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Psychologist At Large:
Reflections, Ruminations and Rants
Self Work
One of the keys to psychological survival is to see oneself as a work in progress. This can also be the key to two people surviving as a couple; each is a work in progress, and so is their relationship. It leaves aside the question of what is to be done, when and how to do it, and with whom. But if we don’t see ourselves as works in progress, and accept that part of what that means is that we are responsible to work on ourselves and our relationships, we won’t ever get to the what, when, how, and with whom.
Men and Women
Lots has been said about the similarities and differences between men and women. Here, for what it’s worth, is my contribution:
I’ve observed that truthfulness in men and women is pretty much the same, but we tend to be idiots differently.
Anxiety and Triviality
One of the reasons why anxiety is so widespread today is that so many people are preoccupied with trivialities. They are so concerned with what their colleagues, bosses, subordinates, relatives, neighbors or social relations think and feel about them, that they have forgotten, if they ever knew, what’s really important.
When we put the meaning of our lives into the hands of the crowd, we do well to be anxious about it.
“Obesity Fight Starved for Cash”
The Chicago Tribune, under this tongue-in-cheek headline, reports that critics say that the United States Department of Agriculture’s advertising program, which hopes to “slow the obesity epidemic,” is grossly underfunded (March 14, 2004). The entire USDA Nutrition Promotional Budget of $1.8 million is insignificant in comparison with the annual advertising expenditures (for 2002) for beer and ale ($1.2 billion), soft drinks ($768 million), candy and mints ($545 million), chips, nuts, popcorn and pretzels ($311 million), and cookies and crackers ($254 million). And that doesn’t take into account the advertising budgets for fast-food chains, which aren’t given.
The problem, of course, is in the negative versus positive results of advertising, the financial “bang for the buck.” The manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of beer, soda, candy, etc., can spend as much money as they do, because it generates sales for their products. Advertising is, for them, a cost of doing business. Good health, in contrast, gives a negative financial reward: less money spent for illness care, for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. Even then, the money saved doesn’t accrue to any manufacturer or service supplier.
Insurance companies would benefit economically from a healthier population, but they wouldn’t realize exact savings. It makes more economic sense for them to just build the cost of advertising into their prices.
The problem here is that the lack of short-term and trackable payoff for advertising for health creates a situation in which the products that conduce toward obesity are advertised almost everywhere, while advertising promoting healthy lifestyle choices is practically nonexistent.
One solution would be for state and federal governments to commit serious funding to ad campaigns to support healthy food choices and exercise. But that would require three ingredients that tend to be in short supply among governments: available funds, common sense, and a long range view.
So, I suppose that what will need to happen, if a balance of advertising is to evolve in this area, is an altruistic grassroots campaign to support ads for healthy food choices and exercise. But who would donate to such a thing, and where would it begin?
Honesty, Sincerity, and Truth
Honesty and sincerity are lauded as values, and they are better, under most circumstances, than lying and insincerity, but they don’t reach their fullest expression unless both are subordinated to truth. A person can act, speak, report, and give witness, honestly and sincerely, and still be wrong. Honest and sincere, but misinformed and untruthful, people have engineered countless religious and political dead ends, organizational malfunctions and meltdowns, and, in war, needlessly spilled blood.
Perhaps Robert MacNamara, in the documentary film, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert MacNamara,” provides an example of untruthful honesty and sincerity. He does a sincere human service by reviewing, so very publicly, the thinking and decision-making processes that went on behind the tragic folly of the Vietnam war. He didn’t have to put himself on the line again so prominently at this late time in his life--MacNamara is in his eighties--and, whatever his personal goals in doing so may have been, I am grateful for the public history lesson from a man who was at the center of such monumental events as the firebombing of Japan during World War II, the Cuban missle crisis, and the Vietnam war. He does seem to report these events honestly; although he doesn’t say everything, he doesn’t claim to. He even goes so far as to say that he realized, when he met his Vietnamese counterpart, long after the war, that the American and Vietnamese leaders completely misread each other from the start; Americans thinking that this fiercely anticolonial people with a long history of resisting Chinese imperial ambition would be just another communist domino, and the Vietnamese thinking that America wanted to replace France, whom they had kicked out, as the dominant colonial power.
Now, that is a perception of considerable depth and power, honestly reported. I hope that, by saying it publicly, MacNamara will help prevent such mistakes happening in future. That seems to be what he’s sincerely trying to accomplish by appearing in this documentary. But what MacNamara doesn’t say is that this information, which seems so surprising and enlightening to him, was available during the time of the war itself, in published form, and widely discussed. The deeper truth is that MacNamara, and the people with and for whom he worked, never troubled to study the background, the nature and history, of the culture which they were preparing, and then undertaking, to attack. They disregarded such information, even when it was publicly reported and discussed, as inconsistent with, and irrelevant to, their worldview and piorities. Brilliant as their intellectual and social achievements were, they simply didn’t know what they were doing, and didn’t trouble themselves to find out.
Unspoken But Obvious
Sometimes the unspoken message becomes obvious. This evening I spoke with an adolescent about feelings that had become so powerful that they forced her to cut herself to make herself feel better. Now that she has done so, she said, these feelings were no longer a problem, so there was no reason to discuss them. As she said that, her feet, dangling over the ottoman, were moving so rapidly that it looked as if they were running. I told her that it looked like she was trying to run away from those feelings, and from talking about them. She denied it: “Teenagers always do that.”
Well, there’s more work to do here.
Eleven Year Old’s Wisdom
An eleven year old, speaking about her sadness over events in her family, told me:
“Parents have a lot of power over their kids. They just don’t know how to use it properly. They forget how it was when they were kids, and then when they have kids they just treat them like their parents treated them.”
I wrote her words verbatim, can’t improve on them, and pass them on to you.
Nonconditional Spirituality
Considering spirituality, first remove denominational dogma, and you get nondenominational spirituality. Then remove emotionalism: nondenominational nonemotional spirituality. Then remove intellectualism: nondenominational nonemotional nonintellectual spirituality. Then remove self-centeredness: nondenominational nonemotional nonintellectual non-self-centered spirituality.
Now you’re talking!
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