What's happening to our mojo?

I’ve always had a terrible sense of direction, and with the advent of smartphones and  GPS, it’s gotten worse. In the past, to avoid getting lost, I had to pay close attention to the physical landmarks along the way. 

That’s a long-winded way of saying I had to be mindful, aware of what I saw as it whizzed by my windshield: the picturesque decaying barn on the hill, the adorable little girl with the big backpack waiting for the school bus, a ray of light illuminating the church steeple in a spiritual glow…

Now, I only have to program in my destination and then zone out in a high-tech slumber, robotically following Siri’s directions: “Stay in the center lane, take a right at the next light, proceed to the route.” It’s like time travel: Getting in my car is now like entering Dr. Who’s phone booth — like magic, I find myself transported to my destination with no recollection of how I got there.

I feel like I’ve been shortchanged: 

Eliminating my self-directed quest to plan my route deprives me of the satisfaction of plotting my own course through life, making me utterly dependent on technology that’s a foreign language to me. It makes me feel more like an autotom and, regrettably, less of a human being.

It’s not just when I’m driving. 

While I don’t get an endorphin high shopping in a supermarket, I throb with a surge of well-being whenever I work in my garden, even if I’m just pulling up weeds. In the same way, I feel a certain sense of satisfaction when I cook a good meal rather than going out, a real sense of mastery when I successfully complete even a minor home repair, or the sense of accomplishment I feel admiring the walkway I just shoveled.

But, sadly, every way we turn, new labor-saving devices are encroaching on us, determined to immobilize us, turning us into couch potatoes as sedentary as our houseplants. Rather than taking a chance of breaking out in a sweat, we have recently fallen for a new breed of mechanical aids like high-tech vacuum cleaners that suck by themselves. 

Rather than using the time saved by these labor-saving devices to practice new skills like cooking, gardening, or home repair, we choose, instead, to spend big money on spas and gyms, which, sadly, only makes us feel worse when we discover that we can’t magically grow perfect bodies like we see advertised on TV.

Worse news is on the horizon: Elon Musk is designing robotic personal assistants in the shape and size of real human beings, which are anticipated to make their debut in 2026. They will take care of everything – probably even sex – so that we never again have to get out of bed.^⁠1

It all leads to the question: What are human beings good for? What is our purpose? Is it just to shop until we drop or marathon-watch every new series on Netflix? The key question is, where is our agency? That’s according to  L.M. Sacasas, in his substack post “Life Cannot Be Delegated.”^⁠2  

He cites Lewis Momford’s definition of what makes a person’s life full and whole: it is one “in which we might find meaning, purpose, satisfaction, and an experience of personal integrity. This form of life cannot be delegated because, by its very nature, it requires our whole-person involvement.”^⁠3

What makes life memorable and indelible is what we choose to pursue whole-heartedly with total body and soul involvement, “not through technologically mediated distraction and escapism.^⁠4”

Full-person involvement has a spiritual component, as Rainer Maria Rilke gently reminds us: Not only is it the only way to self-actualize, but it’s also the path to finding God– using whatever name we might choose to label the pinnacle of life.

“Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor;
it thinks us out of our world.”^⁠5

xxx

Illustration credit: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-robots-are-entering-the-public-worldwith-mixed-results-4ff8d11a

¹ https://www.mountbonnell.info/elons-austin/elon-musks-humanoid-robot-the-game-changer-set-to-transform-everyday-life-by-2026

² https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/life-cannot-be-delegated?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6980&post_id=153663623&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ktp62&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid

⁵ https://www.lauriedoctor.com/musings/2020/8/18/only-in-our-doing-can-we-grasp-you-rilke 

Hope isn’t a feeling, it’s a choice

 

A transactional ethos has overtaken our land. We can see its most extreme form in Donald Trump. We also see it blatantly showcased, not only by greedy plutocrats but by the titans of high-tech, many of which now pledge allegiance to Trump.

These titans aspire not to make things better on Earth but to build massive rocketships to send colonists to impregnate new virgin planets after we have wantonly raped this one.

Trump anointed two of these titans, Musk and Ramaswamy, to be his efficiency czars, tasked with cutting two billion from our budget. They regard themselves as superior beings, dismissive of both their fellow humans and Earth itself.

We are in big trouble!

Neo-Nazis are marching in our streets to support Trump’s agenda of  ‘might make right.’ Ethics will no longer matter, making the notion of right and wrong seem quaint. Nothing will have innate worth, specialness, or sacredness since everything from now on will be transactional. The only thing that matters will be whether you can be useful to the supreme ruler.

Viktor Frankl, survival of the Nazi concentration camps and author of the perennial best-seller, “Man’s Search for Meaning, “ has persuasively argued that the final end result of transactional thinking is death camps. He explained that when a society’s value system is based solely on an individual’s usefulness, then it is inconsistent “not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.^⁠1

Trump typifies this model, disparaging our soldiers who die in defense of our country as ’suckers and losers,’ and telling his nephew, Fred, that people with certain types of severe disabilities “should just die.”^⁠2

Conversely, Frankl, following in our best humanistic tradition, asserts that a person’s value is based not on crass transactions but on our innate dignity and rests on “the unconditional value of each and every person.” With Trump’s election, We must all stand up and defend our sovereign rights.

Time and time again, we hear people say: “But I had no choice.” However, based on his experience in the death camps, Frankl maintains that there is always one final freedom. We can choose our attitude towards events. 

Dr Stephen Covey, who was influenced by Frankl, reiterates this truth, stating that our ability to change and how we react to what happens to us is a function of choice: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”^⁠3

As Americans, we face a choice of surrendering, which is what MAGA is counting on, or rising up to defend our dignity and welfare– along with those of our fellow citizens.  We must hold on to hope that is strong and sturdy, as in the way ‘prairie mystic” Carrie  Newcomer defines it: Hope is not a feeling; it is a choice.^⁠4

In the end,  it is up to us.

As Frankl wrote in a postscript to “Man’s Search for Meaning” in 1984:

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.^⁠5”

xxx

Photo Credit:

A photo I took of the sculpture by the African artist Chuke: “Statue of Limitations” (2018) Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA

Footnotes:

¹ Frankl, Viktor E. “The Case for a Tragic Optimism” (postscript to Man’s Search for Meaning). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984

² https://www.justsecurity.org/98261/disability-think-differently-trump/

³ Pattakos, Alex., and Dundon, E. (2017). Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work, 3rd edition. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

⁴ https://carrienewcomer.substack.com/p/hope-ishope-is-not/comments

⁵ Frankl, Viktor E. “The Case for a Tragic Optimism” (postscript to Man’s Search for Meaning). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984

What mattered in our election was not an intelligent strategy but catering to primal urges

 

I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ‘50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist.

That’s not just my opinion.

 

Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.“ “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.”^⁠1

I rebelled: I wanted freedom!

I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through him, I discovered – beneath my button-down, crew-cut-shorn, prudish existence –  a subterranean world of primal drives, clarifying everything the ’50s considered taboo. Freud snapped the chains that confined me, changing life into an adventure rather than a gulag experience.

He also piqued my interest in psychology, leading me to Columbia, where my excitement was dashed. In true 1950s fashion, academia banished Freud in favor of experimental psychology. Rather than studying people, we conducted animal experiments with white rats and then expected to magically extrapolate our rat data to humans. 

I dropped out of Columbia because the chains had tightened around me again: The rats lost, Freud won.  You might say that Freud greased the skids that launched me into the ‘60s, but only after a heart-rending detour to Vietnam.

The 1960s liberated not only me but our country, overthrowing the age-old conservative mandate of patriarchy, white man rule, and missionary-only sex; In its place, we advocated equal rights for all.

Unfortunately, our cultural revolution produced a vicious backlash, accelerating after the election of our first black president and coming to a head today. Unprecedented social change at whiplash speed was too much for the old guard.  Conservatives called the 1960s a “crisis in democracy.” This was an Orwellian phrase that meant the opposite: they were livid because we had too much democracy.

Over the intervening years, Democrats contributed to the problem by overplaying their hand, ignoring 70% of their base, white, working folks, and instead catered too much to special interest groups, no matter how valid their claims. 

Brewing inside this combustible mix, a counter-revolution was gaining momentum.

Traditionalists and increasing numbers of the working class, along with the business class, gathered under the Republican banner, asserting they were the silent majority, promoting biblical religion, punitive justice, and white supremacy while railing against homosexuals, abortions – and, god forbid, trans people. At first, Republicans hid their intentions by using dog whistles or coded language to speak to their base without promoting outrage.

That is until Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator, ditching code words to point-blank call a spade a spade: Mexicans are rapists, blacks come from shit-hole countries, democrats are communists, and women are nasty with blood coming out of their wherever. NY Times columnist Ezra Klein considers this disinhibition to be “the engine of Trump’s success.”^⁠2

The fact that Trump is reveling in the primal dregs of his unconscious is a sure indication that Freud’s concept of the irrational unconscious is back in vogue. Then, as now, regular folks are yearning for freedom, triggered by existing in a stifling, bureaucratic world with no agency. Of course, Trump eggs them on,  yearning to be their pied piper.

Psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart has accused liberals of ignoring the crucial importance of irrational drives to fuel mass political movements – drives first identified by Freud: “Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress,” 

Rather than surrendering to these primal feelings, as the Republicans have done, it’s up to Democrats and Independents to promote politics that restrain and redirect these urges. The first step  is “to stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable.”  That’s like Nancy Reagan’s solution to drug addiction, which was to just say no. 

The truth is people aren’t always reasonable.  As Freud showed us – each of us has destructive, irrational desires swirling around our cranium, always primed to pounce. 

In the ‘60s, we channeled our unconscious rage by breaking free of the Puritan ‘50s and speaking truth to power about military overreach, patriarchy, and rampant discrimination against all who were not white. Now, Trump is doing the opposite by speaking power to truth.

Trump is channeling our primal distress at being unmoored and over-regulated to mount a counter-revolution against the ’60s. ‘Make America Great Again’ is a code word for a return to ‘the good old days’ of slavish conformity, misogyny, and blatant discrimination aggressively enforced by rich, white men.

Personally, I prefer the Sixties. How about you?

xxx

¹ https://s-usih.org/2016/11/trump-out-of-the-shadows-of-the-sixties-social-movements/

² https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/maga-trump-psychological-appeal/680722/

Humphrey & Donald

 

                                                      Stock photo from Dreamstime: l_61704269.jpeg

I have been in a state of suspended animation since Donald Trump won the election: it’s like I was peacefully walking down my driveway when I  suddenly slipped on an invisible patch of black ice that catapulted me up in the air like a leaf in the wind. A rash of images is flashing in front of my eyes. All I knew for sure was that it was going to hurt like hell when I land.

Contradictions abound.

It was 80 degrees last week, setting a new record. Even this late in the season, the winter rye I planted last week in my garden as a cover crop has sprouted like it was spring. Yet, our incoming president assures us climate change is a hoax. Isn’t life grand living in a world of denial? 

Increasingly, parts of the world are becoming too hot for the human body to survive, to say nothing of being able to grow traditional crops This is sending increasing waves of refugees out into the world like the seeds from exploding milkweed pods. In response, Trump is choosing to close our borders, ignoring America’s perennial promise inscribed on the Statue of Liberty to “send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.” 

A case in point is the behavior of Kristi Noem, slated to be Trump’s new Homeland Security czar, who has bragged about shooting her 14-month-old dog cricket in a sand pit because it was a “less than worthless’ hunting dog.”^⁠1

I’m reminded of a quote by Hannah Arendt: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” Other examples include Trump’s devious stance on social security. His 15 trillion tax cut plan, catering mainly to the rich, will bankrupt that fund by stealing the cash that was slated to go to old folks like me.

My mind still cartwheeling through the air,  flashes back to the piece I wrote about primates last week: about how primitive drives control chimpanzees. Then I remember, serendipitously, Jane Goodall just wrote a new column this week that adds teeth to what I had written, based on her studies with chimpanzees.^⁠2

At the beginning of her research in 1960, her community of chimpanzees was “using and making tools and greeting one another with kisses and embraces.”⁠  But this big happy family didn’t last for long before she started witnessing them initiate increasingly brutal attacks on the neighboring chimpanzee community.

This violence was initiated by one chimp, an alpha male named Humphrey, who the researchers considered to be “something of a psychopath” because he was abusive to the females in his own community. 

“This marked the beginning of a series of savage attacks by males of the northern, larger group, led by Humphrey, on males and adult females in the south” until by 1974, the original single happy community had split in two. “From 1974 to 1977, we witnessed the northern males commit what among humans would be called atrocities.”

Scientists have conclusively shown that humans share this bloody aggressive side with chimps, which is not surprising since they are our closest relatives, with 98.8% of the same DNA. Luckily, however, there is one BIG difference!

Because we have bigger brains, our species, over time, has developed sophisticated methods of controlling our aggressive behavior. We have learned to resolve conflict through debate and dialogue –  “at the ballot box, in the halls of a congress or parliament, or around a negotiating table.”

It has been proven that where democracy has flourished, violence has receded. Unfortunately, democracy is fragile. French neuropsychiatrist Roger Mucchielli, along with others, has shown how bad actors can mortally wound democracy by purposely igniting our primitive drives. “Knowing how to do this allows someone to direct another’s behavior. And it can be done without the person even knowing it is being done.”

That’s what Trump is doing to us today.

Who can argue with Jane Goodall’s assessment: “If we hope to ensure for following generations the peaceful existence many of us have enjoyed, we need leaders and active citizens in all levels of our societies who will stimulate the compassionate and cooperative instincts we share with other primates,”

The future of our species depends upon it.

xxx

¹ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/kristi-noems-new-book-includes-a-bizarrely-detailed-account-of-killing-her-pet-dog?srsltid=AfmBOooxMMS-8XhQaGzPUSSw7Q9XFJarCfGKS6YqmnPArf59lR5h_Qrp

² https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/05/chimpanzees-humans-dark-side-aggression-cruelty/