Drawing Fine Lines in the Sand

Dear Professor Brevity (LOL),

"Mad M" made me smile. An angry moniker for being optimistic? Touche. :)

Recently Robert Schuller's dream, the Chrystal Cathedral went bankrupt and was sold off to the Catholics. So much for positive thinking versus reality. Reality wins. Perhaps my problem isn't so much with Hedges' "dour" message. Nearly throughout the entire book, I can do little but agree with him. So in an effort to answer your question about why I might feel the way I do, I've been trying to untangle that visceral little knot. Maybe it isn't so much choosing one thought process or another but instead choosing the appropriate thinking for the situation or time.

As we've mentioned before, one of the peppery complaints sprayed against the Occupy Wall Streeters is that they don't offer up any solutions. It's hard to problem solve if you haven't first identified the things that need correcting. That requires a big unpleasant dose of, sometimes grim, truth. Illusion shattering and awakening bleary eyed Neos is hard work, and our author (nearly wrote friend :)) is an indefatigable champion of it.  Once awakened, those newcomers to reality are going to need hope that things can be different. They will gasp for it like air. Then solutions and new ideas can be floated. I'm thinking that my resistance, despite agreeing with nearly everything he says, is a result of a heartfelt desire to move on to solutions. Maybe we are (Billy) pilgrims experiencing the same reality at different points in time. (Guess what book I'm re-reading!)

One thing I completely agreed with the author about was the ridiculous way of communicating with a child (manipulation disguised as understanding) outlined on pp.125-126. When that kid is about 12 he's going to stop listening to that drivel and become suspicious of everything the parent says. Ron Paul resonates with young people because they have a radar to detect (even well polished) phoniness.  I didn't really understand the point of Hedges including the research done by Peterson and Park included on p. 127 about the most important "character strengths" in every society around the world. Their study and conclusion, that these traits are necessary and distributed in the same proportions across groups of people, seemed to fall in the harmless category.  Later, on page 129, however, ideas like manipulating social behavior, promoting conformity, and "molding a group into a weak and malleable unit that will take orders" should make the reader queasy. At the bottom of the page my questions and reservations are summed up nicely by Berkeley anthropologist, Laura Nader, "There is a vast difference between social harmony and harmony ideology, between positivity and being genuinely positive."

Here's a question: Isn't the idea of libertarian paternalism (Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein,  is a good example) and taxing unhealthy behaviors like smoking or eating trans fats another form of this? You and I would agree (maybe, lol) that we would like to see healthy behaviors encouraged by a variety of means and unhealthy ones punished by making them more expensive to participate in. Is it okay to manipulate the people for their own good?  It sounds harmless but isn't it just a mild form of coercion?  Is one promoting "social harmony" and the other just pushing "harmony ideology?" There seems to be a lot of gray.

Your Dave Marsh comment made me wonder--what kind of people does he know? Wouldn't that have a tremendous influence on his thinking? Yes he's "divorcing himself" from much of this culture's silly and sometimes dangerous illusion, but one can imagine that that kind of thing might be a very good or a really disastrous idea. OR maybe our own reality is more indicative of truth than we think.  Marsh's idea might be a way of breaking down problems/solutions into manageable chunks that people could deal with thus alleviating feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. I suspect it is the magnitude of the problems and a feeling of powerlessness to solve them that is feeding our national depression, so maybe he's onto something.

This abbreviated correspondence means edit, edit, edit! Brevity has never been our forte! :)