The Ties that Bind: Part 1

"I don't know what his problem is!" Bessie told her over the phone late one night. "I'm graduating soon! If I don't pass this class I'll have to take it again next semester and I don't have the money for that!"

Melody narrowed her eyes. Not her normal bright blue ones, but the hidden intangible ones. She saw a thin string connecting Bessie with her boyfriend. It was pulled as tight as it could be. It wouldn't take much more for it to snap altogether.

 "Melody? You still there?"

Melody snapped back to her normal eyes. She was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling with her cellphone resting next to her ear.

 "Yeah, I'm still here," she said. "Have you actually talked to him about this?"

"Yes, but he just won't--" Bessie started, but Melody cut her off, a touch impatiently.

"I don't mean an argument. I mean did you really talk to him? Like, you say you don't know what his problem is. Did you actually ask him how he feels? Not demand, ask."

The answering silence told Melody all she needed to hear.

"God, why are you talking to me right now? You could be talking to him instead!"

"Because I don't know what to do, and you always give good advice..."

Melody took a deep breath. Counted to ten. Let it out.

"Bessie, it's 1 o'clock in the morning, and I have work at nine. If you don't talk to Bryan as soon as possible and reassure him that you're still into him, he's going to dump you."

"You sound awfully certain of that," said Bessie, suspiciously. "Has Bryan been talking to you then?"

"Oh for the love of--" Melody started angrily, then stopped herself. 1 o'clock in the morning.

She sighed.

"Wait, you're not still telling people that you can see relationships, are you?" asked Bessie, sounding annoyed.

Melody pinched the bridge of her nose.

"I'm not getting into this argument with you again, Bess," she said firmly. "I don't care if you believe me or not. But if Bryan dumps you it will be just as much your fault as his. I won't say I told you so, but you'll know I'm thinking it. Now let me go back to sleep."

"Alright," said Bessie, apologetically. "Sorry for waking you up, I just--"

"It's cool," Melody told her. "Next time call Bryan instead of me. Tell him you miss him and that I said hi. Okay?"

"Alright," said Bessie. "Good night Melody."

"Good night," said Melody, and hung up. She turned on the "do not disturb" setting, then turned off herself shortly after.

Heroism 101: How Things Actually Work

 

 

Welcome to Heroism 101! This class is an introduction to heroing for potential new heroes. It is also a remedial class for established heroes who are feeling lost or helpless, or who are in recovery from well-intentioned extremism or guilt-induced trauma. I'm sure you all have questions about what it means to be a hero. No? Nobody? Well then, I suppose you all have some preconceptions instead--

Please raise your hand in my class, Mr.--

Mr. Awesome, okay...

So class, this "Mr. Awesome" has just asked a very good question! He said he's been 'secretly' invited to join a hero team for special individuals with extraordinary powers called "The Super-Legends". He wants to know if he should join.

So, everyone. Should he join? Or not?

Raise your hands for "he should join". Wow lots of raised hands, I see. Okay, and how many for "he shouldn't join?"

Okay, okay. So for those of you who just raised your hands, could anyone tell me why Mr. Awesome shouldn't join "the Super-Legends"?

Yes indeed, it does sound kinda pretentious, doesn't it. But why does it sound pretentious?

You there, in the back! What about that heroism job offer sounded pretentious?

Okay, that was a good thought. Anyone else?

No one? Alright then. Mr. Awesome, before you accept that heroism job offer, you should ask the following question: What do they mean by "extraordinary powers"?

Indeed. Now, I've actually had the privilege of meeting the Super-Legends in the flesh. They fight crime. They beat up bad guys. The police see them as nosy, inexperienced idiots who always get in the way and mess things up. They've faced countless lawsuits.

 

They saved my life once, but in the process they accidentally killed my dog. And the firefighters were already on the scene, and likely would have handled things better if the Super-Legends hadn't gotten in the way. They claim that they have super-powers. They don't. They're just ordinary incompetent vigilantes who think they can do a better job than the trained professionals because they think they're special and gifted.

And unfortunately because they have indeed saved lives, some people listen to them and believe them.

 

They aren't superheroes. It's all fantastic nonsense. They and their fans are falling prey to the Great Man fallacy. The Great Man fallacy is the tendency to assume that history is shaped primarily by special, naturally gifted people called "heroes", and that these "heroes" were all given their gifts on a silver platter, that they were destined for greatness from the moment they were born and that we mere mortals can never hope to match them.*

But one need only look a little closer and ignore the temptation to wishful thinking, to see how obviously nonsensical that is. What powers have these historical figures really had to shape the course of history?

 

Einstein had to be pretty smart to figure out his theories of relativity. But he didn't start out that way. He didn't have to figure everything out himself, and he couldn't have. If you plopped baby Einstein down in an ancient hunter-gatherer tribe on the African Savannah a hundred thousand years ago, he wouldn't ever stumble upon the idea of "E=MC^2". He'd be just as ignorant and incompetent as the rest of humanity was back then. The same thing could be said for every other hero in history, from Washington to Gandhi and everyone in between.

What powers did these historical heroes really have? The same ones anyone has. They had their mouths to speak with, their legs to walk with, their arms to carry with, their minds to think with and their hearts to feel with. Anything more than that they would have had to borrow from other people or from the environment around them.

If your powers can't be taught to others then they may be far less useful than you think they are. A power that only you can use, if such a thing ever existed, would be a power whose impact is fleeting and cannot scale.

 

Even Kark Clent from the old 20th century Ultra-man comic book series couldn't be everywhere at once. For every life he saved, there were many more that he couldn't, and he often caused a lot of collateral damage in the process.
 

Beating up giant robots and saving kittens from trees can definitely be heroic, but if that's all you can do it isn't so impressive. The military and other kinds of security workers have already known how to do that for a very long time.

But if your powers can be taught to others...

 

If they can help you to heal, build and create rather than just hurt, defeat and destroy... if you could use those powers to save the world without throwing a single punch or firing a single bullet, and without throwing a single political or cultural adversary into a cage or the street...

If you could find your way through the murky threads of relationships and fate... not by being omniscient but through educated guessing and hard work, to create a domino effect of increasing goodness and competence in the dark and gritty real world...

Then you could overcome the cycle of vengeance, and make human civilization competent enough to survive in the hostile environment of outer space.

Or in other words you'd save the world and then the world would stay saved, because it would have learned how to save itself. If you could do anything even a tiny fraction as difficult and impactful as that, it would be much more impressive than beating up giant robots or saving kittens from trees. None of that childish "Super-Legends" nonsense.

They say that heroes are born, not made. That being a hero isn't something that can be taught. I say that's nonsense! Just like any other job or passion project, to become a hero you need to really want to be one, enough to put in the hard work of actually making things better, saving lives, pulling through and carrying on when all seems lost.

 

And you need to learn how actual adults do heroing work--in the dark, difficult and gritty real world, with only their wills and their skills, their hard work and determination, and those friends and family who stand by them... without any superpowers or prophecies or special destinies handed to them on a silver platter.

If you think you need those bells and whistles to be a hero then you probably wouldn't be a very effective one and you'd have been better off staying home with your comic books and letting the grownups handle things.

For homework: write an essay on what drives you to become a hero or what drove you to become a hero. What is your purpose, your life's mission? What is at stake for you and others if you fail? What will happen if you succeed? Why does it matter? Since these essays will tend to be very personal, you need not share them with me.

 

However, you all have therapists yes? Of course you do, and if you don't you're not ready for this line of work and you probably won't pass this class.

If your therapist tells me that you completed the essay and that it fully answered the assignment questions, you will get full marks on it. If your therapist tells me that you did not complete the essay, or that you gave incomplete answers, you will receive either partial credit or no credit for the assignment, depending on the quality of your answers according to your therapists.

You may also choose not to do the assignment at all, since this class costs zero in tuition and doesn't impact your GPA. Your grades on assignments in this class aren't a perfect indicator of your potential or readiness to be a hero or to become a better hero, although they can be a useful clue for figuring that out.

If you do the essay, it must be submitted to your therapist before class at the start of next month. Until then consider these Tuesday mornings to be an independent study where you may read, write, search the internet, do some soul-searching, whatever you feel you will need to do to help prepare yourself to be a hero or to become a better hero.

That's all for today everybody. Class dismissed!

*en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

3 Quick Tips for Talking to Your Racist Uncle or Elitist Aunt

So it's occurred to me that there are too many people who don't know how to understand, relate to or talk to those with different political views than their own. If you've ever thought something like, "I just don't understand people like that. How could they do and believe such crazy things?" then here are some nifty tricks to help you learn how to do just that.

1. Values before facts. Your goal is to connect with the other person, establish trust, and share your thoughts, feelings and perspectives with each other. NOT to prove them wrong or change their behavior. Persuasion on specific issues can come later. First you need to find common ground and build the relationship, which arguably is more important anyway.

2. Listen without judgment. Understanding someone else requires temporarily taking on their perspective, looking at the world through their eyes and seeing what they see, "stepping into their shoes" as it's often said. Don't filter their paradigms through your own while listening to them, because then you're not really listening. Temporarily remove all your assumptions (even when those assumptions are valid and true!) and just hear them out.

3. Steelman the other person and their perspective. Imagine your way into the mind of the most reasonable, normal, human version of the person you're talking to. That's probably who you're actually talking to, or close enough to start connecting with. The person you're talking to is a human being, so if your mental picture of them doesn't pass the Ideological Turing test* then it's probably a strawman.

These three rules of thumb won't make you an expert communicator overnight, but they should be enough to get you started on reaching people across the political divide. Try it, see how it goes!

*The Ideological Turing Test

Note on Removed Content: Learning From my Mistakes Without the Fanfare

I sometimes remove content from this blog if I think it is either wrong, insensitive or too controversial to accomplish what it's intended to accomplish.

I'm smart and mature enough to be capable of changing my mind without making a public fuss about it or trying to explain or defend my motives for writing to the entire world. Sometimes I might make a short public apology for the really bad posts, but that's about it.

Additionally, this blog needs to maintain a unifying message and theme. If it merely points out all the specific ways that everyone on every side is right and wrong about all these different things, it won't be able to be the blog I want it to be. The most important and essential messages and themes would be lost in translation for many readers.

 

I feel like I can do better than that. I can get people to understand their common ground and common humanity without getting lost fighting over the various ways in which each side sacrifices different aspects of moral goodness.

If you find one of my posts harmful, offensive or ignorant, it probably will be taken down at some point eventually—even if it's the sort of post which you wouldn't normally expect someone to change their mind about.

Please do not assume such a post is representative of the rest of this blog or of my political or cultural allegiances. 

There's always more to learn and more room to grow. That's what life's all about after all. I'm still learning and growing and always will be, so please be patient with me. Thanks!

P.S. To be clear, I consider myself an ally to every political and ideological faction of humankind. My worldviews and philosophy may look like a Rorschach blot to those who don't quite understand that they're looking at.

Everyone has valid concerns and values. It's their methods of satisfying those values and their expectations of how the world works that are sometimes wrong, but in different ways. We all have different weaknesses and different blind spots.

Obama is Right, but also VERY WRONG

 

This speech reminded me that Obama, who is supposed to be the ideological symbol of what the Democrat party is all about, is actually a left-leaning centrist. The things he said about how Trump is only trying to get attention rather than having any real ideological motive are the same things I've been saying all along, which almost everyone I know on both the left and the right have insisted isn't the case. The leftists keep saying he's motivated by a desire to oppress racial, sexual, and religious minorities etc., the rightists keep saying he's motivated by a desire to clean out the swamp of corruption in the mainstream media and Washington and look out for the little guy. They're both wrong!

I find it fascinating how Obama seems to have just given voice to my opinion of Trump rather than the opinion that most liberals seemed to have of Trump before then. Not only that, but he seems to have done it in a way that may have subtly shifted the liberal zeitgeist further towards that perspective without him just coming out and saying, "Your criticisms of Trump are wrong, here are some more accurate ones."

That being said, Obama misdiagnoses the root problem. He says Trump is the root problem, and that voting him out of office is the necessary first step to repairing our country.

But Trump isn't the root problem, he's only a symptom. The real root problem is that our country is already far beyond excessively centralized. People here have gotten themselves stuck in giant coalitions in order to protect themselves from other giant coalitions. It's a downward spiral of distrust and dehumanization made possible by corporate- and automation-fueled distance from our neighbors.

Not only does Obama misdiagnose the root problem, but he also demonstrates a lack of basic understanding of what ought to be a vital principle of representative government:

 

You DO NOT EVER stake everything that hundreds of millions of people care about on the actions of a single champion, because that single champion is an imperfect human being and therefore a single point of failure.

 

Staking everything on the actions of a single champion again and again for at least a decade is the whole reason we're in this mess in the first place!

If you really have to bet the lives and freedoms of hundreds of millions of people and the future of the human species on the actions of a single champion, that means you and representative government in general is already doomed.

But we don't have to do that! We've got other options. We don't need a political deus ex machina to save us. We can save ourselves!!

Bells and Whistles

Supervillain: With the power of my evil genius plan, my ultimate weapon, and my army of disposable robot minions, I will take over the world!

American 1: laughs What an adorable amateur. He really thinks all those bells and whistles are necessary!

Supervillain: What!?

American 2: to American 1 Remember that time when we stumbled our way into world domination?

American 1: Face screws up in disgust Yeah. But that was decades ago man. We have more important things to worry about now than ruling the world.

Supervillain: Eyes widen in shocked outrage

American 2: Tell me about it. Although it kinda sucks that the global market infrastructure the world depends on is collapsing in our absence.

American 1: Yeah, but its not like we ever needed global markets in the first place. We only set those up to bribe everybody to fight the Soviets. But they're gone now so...

American 2: I know, but it's just, something doesn't feel quite right about this.

American 1: We need to take care of our own first. If it makes you feel any better you can send some money to Haiti and post a hashtag about it on social media later.

American 2: Yeah, you're right. Good idea.

Exit Americans

Supervillain: screams in pure unadulterated fury

Your Loneliness Isn't Your Fault (Take 2)

Your loneliness isn't your fault. You are not ugly, you are not a bad person and you are not "undatable". If you actually look at all the people who are complaining about their lack of a love life, and compare to the ones who are in loving relationships, you will realize that there is often no pattern, no rhyme or reason for why some people have it and others don't.

The problem isn't just that you in particular can't find love, it's also that those who would love you if they knew you can't find you. Because without the community infrastructure, the social connections and networks to point us in the right direction and help narrow the search, we're all looking for a needle in a haystack!

For the most part that infrastructure just doesn't exist right now. In its place we have dating apps, which are terrible at helping people find compatible matches because they're software and not human beings. The software doesn't understand human beings well enough to understand what we need out of our relationships and who we would enjoy and fit with best.

You deserve to be loved, and there are many compatible people out there who you could find happiness with if only you could find each other. But right now whether you find each other or not is dependent on an unfair lottery. The odds of your finding each other are often very slim. Improving yourself, your appearance or the way you interact with others may have very little impact on those odds if at all.

We need to bring back human matchmaking. Fill out this quiz and share your answers with a trusted friend or community member. Have them recommend people to date or others who can give you recommendations.

Please share this message and the quiz with all your friends. We can make the world a more loving place.

Thank you.