Month: February 2021

Just like the first line in the Jane’s Addiction song. In fact, during that same summer, the summer of 1966, I became a criminal of the lowest caliber, not just a thief, but an arsonist as well as a kind of pimp. The arson is the only thing that I felt truly guilty about. And that’s the thing that fascinates me now, that I felt rock-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach horrible for weeks after starting a fire, but had no misgivings about the other two; with the theft in particular, I felt absolutely no remorse whatsoever.

I got caught stealing a single peanut from the grocery store. While mom was distracted by my little sister, I pocketed a peanut from a heaping pile of roasted peanuts in a bulk bin in the produce section. When we got back to the car, I pulled it out, started to crack it open, and mom suddenly realized what I had done.

She was livid. She was angrier with me than she had ever been before. She said she was going to take me back into the store and find the store manager and have me give the peanut back to him—in person—and apologize for stealing. I resisted frantically and started balling. The thought of confessing my crime to the store manager, a complete stranger, was terrifying. I distinctly remember trying to reason with her at the time, arguing that there were so many peanuts that taking a single one of them simply didn’t make a difference. And, besides, unlike the other boxed and packaged products for sale in the store, the peanuts were unpackaged and out in the open, clearly available for anyone who wanted one. It was like the always-full bowl of tiny pillow-shaped pastel mints that my grandmother had sitting on the coffee table, free for anyone who had a hankering.

OK, so my five-year-old arguments were nowhere near as articulate as all that. And even if they were, I’m pretty sure my mother wouldn’t have been persuaded. We sat like that in the car for a long time, with her demanding that I take the peanut back, and me pleading desperately through tears. I’m not sure why, but she eventually gave into my sobbing pleas—I suspect it probably had something to do with my one-year-old sister, who, not wanting to be left out, had started crying herself. Whatever the case, she started the car and drove us home.

The arson occurred sometime after the peanut incident, on a weekend when my dad was home and burning some yard waste just outside the backyard fence. I grabbed a stick and plunged it into the heart of the fire until it ignited, and then took it across the alley and tossed it in the tall dry grass alongside the neighbor’s red-stained woven-cedar fence. By the time the fire department put it out, an entire section of the fence was turned to charcoal, along with the lower branches of a crabapple tree and a sizeable portion of the vacant field next door.

But I never got caught. When asked if I knew how the fire started, I lied and blamed it on a couple of older kids I said that I saw in the alley earlier that day. I only sort of made the story up, and my description of the kids was based entirely on the bullies who had tossed my bike in the field and tried to beat me up a few weeks earlier, so my story was coherent and consistent—and the cops seemed to recognize who I was talking about. I was entirely in the clear. No one suspected me. And when I finally came clean several weeks after the incident, my parents didn’t believe me at first. I had to come clean, though. My immature conscience simply couldn’t bear the weight.

My time as a pimp was pretty limited, restricted to one afternoon. It involved Becky, a girl my age who, for a short time, lived two houses down. I convinced Becky to pee in front of me and two of my friends in the backyard sandbox. She felt embarrassed and went home right afterwards, but my friends and I talked about the incident for months.

So, here’s my question. I was completely wracked with guilt about the fire. And although I don’t remember experiencing any actual guilt about Becky, I no longer wanted to play with her because things between us felt a little awkward, something perhaps approaching guilt—at the very least I had the sense that I probably shouldn’t have talked her into the dirty deed. But the shoplifting never bothered me. I was bothered by the fact that my mother was so upset, but not by the act of theft itself. Why? What is it about the peanut that is different from the other two?

The easy answer is that it was just a single peanut. But that doesn’t feel right to me. I suspect that my mother’s reaction wouldn’t have been any different if it had been a more expensive item. And, besides, my five-year-old mind was not developed enough to appreciate the relative worth of things in economic terms. There is something else about this specific act of theft itself, something that makes it qualitatively different from the other two crimes.

Qualitatively different from other kinds of theft, as well. I have stolen a few things since the peanut incident, but never just for the thrill of it like the kleptomaniac couple in the Jane’s Addiction song. Stealing seems morally wrong to me on some level, but, as offenses go, stealing food barely registers, something on par with j-walking or growing cannabis in your backyard garden in Indiana in terms of its triviality. Looking back, I wonder whether I would have felt guilt had I stolen something that wasn’t edible, a plastic toy for example, instead of a peanut.

And the guilt I felt about the fire wasn’t really about the fire itself. Although arson is a property crime, I was too young to fully appreciate the destructive impact of the fire I started. My guilt was not directed at the material damage I caused—which was, all things considered, pretty negligible. And even from my adult perspective, I can’t imagine ever feeling remorse solely for causing property damage. Especially since I now know how insurance companies work.

What I remember most about my experience of the incident at the time was feeling shock and horror at all the commotion the fire caused: neighbors ran over with lengths of garden hose; two fire trucks came with their sirens blasting; the police were there. From my five-year-old point of view, it was a massive spectacle. All of these people were mobilized over something that I did and lied about doing.

And I think that was it. It was the lie part; it was the not-taking-responsibility for the results of my actions, in combination with the trouble I had caused other people, that played most heavily on my conscience. Once I told my parents what I had done, the guilt dissipated quickly. Thinking back on the incident now, from the nostalgic vantage of five and a half decades, only makes me smile—no trace of anything close to guilt or remorse remains.

So, back to my question: why feelings of guilt over the fire, even if the guilt was really more about causing other people trouble and then lying about it than the actual fire, but no feelings of anything approaching guilt for stealing the peanut? Again, to say that it is a matter scope of impact or degree of result—pocketing one tiny peanut versus mobilizing the fire department—doesn’t feel like the whole story. The critical difference seems to me to be one of social impact: the fire affected numerous other people; the peanut was only a problem for my mom.

Perhaps the difference has something to do with the fact that I am a social primate, that I have psychological expectations—call them instincts—that are a result of millions of years of natural selection, most of which occurred in small egalitarian communities where having good relationships with others was a requisite for mutual survival. And despite the fact that civilization has veneered over my egalitarian hunter-gatherer psychology with a thin layer supporting obligatory acquiescence to authority—a layer entirely unrelated to my evolutionary heritage but necessary to keep the consumption machine running smoothly and efficiently—my base morality is, like yours and everyone else’s, Paleolithic in its design.

Think about my feelings of guilt (or lack thereof) in terms of what might be expected of an instinctual morality stitched from a social cloth woven across a quarter million years of life in the context of hunter-gatherer band society. There are distinct features of band society that would seem to be consistent both with my feelings of remorse about the fire and my lack of those feelings for stealing the peanut.  

First, modern-day hunter-gatherers have sometimes very elaborate social leveling mechanisms to guard against the undue influence of specific individuals. Any action by an individual that disturbs the relative harmony of the group is a potential threat to group coherence. And any threat to group coherence is a potential threat to survival. By starting the fire, I caused a spectacle that disrupted the normal calm activity of the people in my community. And by lying about it, I further violated my instinctual sense of obligation to the larger group. And, although this might be stretching things a bit, perhaps coming clean and telling my parents about my crime was a way of seeking to repair a psychological rift in my feelings of community connection.    

The peanut is much easier to explain in terms my instinctual hunter-gatherer sensibilities. Band society—like the cultures of most other higher primates—operates under powerful norms of reciprocity. This is especially true with respect to food sharing. Some days the hunting or foraging goes well for you, and when it does, you share all the results with everyone else, making sure to divi things up as equitably as possible. On other days, you might come up empty, and on those days one or more of your neighbors will have your back, so you never really have to worry about going hungry. Food is something that is readily available, always shared, and never something that you need to ask for. Seen through the instinctual lens of reciprocity, the massive pile of peanuts in the grocery store obviously meant that I was expected to help myself (and the fact that people have to pay other people for food flies in the face of a quarter million years of our species’ experience).

OK, so my feelings of guilt about the fire can be linked (perhaps) to my instincts regarding my group obligations and my lack of remorse for stealing a peanut can be linked to my evolved expectations regarding reciprocity norms. But what about my brief career as a pimp? How might instinctual morality explain my relative lack of remorse about Becky?

Now that I think about it, probably no need to tease that one out. I suspect the evolutionary connections there are, unfortunately, pretty obvious. 

I have been asked numerous times recently some version of the following question:

How can people like these QAnon folks actually believe their completely ridiculous conspiracy theories?

The easy answer comes right out of social psychology: it’s a simple case of social media facilitated group polarization. Group polarization is the phenomenon in which when you interact with a group of people who share your beliefs and opinions, your beliefs and opinions become more extreme versions of what they were before. With frequent interaction, beliefs can evolve into some pretty bizarre forms.

There are at least two mechanisms for this. First, adopting an extreme version of what everyone in your group already believes is a way of gaining notice and notoriety in the group.

Second, you have reasons and justifications for believing what you do, and the people you interact with also have reasons and justifications for believing what they do—some of which might be different from your reasons and justifications. So, when you interact with a group of like-minded people, you are likely to acquire additional ways of justifying your shared beliefs—which makes your beliefs appear even more reasonable to you than they were before.

The more difficult answer—and one that I suspect some folks won’t want to hear—is as much philosophical as it is psychological, and hinges on the fact that reality is something that is socially constructed. The bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories that QAnon and their ilk promote are not actually all that unusual in terms of their bat-shit craziness. The thing that makes them seem unusual has more to do with the (relatively) small number of folks who believe them, than with anything about their content. Right now, a large proportion of my friends and acquaintances believe medieval fairytales about the magical exploits of the son of a Bronze Age sky-dwelling war god. In terms of craziness of content, the only thing that separates QAnon conspiracy theories and mainstream Christianity is the mainstream part.  

[…] The reactance theory was clearly at play in Senate. The majority of Republicans did not want to have their attitudes changed so they were not changed. It is interesting that in the lecture you mentioned that people with higher levels of intelligence are more immune to attitude change. If we were in class I would ask how this relates to learning and neuroplasticity. I always thought that children were smarter than adults because of their willingness to change their beliefs when presented with new information.

Your question would make for a very good class discussion. I would be tempted to approach this from two levels, the neural level and the cognitive level.

In terms of brain development, a child’s brain is much more plastic than an adult’s is. Early brain development proceeds by a process of proliferation and pruning in which an explosion of neural connections is followed by a winnowing away of those that aren’t used. At two years old, you have more neural connections than you will have the rest of your life. Learning from that point is as much about eliminating connections as it is about growing new ones—you might think of it as reducing the noise in the system.

From a cognitive perspective what is happening is schema development. Recall the distinction between assimilation and accommodation, what is happening with the young child is all about accommodation: creating entirely new schemas and actively modifying old ones. As we get older, and our schemas become more plentiful and more elaborate, we become far more prone to assimilation—to the point where we are quite likely to assimilate—deal with new information by using existing schemas—even when we should accommodate. This tendency is sometimes called “the assimilation bias.” This bias occurs because at the neurological level accommodation is “expensive” in that it requires the formation of new connections and/or alterations to existing ones (this is also why taking a class in an area that you aren’t familiar with can be so taxing: creating new schemas is hard work).

Intelligence comes into play here. Higher intelligence means more sophisticated and elaborate schemas, which means more ways to assimilate new information into your existing knowledge base, which means that it is going to take more sophisticated persuasion to get you to change your attitudes. But I don’t think the senate republicans’ refusal to change their minds had much to do with intelligence–the republicans who voted to convict seem to me to be at least as intelligent as a group as the ones who voted to acquit.

As we get older, we become increasingly likely to rely on existing schemas and incorporate new information into what we already think we know (aka increasingly dogmatic). Ignoring the likely influence of factors such as party loyalty and fear of blowback from constituents, and strictly from a cognitive processing perspective, assimilation bias is how I would explain the pro-Trump republican’s apparent inability to be moved by the overwhelming weight of the facts presented.

“The elephant in the room” is a metaphorical idiom that can be traced back to an early 19^th century fable by a Russian poet. It is invoked in situations where attention is being diverted from something that is or should be glaringly obvious because it would be too uncomfortable, embarrassing, dangerous, or difficult to address it head on. It is a favorite of addiction counselors and family therapists. It also frequently finds its way into political rhetoric, as a tool for intimating that “the real issue” is being ignored.

I want to borrow this particular room-inhabiting elephant for a moment, but I want to squeeze him into a slightly altered form in order to use him as an allegory for our current political circumstances.

Imagine a room that is occupied by an elephant, but everyone in this room openly acknowledges the elephant’s presence. Imagine further that the people in the room are desperately trying to limit the elephant’s ability to damage the room’s furnishings but everyone has a different idea about how to handle the situation; no one can agree on what needs to be done to keep the elephant calm, where in the room it should be standing, which direction its trunk should be pointing, how each of its feet should be positioned, what to do about the rapidly accumulating volume of elephant dung, etc.

As with the original Russian fable version, this altered version is also meant to convey the underlying moral that something obvious is being ignored. And, as with the original, the obvious thing has something to do with the elephant. But in this case, the reason the obvious thing is being ignored has nothing to do with avoiding discomfort or embarrassment or danger or difficulty. Instead, the real issue is being ignored because the way the problem has been framed renders it invisible. The real issue is not apparent to the people in the room because they have identified the problem as the need to limit the elephant’s destructive potential, they have framed the problem in terms of the question: “How do we best control the elephant?” rather than in terms of the most glaringly obvious question: Why the hell is there an elephant in this room?

In part 1, I suggested that a common cognitive bias might help explain some of the differences between folks on the extreme left and the extreme right regions of the political spectrum. Specifically, folks on the far right tend to make internal attributions when rationalizing their policy agenda, and those on the far left are more likely to frame things in terms of external, situational factors. The right sees individuals as ultimately responsible for their good or bad fortune in life: poverty is a sign of personal failing; wealth is a sign of personal merit. The left, on the other hand (the left hand?) is more sensitive to the influence of external, contextual forces: poverty comes from lack of education and opportunity, and is exacerbated by systemic racism and an economic system designed to increase income disparity—a system that actually requires income disparity in order to function properly, a system that intentionally leverages the desperation that attends the threat of poverty.

I went on to say that, because of the focus placed on the role of systemic forces, I see the “radical” left as the lesser of evils, and then went on to clarify that the left reflects the lesser of evils, but is still very much an evil. And I ended with: “The truth is that everyone on both the far left and far right—and all points in between—is making a fundamental and critical mistake in their judgment of things.” Here I want to suggest that the fundamental and critical mistake in judgement is a result of how the problem is being framed. As with the people in my altered elephant-in-the-room account, the real issue is being ignored by everyone on both the left and right and all points in between because the problem is being framed in a way that obviates the asking of the most glaringly obvious question.

Before I go on, let me quickly address my use of the singular problem in the above sentence. Despite an expanding number of specific issues and concerns, there is really only one main problem that is being addressed: the system needs to change.[1] Everyone differs in terms of which particular parts of the system they think need to change, and in which specific direction, and by how much. But the problem—the only problem—is with the current state of the system. Poverty, climate change, pandemic response, healthcare, most if not all mainstream political policy disagreements ultimately come down to whether or how or which direction or to what degree the system needs to be changed. Once the problem has been framed in this way, all proposed solutions will naturally involve making—or not making or reversing—changes, tweaks, alterations, and adjustments to the system.

The system, of course, is the elephant in my allegory. And despite all the massive damage and destruction and pain and suffering it is causing, everyone continues to act as if its presence in the room is a natural thing, as if it belongs in the room. Everyone on all sides of every debate wants the system to be different than it is, but they all fully embrace the system itself as a necessary feature of human social life. The idea that there needs to be a system to begin with is never questioned. It is, in fact, unquestionable.

“Why the hell does there need to be a system in the first place?” should be the most glaringly obvious question. And the fact that humans have existed as a species for a long, long time before their lives were made systematic, the fact that people flourished for hundreds of thousands of years in the complete absence of a system of any kind, provides pretty clear evidence that a system isn’t an essential feature of human life.   

Yes, there are all kinds of problems with our current system. But none of these problems are the real issue. The real issue isn’t with the nature of the system, with the details about how it is currently structured or organized or with how its operative rules are or are not being applied in any specific situation. The real issue is that our lives are being structured according to the operative rules of a system. Our very thoughts have been systematized—and even our emotional responses are being structured according to systematic patterns.

We need to flush the system out of our hearts and minds. But before we can do that, we need to acknowledge that the real issue is the system itself. The real issue is that we are daily (hourly, every second) obliged to superimpose a mechanical, systematic overlay atop all of our organically human activity, framing our experience of the world in terms of civilization’s mechanistic thought-forms. Until we acknowledge this particularly gargantuan elephant in the room, any revolt against the current system is doomed to fail.

Consider what Robert Pirsig had to say about this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government […] because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself […], and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government,[2] but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.

It isn’t a matter of deciding whether internal motives or situational influences are more or less important. They both emerge from within a systematize way of living that is rapidly destroying the living planet. Instead of arguing about how best to fix the system, we need to stop living in systematic ways and reembrace organic and authentically human modes of life.

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[1] By “system” I mean the collection of laws and policies and procedures and technologies and bureaucratically organized conduits of power that control and structure and direct and otherwise impact the activity of people.  

[2] “Systematic government” is redundant.