Month: August 2024

On movements.

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As a younger adult I did a lot of volunteer work in gay rights organizations. As a kid I’d gotten picked on a lot for being a “faggot” even though I wasn’t gay, so I had a lot of empathy. I’m proud of the time I put in for Basic Rights Oregon and other gay organizations. But I supported the LGBT movement to fight against the bullies – not to become one of the bullies. When we get to the point that a couple in Oregon is ordered by the court to bake a gay wedding cake, that’s where I gotta get off.

When you see injustice against a group of people, you organize to fight that injustice, and that’s a good thing. But once you start that process, certain other things are going to happen, whether you want them to or not:

(1) People will get so caught up in the excitement of “fighting for the cause” that they won’t want to quit. If you ever actually achieve your goals, they’ll be disappointed because they’ll miss going to the rallies. And there are professional organizers and activists who depend on “fighting injustice” for a paycheck. So there’s a danger that you could end up creating the problem just so you can keep fighting it.

(2) Equality means equal rights, but it also means equal responsibilities – and nobody wants to hear about that part. If you keep telling people about all the stuff they’re entitled to because they’ve had it so hard, they’ll never stop listening to you. But real equality and real justice means no discrimination and no favoritism either. You have the right to be treated fairly and judged fairly, but you still have to earn your own way.

(3) And then with any kind of social reform movement, where you’ve got people who sincerely want to build a better society, there’s another element that creeps in unnoticed. Those are the people who don’t care anything about the cause, they don’t care anything about justice, they don’t care anything about building a better world. They’ve got their own program and they are in it for power. They don’t want to build up, they want to tear everything down and burn everything down. And then they want to build their own tower on the rubble, with them at the top.

Those are some of the reasons why social reform movements that start off with the best intentions can go off the path; #3 is especially dangerous. And there are many more, because it’s a lot easier to get things wrong than to get them right.

People sometimes ask “What causes poverty?” or “What causes failure?” But those are the wrong questions. Poverty and failure are easy to explain. Poverty is the default state of mankind, and it’s always easier to fail than to succeed. Any economist will tell you that the important question is “What causes prosperity?” Any psychologist will tell you what matters is “What causes success?” Moving up requires strength, will, and wisdom.

How to help?

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We want to help others, and it’s good that we do. But how to help? Sometimes the answer is simple: if a person is starving, you give them food; if they’re drowning, you throw them a life preserver; if they’re in a burning building, you bring them out. I am not claiming that these things are easy – clearly, it takes great courage to rush into a burning building – but there is nothing difficult about knowing what the person needs. You know immediately what’s the right thing to do – you just have to do it.

In the real world, knowing how to help is often more difficult and complicated. What is the right kind of help, and what is the wrong kind? How much help is enough, and how much is too much? Perhaps you see an elderly or disabled person carrying a bag of groceries, and you want to help. But maybe they are suspicious of your intentions; or maybe the person is very proud, or has worked hard to overcome a disability, and prefers to be independent. How do you know? You might have to pay close attention to the person’s reaction as you offer to help – their words, their tone, their facial expressions, their body language – to be sure that your help is really wanted.

For the government bureaucrat, every problem is a problem for the government to solve, by “some sort of collective action”: changes to public transit, changes to building codes, and hey, why not a “basic income” while we’re at it?

Every one of these proposed courses of action (“some sort of collective action”) implies some sort of public policy change – to transit, to building codes, or to the economy itself. Each one of those changes entails something that will impose costs on someone else (transit riders, shopkeepers, the working population), and (not coincidentally) accrues more power to the party imposing the changes.

Conversely, what is lost in the “collective action” approach is the knowledge of the particulars – the granular, mundane, local knowledge of THIS individual in THIS situation in THIS place and time – that is essential to assessing the person’s specific needs.

So, the first step is to determine whether the person actually needs help – that is, to ask. And how you ask makes a difference: there is a difference between “May I help you with that?” and “Do you need help?”. “May I help you?” communicates that the speaker would be honored, would consider it a privilege, to be allowed to help; while “do you need help?” puts the listener on the defensive and forces them to state a need.

Communication and metacommunication.

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When we as humans speak or communicate with one another, typically that communication is happening on a number of levels and may aim at a number of goals.

To keep things simple, I’m going to say that communication usually serves one or more of three, maybe four purposes:

(1) to exchange information;
(2) to make a request;
(3) to establish a relationship; and
(4) to convince or persuade somebody of something.

That last one might be a combination of the other three: you are giving them information, which you are asking them to incorporate into their world-view, and probably you want to establish some kind of relationship with the person so that your words will carry more weight. It is literally a matter of “winning friends and influencing people”.

We use communication to establish relationships all the time, in obvious ways and subtle ones. Your tone and demeanor might signal that you want to create a friendly relationship, or a respectful one. (Some languages even have grammatical forms exactly for this.) You may also wish to signal your membership in a particular group, which may include certain listeners and exclude others: it’s why you use your region’s dialect, your profession’s jargon, or your generation’s slang.

When computers exchange messages, the message normally includes a header and/or footer with metadata about the message itself, such as: sender’s identity, recipient’s identity, security and permissions, forwarding information, encoding and encryption, priority and timeliness, and expected length of the message.

Human beings are not computers, but we communicate some of the same kinds of metadata in our daily interactions: who we are (or who a message is coming from), who the message is for, who else is allowed to know about it, the urgency of the message, the authority or reliability of the information being presented, what language (or dialect) we’re using, and perhaps even how long the conversation is expected to last – does the speaker have a lot that they want to talk about? does the listener have the time (or patience) to listen to it all?

On writing.

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I had it in my head that creativity expands to fill the available time – that if I could just manage to get enough free time, I could sit down and start writing properly.

But what if that’s wrong? Maybe it is, instead, like the fuel-air mixture in an internal combustion engine, that must be compressed before it can ignite.