COMEDY CANCELLED

July 20th, 2019

This episode relies heavily on Episode 173: Wisecrack Canary

Today, we live in an environment where comedians are held to higher standards of behavior than world leaders are. Presidents seem to have a license for everything while comedians, strangely, seem to be vying for places in heaven while tempting the devil in everyone.

But it may be silly to think that anything has really changed.  The origin of the standup comedian originates, presumably, with the court jester whose job it was to make fun of the king for the amusement of all. 

But if the jester failed in this task and angered the king with his jokes, it was the king who executed the jester for going too far.

Now, there exists no king to execute the comedian when the joke fails to land well.  But the power to cancel a comedian has not evaporated, but merely moved.

Where does this king exist in the age of democracy where presidents fall short of the powers of a dictator?  The quick, assuming answer is the president, as with a country like the United States, but this immediately harks of a dictatorship and democracies are built as a direct and blatant alternative to fascism.  The power is distributed, naturally, as is the hallmark and hope of democracy, and the seat of power in this instance seems still sensitive to the job of taking out the jester when behavior is deemed…

too far.

This cleaved power, as divided between a leader like a president and the people who presumably enable the power of such a president still seems somewhat at odds with itself, as though the perspective of the distributed people and the ability for such distributed power to make sensible decisions has not yet matured.  Perhaps its even likely that it’s impossible for such a group to mature to some ideal state. For the time being it’s best we hope otherwise.

It is interesting how quickly and adeptly positions of power acclimate to missing limbs when the distributed nature of democracy lops off another ability previously reserved for a king.  The boon of laziness is that we long to schluff off responsibility to others.  Perhaps this human foible allowed for George Washington’s superhuman refusal of dictatorial powers to persist beyond the man.  How lovely would it be if laziness could account for some of the improvements in society?  No president has really ever made a meaningful attempt to wrench back powers from its distributed form.  Everyone wants the grandeur that comes along with the responsibility of power, but no one actually wants to put up with the hassle of responsibility.

What’s perhaps a surprise to ponder is that the jester is still functioning much the same way he was in the days of the court. He (or she) pokes fun at the seats of power.  But what is new is that the seat of power has ramified.  The seat(s) of power are now occupied by world leaders, business people and the population at large…. not to mention the comedian themselves given a certain threshold of success both in terms of popularity and financial horsepower. 

All of these groups are regular and valid sources of humor for the comedian.  They make fun of world leaders, they make fun of other rich people, they make fun of the common person, and then of course, comedians make fun of themselves.

Even more curious is where the power to silence a comedian has wandered off to.  A world leader of a democracy would be generally shunned for attempting such a thing.  A business leader would probably add fodder to the fire where they are the butt of the joke. 

But the masses are relatively untouchable in this regard and can cancel someone’s career with a swiftness that was hitherto reserved by the guillotine. 

And unlike comedians, business leaders, or world leaders, the masses cannot be cancelled out.  They are untouchable in this regard because the masses are by default distributed.

But there lies within this steaming, heap of mass an important caveat.  ‘The masses’ are spoken of in this respect as a singular but untraceable unit.  But this usage lacks the necessary granularity. 

Here enters The Minority Rule.  Within the masses, those who inflict and succeed with this cancel culture do not actually ever comprise a majority.  In the rare case that the masses are actually unified, then constitutional amendments occur. Otherwise, the cancelling power of the mass culture can be attributed to a much smaller, stubborn and very vocal subset.

While everyone has an opinion, few have an opinion strong enough, or a temperament attuned to the volume necessary to be a part of this subset of the masses that kicks and screams until they get their way.

If everyone in the room is silent aside from two or three people speaking, then that group has the loudest voice by default.

Power has transferred to the minority rule. And an easy way of thinking about this rule is to think about a single drop of ink being dropped into a vat of water…. it’s quite difficult to pick out any part of the vat that is not representative of the ink because it diffuses… its nearly impossible to pick out some water in the vat that isn’t influenced by the ink, unless we get down to an exceptionally granular and difficult level.

As Margaret Meade once wrote:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

She could not be more correct, but the dark side of her realization is not apparent in her rosy, inspirational verbiage.

Thoughts can be ones of anger, and ‘thoughtful’ can have a very unexpected meaning in this sense.  A small group of angry, committed people can turn off the humor for everyone else.  And this has been the case in several circumstances. 

It’s the unfortunate tendency of the majority to tolerate the intolerance of a minority that inevitably leads to the decapitation of the majority. 

This is simultaneously why it seems so unbelievable when tiny factions come out of left field and grow to dominate, and also why it’s entirely possible.

The only sensible and practical response is something that exists between stubbornness, patience and determination.

As Tinkered Thinking has explored previously, Stubborn and Determined form an essential Rivalnym.  Patience is the unifying fuel that powers both of these positions. 

What mistakes and apologies boil down to is essentially a declaration of intention.  Honest mistakes will be made, must be made and certainly have been made. The only thing that reveals such mistakes as honest is the intention described around the event.  If that intention, combined with a thoughtful interpretation of the event’s results leads to a change in behavior, then we as a species have nothing to worry about.  This becomes more complicated as we make room for people who must learn slowly through repeated mistakes.  There incurs a point when we as a society ask how many infractions we are willing to field before the connections between intention, retrospection and behavioral change are clearly not strong enough to move forward productively.  The questions that may arise in this framework are numerous, fascinating and should be the foundation of any correctional institution, like the prison system.  But for now, the correctional facilities that make up the majority are totally blunt to these nuances.  So blunt in fact, that it mirrors the often ill-guided instant reaction of the vocal minority that inevitably imposes its will on the majority.

Our discussion must inevitably land back on laziness.  It’s the inactivity of the majority that allows for the minority rule to dominate. The problem is that the minority rule can create great damage.  This is how terrorists can achieve such success with guerrilla warfare, which epitomizes the minority rule in a physical and violent way. 

The change needed is for another minority – it need not even be the majority – to react to the unwise assumptions of the minority trying to impose their will, and to simply say, ‘no, perhaps mistakes were made, but all is still good, chill out.’

This episodes references Episode 293: Rivalnym.

FOLLOWER VS JOINER

July 19th, 2019

All sorts of social media platforms connect people by creating an infrastructure where people follow others.  We can for a moment, just take this literally and wonder how feasible it is to follow a whole bunch of different people?  If everyone we follow is moving in different directions, which direction does that mean we go?

Of course, moving in a an actual physical direction relative to the people we might follow on social media doesn’t apply. And yet the language we use for such things, whether it be following, revolutions, movements…. many of these are phrased in the verbiage of physical space. 

We must always pause to wonder if the language of our metaphors has even more resonance when taken somewhat literally. At the very least, this exercise enables us to look at the same thing from a different perspective, a different perspective that might allow us to consider a worrisome aspect.

The image of following a whole bunch of different people moving in different directions yields something that looks like gridlock.  But we can also rephrase this image and see something like a web.  With each person connecting outwardly to different people, influenced from a wide variety of spaces.  This need not be gridlock.  We can rephrase this as a kind of support structure.  Supporting what, we might ask?

This is simultaneously a recipe for echo chambers, or self-inflicted torture chambers, or counter to these, this support web can provide a variety of influences that all don’t necessarily agree with one another.

Webs, under this perspective are not reminiscent of people following one another.  A better notion is the idea of people being joined with one another and supporting a network of information transfer. 

The best example is probably twitter.  While some find it o be a cesspool of violent and uncouth proportions, others tailor their network and curate who they are joined with and suddenly their feed is flooded with a wealth of helpful information that helps push towards goals.

Physically we can only ever move in one direction. But ideologically, we can experience a buffet, joining our attention to new ideas and thereby bolstering the framework through which we gaze at the world.

THE NET

July 18th, 2019

Questions can hone themselves as we rephrase them.

Imagine for a moment a wide net that a fisherman casts out into the water.  The net is large and nebulous, like the shape of a summer cloud, designed to cover as much area as possible.

It’s like a probability cloud.  The fisherman is taking a chance and making a guess that the fish he wants to catch is somewhere in this big area.

And then the fisherman slowly begins to draw the net in, slowly closing the opening, changing the shape so that the space – that big nebulous area – starts to shrink.

Once drawn closed, the fisherman lifts the net and the net sucks in tightly against the fish caught in the net, outlining it’s form nearly perfectly.

Questions, and the art of forming and reforming questions, matches this process of changing form. 

We can take an all too common circumstance and use it as a hypothetical case study for this exercise of question rephrasing.

Let’s say a friend complains and says:

I hate my job.

We can respond:

What do you hate about your job?

I hate the commute and I don’t like any of the people I work with.

So its really a matter of travelling to a certain place everyday and dealing with people you don’t like?

Yes, I suppose so.

Is it possible that you would be happier if you had a much shorter commute and you liked the people you work with?

No, because I think the actual work is boring too.

Why is it boring?

It’s too easy.  I get it done quickly and often times I have to wait around for other people to finish their work before I can move forward.

So it’s not just that you don’t like these people, they actually hinder your ability to do work that you find boring?

YES!

Would you be content working alone?  Or is it necessary to have people around?

The only time I like is when I’m left alone to get work done.  Even if I think it’s boring, at least there’s no one around to screw it up.

So it’s possible you’d be comfortable working alone?

Probably.

At this point, the questions have approached the issue from a few different angles and we have a better read out on the shape of a possible solution.  The first question revealed an important aspect of this solution.  The commute and the problematic people.  So at first a solution seems like a closer version of the job with a different group of people.  But rephrasing the question with this as a possible solution uncovers another key fact, namely that the actual work is a problem too.    At this point it might seem that we are dealing with a miserable person who complains about everything,  but this would be a mistake.  This would be similar to being annoyed with a fish because it keeps flopping around spastically on the floor, and wondering why it doesn’t just chill out and accept the situation it is in.

The complaints are clues about the shape of the solution.

Just like a net shaped like a fish is not actually a fish but allows us to reason that there is probably a fish inside the net, so too can questions be formed to eat away superfluous unknown space in order to get closer to a solution, so close in fact that the questions begin to describe the solution.

Clearly, it seems this friend would be happier working alone with some location independence.  And clearly they need to find a field that is more difficult. Maybe something that moves quickly and therefore requires a constant level of learning.

It would be easy at this point to suggest something that falls into these parameters. But this is likely to be counter-productive, and it’s a lost opportunity to practice the art of the question.  We still lack a ton of information about this friend.  It could be easy to suggest something like freelance web designer, but this could easily be way off the mark and easily shut down.  Still, even this would give us more useful information if we don’t take the shutdown personally. Beyond this, however, we can do better by delving further into that which we do not understand.

We might ask questions that delve into our friend’s past, even asking them what they wanted to be when they were a child, and discovering how that narrative changed over the years.

This is one of the virtues of conversation: each person discovers aspects of their own thought they were not conscious of. We seem to have the notion that thoughts are like sentences and paragraphs in a book.  But in reality they are hazy, emotional concepts that don’t always have words and descriptions attached to them.  This is why writing, or more casually, journaling can be so useful. As a practice, writing forces us to make these fleeting ethereal concepts concrete in the real world.  Between writing and thought, we can see how conversation is a limp and lazy middle ground.  Unless the conversation is recorded and is reviewed, we are only left with the emotional illusion of achievement and the satisfaction therein.  But writing on the other hand, is something we can review, disagree with and fine tune. It’s extremely difficult to be analytical about our own speech, let alone our own thoughts simply because our memory of such things is so poor.

What’s notable about the little conversation of questions above, is that we can apply this same tightening of questions to ourselves. That little dialogue can be held by a single person.  But this is a difficult to pull off in the way that no one wants to do their taxes. It takes a little work to be so incisive and honest about one’s situation.

Questions are useful, not just as a tool to hone themselves.  Questions can be a tool with which we use to hone ourselves and who we are in the world.

This episode relates to Episode 30: The Only Tool, Episode 451: Crafting Riddles, Episode 403: Big Question, Bad Question and Episode 390: Question About The Question

POKE THE MONSTER

July 17th, 2019

Any genuine question seeks to explore something that is truly unknown.  This can be distinguished from requestsfor information that have already been discovered by someone else.  Notice also the root similarity between quest-ion and re-quest.

A genuine question delves a little further into the chaotic unknown with the aim of creating a little more understandable order.

The old caution ‘be careful what you wish for…’comes to mind. 

If we genuinely delve into the unknown, then we cannot be sure what we are going to find, and we may not like what we find.

We need only remind ourselves of Oppenheimer’s change of heart after he spearheaded the creation of nuclear weapons at the end of WWII.  After being rigorously engaged with work that he found interesting, he quite literally found something he came to regard as monstrous.  Granted he found exactly what he was looking for. 

Perhaps this was a sort of morbid curiosity.  Or perhaps his zoom got stuck on the minutia of curiosity and he could not Zoom Out to the big picture to see what he would eventually come to regret.  While humans have - amazingly- been able to continue the project of civilization with nuclear weapons in hand for many decades, we can imagine a similar sort of circumstance in the future.

What other slumbering monsters might we poke at out of naivety and curiosity.

This is inevitably one cost of dancing with the unknown.

But the art of the question can aid us on this difficult quest as we blindly try to map the unknown.

Questions are like lures that we cast out into the unknown.

We need only test out questions, by fielding them with a meta-set of questions.  Such as: am I baiting a monster with this question?

Or is this question designed to lure something wonderful out of the unknown?

NEGATIVE GRATITUDE

July 16th, 2019

We have all awoken in the morning with a sense of horror about what our life has become.  Or at least according to the dream we’ve just exited.  Perhaps, in the dream, we were fired, or cheated on a spouse or committed a crime. 

When the mind finally settles into a sense of which reality is which, the sense of gratitude that washes over our sense of self can be immense and so strangely pleasurable that it can make one wonder why we do not actively seek out this state.

Generally most people do not, but it can be molded into a very useful practice.

Fostering a sense of gratitude can be done by focusing positively on the things we do have in our life, whether that be people or resources or situation, but we can also foster a sense of gratitude by devoting some creative thought to the misfortunes that have not befallen our circumstance. 

Like the nightmare that we get to wake up from, we can day dream of terrible things in a way that is ultimately positive.  It may at first seem morbid to imagine losing a loved one, but this difficult and potentially painful exercise achieves two things: it increases our gratitude for the current situation which is not marred by this event, and two, it imaginatively prepares us for the circumstance in which this terrible event actually doeshappen in the future. 

While it can be tempting to hold the stance that we must always think positively and not bother with such morbid imaginings, the exercise, though difficult holds too great a benefit.  Ignoring the terrible things that might happen and probably will happen is just as unrealistic as being hell bent on the negative. Being realistic is in some sense a solemn matter.  William James defined ‘solemn’ as a state that holds some of it’s opposite.  To be a solemn optimist is to be optimistic about the future without fooling one’s self into the delusion that it might turn out differently.

Arriving at gratitude via a negative avenue is one way to invoke the practice of solemn optimism.  The exercise does two useful things: it improves the present and the future. One via gratitude and the other through a means of mental fortification.  Ultimately we soften ourselves to the moment and strengthen ourselves to the future.

The paradox reminiscent in the contradictory phrase ‘negative gratitude’ has an effect that has a like wise contradictory paradox of both softening and toughening who we are.

This episode references Episode 345: Solemn Optimist