demarcates torture from uncomfortable piffle. Their daily work, on a contract of uncertain duration—(to assure their ‘security’) would oblige them to subject themselves, and each other, to the same experiences they once had decreed for others. At the end of that work they will be able to render opinions and judgments of their own, on precisely where that line aught to be drawn.

These serious legal issues are at the core of national and worldwide debates that only seasoned field experts can hope to sort out for us. We trusted them and depended upon them when they made their initial determinations, and we should continue show our trust and loyalty and support now. In a sentence, our hats are off to the lot of you as your head(s) are off to the dungeons, and keep up the great work!

Economic Recession and The Psychological Ecosystem Around Individual Depression and Violence

Economic recession and depression are part of the larger psychological ecosystem that interacts with individual human depression. If we were too busy to notice these relationships before the current economic ‘downturn’, we cannot fail to be aware of it now if we read the headlines.

We all live together in a largely unnoticed greater context of nested interacting ecosystems. This is a way of describing and interlinking environments of all sorts—physical, social, economic, educational, climatic, geophysical—I could go on naming them until the list and their interactions became too complex to imagine, let alone sort out. That is the work of science, and this is a brief article of opinion.

People are killing themselves and each other at an increasing rate. While what the media casually refers to as ‘gun violence’ has always varied quite a lot, in the United States statistics have been more or less consistently bloody with up’s and down’s but the yearly totals of deaths by violence of all kinds is usually written in red ink. Murder is probably easier with a gun, but without guns, psychotics would kill with knives or bats or automobiles. We cannot hope to limit the uses of sticks and stones, bats and bullets, but we can and must deliver mental health intervention to desperately needy families and individuals even in tough times. Most especially in tough times. Everyone knows of at least one such example. Every community institution is aware of several or many. We pile up the papers, overwork and underpay our health delivery workers and ignore the problems until the spike on the desk is suddenly bloodied.

Since the downturn, there has been an up-tick, a compulsive thumb cocking the hammer and releasing the safety; taking aim at the mirror or through the window. Desperate times trigger desperate acts and the times are becoming increasingly desperate.

The feeling of helplessness, or real hopelessness and helplessness for that matter, is at least in part a mental and emotional trap, a closed dark room. For some this room has only rage and a gun as an exit.

Will we change our attitudes about emotional stress, depression, and the potential for destructive acts like murder and suicide, or quite often murder/suicide and rid ourselves of the stigma of being human and terribly upset?

Probably we will not be effective in large-scale public education and healthcare delivery for some time to come, as financial resources for preventative care are being cut from budgets. Can you see the downward spiral?

We may complain and grow fearful for our lives and for our children’s safety, but it is our collective responsibility, not our guilt, that needs to be recognized. In these desperate times, we desperately need legislation to assist in the early identification of children and adults who are at high risk of committing mayhem, and get some kind of help delivered to their doors, whatever the cost.

There are far too many privately owned guns in the nation to effectively reduce their use in psychotic attacks. There are, as most of us have been figuring out, far more crazy people, seriously crazy people, in every group than we used to believe. Believe it now.

As a nation, we have jealously guarded both our first amendment right to peaceably assemble, and our second amendment right to keep and bear arms. These two positive aspects of our national heritage are coming into increasing conflict. How long will you or anyone feel safe in a crowd that (statistically) must contain a few depressed people with fear, helplessness, self-hate, rage, and homicide blocking their minds?

Gun control, or perhaps more realistically an acceptably intelligent negotiated legislative effort leading to ‘gun management’ will be of some limited help.

We must focus our attention on matters of mental health, childhood education and safety from abuse, and job creation.

Mayer Spivack, Wednesday, April 8, 2009

 

 

 

Those Who Work With Money Are Tempted To Play With Money

When you work with other people’s money you may be tempted to play with money. Some bankers now seem to fear that no one will trust them or pay them again—ever, so they are trying to quickly grab as  much cash as they can on the way out of the tower, a case of institutional ‘take the money and run’.

In a few months time, everything they value or measure value by, has been devalued by their own hand. They have undone themselves and us. As their stash of value diminishes (as does our own), by reflection, their self-worth along with their net worth—disintegrates. Their established social and professional connections fracture. They are in pain. In a moneyslide, many now tumble like mud down an over-logged hillside in a downpour, pouring down from the top and wildly grabbing at our wallets to stop their fall. They appear ready to take anything from anyone because they believe that their own lives or their way-of-life is out of control and the whole hill is washing down the sewers. The out-of-control aspect of their fall is crucial to their mental health. These folks were quite control centered orderly people when things are going their way. That is why we trusted them. As the chaos they created explodes around them, they have become disoriented and helpless. They have no control of anything. They are at a Wall Street intersection, with their pants down. It is no dream, and their panic is beyond their (or our own) control.

Something happens in the conscience (wherever that may be in the brain) when a marginally illegal, destructive, or self-destructive impulse goes badly wrong. When bankers and investment councilors lie and run off with lots of our money they also lose everything that they are or have been. They lose their sense of who they are and eventually lose their money. Once heroes of the reserved tables and the country club, they fear that they will be shunned.

Just as the depressed enraged husband who mangles and shoots his wife and children must then tip into the part of his mind from which there is no returning, and must shoot himself to stop his crazy rage, these moneymadmen tip and morph into self-destructive cash filled piñatas that will be batted about by their victims until they are entirely emptied of their hoard of sweets and pocket change.

People seem to have a tipping-point for fear. When unconscious fear and guilt dominates the mind; when a sneak becomes a thief, that thief may become a bank-robber. This is why bankers rob banks (After all, who else has the insider information to be able to rob a bank?). As we know there have been many ‘professional’ bank robbers who famously robbed banks in the kind of robberies that require a misspelled note handed to the teller, a mysterious paper bag, and maybe a gun. (Incidentally this classic kind of penny-anti bank robbery is on the increase now that the magic carpet has flown off without us, pilot-less.) Bonnie and Clyde are the archetypal characters in that dramatic tradition. But these kinds of crooks are amateurs despite the infrequent dramatic heist in which they haul off thousands of dollars in nickel and dime money-bags. They rarely vanish with billions. The pros are showing the way and providing their biographies for the next decade’s film scripts.

We are gullible. In lies we trust. Our trusting mind-sets and belief systems having learned unshakable categories for social and professional roles and behavior, and codes of conduct and ethics, we do not anticipate that the trusted experts upon whom we depend are playing with our money in an expensive version of three-card-Monte or a shell-game with our minds and our money. Gullibility, our own greed, and our ignorance allow us no hint that bankers might ever become robbers.

There is a wailing multi-million-voiced high wind on Wall Street. The card game is been busted, and the cards are scattering with the operator, the shills, and the marks  money. We have seen the cardboard box fold-up and blow away, and the confident ingratiating smile twist into a smirk.

Trust not only has to be earned, it has to be demonstrated, and we must do our own and our national due-diligence by asking the kind of simple, probing, questions that must untangle and ultimately result in laws that edit out misleading language and the tiny print on the other side of our contracts. So far we have been reluctant to reveal the extent of our ignorance to our hired-in experts. But this is not ignorance. it is honest confusion in a long prevailing culture of financial obfuscation and fraud.

Once we were e a nation of people who made things. We worked with our hands, our minds, and our whole bodies to produce goods of value to ourselves and to others. That kind of effort was a full time job (and where has that gone?) that left little time or energy for a farmer or machinist to become an amateur banker or investment broker. This information-gap provided the niche for the con men. That gap and the niche will never go away. Someone will always try to exploit it. But we need to get back to the business of making stuff of real utility and tangible goods of value. We can now take off our dunce-caps. We can stop pushing paper around from pile to pile until someone looses track of it. April fools used to last only one day. Let’s keep it that way.

A Response to Adam Nagourney, 5/19/2008 New York Times Article Entitled "A Lack Of Luck And Skill"

The NYT has proven itself again and again during this Democratic race to be as conservative as anyone in the industry. The media ’s “molly coddling” of Senator Obama has been as rampant as the sexism towards Senator Clinton. To imply that Senator Obama is somehow a weak and helpless victim of a strong woman candidate, is ridiculous and astounding in this century. It is interesting that the fact that he was raised by a white mother and grandparent, while being abandoned by his African father has been played down in the media. Multicultural would be a more accurate description of Obama's background, not simply focusing on the ethnicity of his father. Isn’t that a rascist, as well as sexist position for the media to take about Senator Obama’s personal history? “Lack of luck and skill” is not the issue for Senator Clinton… The media has set the stage for this, and I am sad to say that the NYT has played a major role in perpetuating the sexism and 1950’s mentality towards a strong and extremely competent candidate for President of the United States.

This was first posted by L.H. Freedman on May 19th, 2008 @1:31 PM in the New York Times.

Electoral Psychodynamics and Senator Obama

Many Americans, and especially the press and media, fear, talk about, and impugn strong confident women who enter the generally hardball realm (or kick-boxing ring) of political power. While we are all free to talk in any way we wish to, expressing ourselves in either healthy or unhealthy ways, the media and the press have a greater impact on government then the rest of us when they pronounce or broadcast prejudicial speech, sly winking innuendo and personal neurosis in place of balanced measured opinion and factual journalism.

The media therefore have an obligation to us all to hold their opinion and journalism to the highest possible standards. They cannot behave like a snickering high-school locker-room gang if they are to maintain credibility as the Fourth Estate. Some members of the press and media (and ourselves) would benefit us all if they had their heads examined.

I am not attempting to present a psychobiography of either Democratic candidate but instead to inspire all of us, especially individuals in the media, to examine and outgrow a few of our attitudes, fears and prejudices. Each of us manifests our own personal psychodynamics, and those effect how we might correctly judge or misjudge the characters of the candidates. In the interests of writing accurate reportage or making sound decisions each person in the media and press should strive to identify and separate our neurotic reactions, resentments and old childhood fears, particularly regarding powerful women, from the real issues of candidacy and presidential office.

As a lifelong Democrat and a retired psychotherapist I watch and listen to the debates between two fine Democratic candidates for nomination to the presidency with the fabled psychotherapist’s ‘third ear’.

My ‘third’ ear hears a great deal of intolerable, underhanded anti-female rhetoric, particularly from within the media. I also hear that both candidates are locked into a sorry three-way zero-sum battle with the press and with each other while the rest of us watch or cheer the fight. I hope that we can learn what our unconscious positions are, become more aware of them, question them, and that all might benefit from some self-searching for the benefit of the democratic and Democratic Party process.

One Person, One Ballot, One Envelope

National Public Radio, that great national radio university, announced that voters in some states were unable to vote because some polling places ran short of ballots and envelopes. Voters waited outside polling places in freezing weather for their moment in the voting booth. Many waited patently while many were too cold and could wait no more. But worse still, many were stopped at the door after waiting for hours because ballots and ballot envelopes had run out. Why do we allow this?

Every mailbox in this nation is stuffed with junk mail every day. Nearly all of that goes directly into the trash. We accept or tolerate that situation.

We also tolerate denying voting rights to eager voters because we are afraid to waste a little more paper. We have to expect the waste of some paper ballots in order to preserve our votes. The assurance that every voter can vote is worth the cost of additional trash, and is a worthwhile and manageable risk. Our failure to print one ballot and provide one envelope for every registered voter in the nation is a silly false economy.

We should require federal law to mandate every state, district and county to protect the right of every voter by providing enough voting ‘stationary’ for everyone. We should assume and expect that some ballots and envelopes will remain to be recycled. No person or agency should be permitted to estimate or guess future voter turn-out based upon previous election figures.

Compared to the annual gross national paper junk-mail waste-stream, two additional sheets of paper per possible voter per election-year (recycled at that) is more than a fair trade and expense for the guarantee of our individual voting rights. This change would also put an end to one form of voter manipulation that is no less than a sub-rosa form of gerrymandering. This should become our next, or first, electoral reform. If this voter fairness requires government subsidy, so be it, no matter how poor, we all can afford to add it to our income tax. A penny for your thoughts.

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.

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.

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. The third end of the gun is the emotional act of shooting the gun. It is an end in itself. In school shootings and many other kinds of shootings, all three ends of the gun are involved.