More Black Swans

Today Benedict Carey offers to guide us through the world of pink unicorns, three-dollar bills, and bearded nuns. I am surprised that he left out black swans, but his points are well taken. Link here.

As Nassim Taleb explained, black swans are events that were thought to be impossible or inconceivable. Not only did these impossible events happen, but they often changed the world. Among his black swans were the terror attack of September 11, World War I, and Hurricane Katrina.

Call it uncanny, call it extremely unlikely, in Carey's words: "such an experience... violates all logic and expectations."

As Carey explains, the human mind plans for the future. Before setting off on a journey, it plans for the possible eventualities. It also creates certain expectations, of pleasure, of relaxation, of enlightenment.

Before changing careers, you will consider all of the possible consequences and plan accordingly.

Policy analysis and war games always factor in the different possible outcomes of any action. At times these become enormously complicated. And, dare I say, there is always an element of the unpredictable.

Such exercises require considerable imagination. The worlds containing the possible outcomes are, obviously, fictional.

Much planning is based on past history. If you know that doing X has usually produced outcome Y you will reasonably expect that the pattern will maintain itself.

And yet, great planners do not limit themselves to the past. They engage their imagination to conjure up alternative scenarios that might never have happened.

Recall that after 9/11 commentators were saying that we were unprepared for the attack because our intelligence services lacked imagination.

Problems arise when your best laid plans go awry, when the future that arrives is not one of those you had planned for.

Psychologists believe that such experiences spur us to find patterns and order. The experience of disorder, or perhaps the feeling of being unprepared to confront something that we had not foreseen, activates the mind to seek out order. Or else, to force reality to make sense.

This implies that the next time we will be able to foresee all possibilities and thus be prepared.

As Carey puts it, absurdity focuses the mind. An encounter with something absurd sets the mind in motion. He adds that these mental activities are not always salutary: confronted with a calamity the mind might well light on a conspiracy theory.

Disoriented by absurdity we try to force the world to make sense. We try to explain it away. Carey offers the example of our running into an easy chair in the middle of the woods. First, we try to figure out how it got there. Largely because we want to know whether it is signaling us to an impending danger.

More importantly, when we are disoriented, we need to reorient ourselves. Whether that means jumping over the chair or walking around it... reorientation means continuing our journey.

Unless the event is so cataclysmic that it prevents us from continuing the journey, that is, acting according to plan.

Now, change the terms. In place of a chair, run into a large and menacing bear. Evidently, that will require a change of plan, to say nothing of some extreme caution.

In those cases we will make a new plan for a new journey. But that is not the same as trying to figure out why a specific event has happened and why we had not imagined it or planned for it.

Carey seems to suggest that when our plans are disrupted we feel something like shame. Then we can either wonder why we made the mistake or can proceed.

Shame makes us withdraw. It tells us not to try our luck. It does not tell us to adapt to new circumstances; it tells us that we have failed to master reality.

Of course, the existence of pink unicorns and black swans means that we can never fully master reality, that there will always be a part of it that escapes the mind's will to make it make sense or to fit it into an orderly whole.

One thing you do not want to do when you confront something absurd or uncanny is to follow Freud's advice and assume that it is a flash of truth from your unconscious mind.

You do not want to withdraw into your mind to seek out what it is saying about your repressed desires.

Those who engage this psychoanalytic exercise are attempting to assert their mastery over reality, the better to avoid redefining their goals and planning a new journey.

Addicted to Winning?

Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith reports that highly successful executives share one common problem: they are addicted to winning. Link here.

Surely, it is good to win. But people who are afflicted by an overwhelming desire to win, to win at everything, all the time, no matter the cost, are functioning like addicts. They are not looking for success; they are looking for a fix.

They remind me of the compulsive gamblers who want to bet on everything.

It is good that people compete. Without competition we would be far less effective on our jobs and would have no real incentive to improve ourselves. Without competition we would all become middling mediocrities.

Yet, cooperation is also a good thing. Your victory is not just yours and yours alone. Unless you are addicted to winning, of course.

Cooperation matters because all people belong to groups; we are hard-wired to get along with others. We need to know how to cooperate if we want to play on a team. And we all belong to teams. There is no such thing as a victory that is not going to be shared.

Goldsmith offers an excellent example. I daresay it is very common. Two people are arguing about where to have dinner. A wants to go to one restaurant; B wants to eat an another.

Finally, B prevails. A goes along.

Now, the food is bad; the service is bad; B's decision was not very good. What should A do?

Should he complain about the food, rub B's face in his bad decision, and exult at the presumed proof that he was right?

Or should he forget the argument, try to enjoy the meal, and make to best of the evening?

You have probably guessed that Goldsmith, and I, recommend the second option. A person with better character will say nothing, will go to great lengths to avoid afflicting further embarrassment on his friend, and will make the best of the evening.

Of course, you knew that. The strange part is that Goldsmith's clients did not. 75% of them chose the first option. These executives revel in being right and would not willingly forgo an opportunity to stake out a victory.

The moral of the story is simple: there is a time for competition, and there is a time for cooperation.

If you mix them up, say, by deciding that you are too good to cooperate, you will end up wasting energy competing over trifles. In the process you will end up losing friendships, to say nothing of teammates.

But if you decide that you are too good to compete, you will simply settle into the role of permanent loser... which is not the most attractive option either.

Freud's Unfriendly Persuasion

Today is the first day of the new Supreme Court term. So, it feels like the right time to compare Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Sigmund Freud.

Among law students and legal scholars Holmes is considered to be something of a demi-god. We owe him the concept of the marketplace of ideas, one of the foundations of first amendment jurisprudence.

When individuals debate issues by speaking their opinions freely in the marketplace of ideas, the ensuing bargaining will lead to something like the truth.

Presumably, no single individual or institution has a monopoly on the truth. Only when honorable people debate their ideas openly will they come to an agreement on an idea that exists somewhere between the proposals first offered.

The marketplace of ideas works its magic because both parties to the debate have agreed to subject themselves to friendly persuasion.

To my mind this is the opposite of what happens in psychoanalysis. Many of Freud's acolytes have touted the master's commitment to free thought and free expression, but they have missed the point.

Psychoanalytic patients speak what comes to mind. Psychoanalysts offer interpretations. These interpretations are supposed to be the meaning of what the patient has been babbling about.

But when a psychoanalyst interprets the patient cannot choose freely between agreeing and disagreeing. He can acquiesce or resist.

The analyst's interpretation is the one true opinion. The culture of psychoanalysis has taught people that they reject it at their psychic peril.

If the patient resists the truth,then, by Freudian definition, he is proving that he has unresolved infantile sexual conflicts.

If he announces to the world that he disagrees with Freudian theory, some members of the culture will declare that he has thereby announced to the world that he has unresolved psycho-sexual problems.

But a psychoanalytic patient cannot just nod his head in assent. He is obliged, before his psychoanalyst will declare that he has terminated treatment successfully, to provide material evidence from his past history affirming the correctness of the analyst's one true opinion.

The challenge is most daunting for candidates in psychoanalytic institutes. Not only do they have to accede to the analyst's interpretation, but they have to become so thoroughly convinced of Freud's truth that they can persuade their analysts that they have become true Freudian believers.

I will mention in passing that Freudian theory was not produced by the marketplace of ideas. It came to Freud as an epiphany, a moment of divine inspiration. For true Freudians it is not subject to revision or contradiction.

If people do not accept it they are either sick or stupid. In either case they need help.

I will call this process: unfriendly persuasion. When you have been deprived access to a free market in ideas, you are faced with the choice of accepting the dominant dogmas or suffering the consequences. Call it mind control; call it thought reform.

Unfortunately, the practice of unfriendly persuasion has entered our political debate.

Too many people express their thoughts as though they were the one true opinion. For reasons that are beyond my understanding many of these people are stand-up comics.

Given the mental insufficiencies of this crowd, it is not surprising that they have tried to persuade others by denouncing disagreement as a sign of stupidity, mental defect, bigotry, or psycho-sexual conflicts.

This is the price we pay for allowing stand-up comics to lead the political debate.

Paul Krugman's Discontents

I do not think it's an exaggeration to say that the single most important topic of intellectual debate today concerns the value and uses of markets.

In the aftermath of a financial crisis that brought us to an edge of an abyss, economists and other brainy commentators have debated whether the fault lay with the markets or with the government.

Ought we to abandon our system of free market capitalism, to say nothing of free trade, because the crisis showed that markets don't work?

In a now well-known New York Times Magazine article, Paul Krugman argued the affirmative. More than that, he indicts his colleagues for having encouraged policies that caused the crisis.

As a newspaper columnist Krugman is more polemicist than economist these days, but he is surely very intelligent. His opinions about matters economic are certainly worth a read. Link here.

Many of us have been waiting anxiously for the empire to strike back. On September 16 John Cochrane, of the University of Chicago Business School, one of the economists derided in Krugman's article, posted a detailed response.
Link here.

If Krugman is worth reading, so is Cochrane. No one was ever harmed by seeing both sides of an argument. After all, that is what the marketplace of ideas is all about.

Family Dinner

It should have been good news. Thirteen years ago parents learned that if they wanted to shield their teenage children from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, they needed merely to schedule more regular family dinners.

In 1996 Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Drug Abuse reported this conclusion. Further studies have confirmed their findings. Other researchers have suggested that regular family dinners can also prevent some adolescent eating disorders.

This suggests that adolescents are suffering because their families lack organizational structure. We need to spend less time thinking about whether parents love their children enough and more time encouraging them to organize family life.

As a cure for adolescent malaise, this feels more constructive than pills, talk therapy, mystical journeys of self-discovery, identity crises, and soulful conversations with parents.

Of course, family dinner is also harder. It requires more work, more coordination, and more planning.

You would think that it would all be good news. Not quite. Two days ago the New York Times reported that our therapy culture has taken this simple advice and used it to guilt-trip parents.

When you have learned how to guilt trip yourself and others, constructive suggestions become opportunities to exercise your talent. Link here.

It would be better if we all understood that once the information is out, once people know the importance of these rituals, then it is up to them to work out the details. Or not.

The more important issue concerns why family dinners work.

For my part I am not surprised by this research. Nor was I in 1996.

I emphasized the importance of family dinners in my book on "Saving Face," which slightly predated the original research. When I was working on that book I did not want to look at parent-child relationships in terms of a mother-infant dyad or in terms of psychosexual development. So, I took the more Confucian approach and considered the family as a functioning group, held together by ritual, not by emotional glue.

I wrote: "In a functional family the family dinner serves as a ritual affirmation of group membership. It transforms nourishment from a private experience of consumption into an orderly social event."

I added: "A family is not a romantic idyll in which solidarity is created by covering everyone in love. A child may receive all the love he could ever deal with and still by harmed by not knowing whether anyone will be there when he comes home from school, by not knowing when and with whom he will be having dinner, or by not knowing whether anyone cares about how well he did on his spelling quiz. Erratic evidence of deep affection will not compensate for the insecurity produced by inconsistent behavior."

Insecurity about an uncertain future causes children to look backward with nostalgia. It does not allow them to look forward with optimism.

As the Times article suggests, the value of family dinner does not lie in the deeply meaningful conversations that may or may not take place there. Dinners provide a child with organization, structure, and reconnection. They make him feel that he belongs, thus that he is not simply out there on his own.

I did not think then and I do not think now that the issue should be quality or quantity time. You may recall that the culture invented the notion of quality time when parental schedules became so full that parents did not have very much time to spend with their children.

Supposedly, increased quality time would compensate for decreased quantity time.

Thereby parents were encourage to seek out moments of intense emotional connection.

At the time this seemed shortsighted. It still does. It ignored the child's social being and veered dangerously close to taking the therapy session-- quality time, if ever there was any-- as the prototype of human relationships.

A child who does not have consistent family dinners will lose the sense of belonging to a group, will fail to see how his actions affect others, and will lose control over his impulses.

He might compensate with experiences of intense intimacy, or by experiences of intense sensation. Feeling along and isolated, disconnected from others, demoralized and depressed... a child might need to go to an extreme to connect or to experience pleasure.

Unfortunately, relationships that involve excessive intimacy can never fully provide the feeling of being a functioning social being.

Nor can talk therapy. Isn't talk therapy an excessively intimate experience that is supposed to cure anomie, but that often turns into drama.

As I have suggestion, drama ensues when we seek to use intimate relationships to compensate for a failure to affirm ourselves as social beings.

Staying Friends

It's easier to make a friend than to keep a friend. Similarly, it does not take too much effort to fall in love at first sight. Staying in love for years or even decades is quite a different challenge.

Friends come and go; so do relationships. Breaking up is traumatic and often makes people feel inadequate, even toxic.

Why does it happen? One reason is that we tend to want our friendships to mirror our family relationships. Not because family ties are so wonderful or gratifying, but because they are indissoluble. You do not choose your family; you are born into it. Worse yet, it does not matter how you behave. Your parents, siblings, and children are yours forever.

Behave that way towards your friends and you will find yourself with fewer and fewer of them.

We choose our friends. We like to think that we choose them freely. We try to be on best behavior around them, because they can distance themselves or even drop us.

Friendship requires far more work than family ties. Instead of making family the prototype of human relationships, we should try to treat our family members like friends. That would surely improve everyone's family life.

So, how do you stay friends. Dr. Irene Levine has some good suggestions, though she comes at it from the wrong angle. Instead of encouraging you to build your character, she wants you to become aware of your "toxic" qualities. Link here.

Being self-conscious about your toxicity will not make you a better friend. It will induce you to waste too much mental effort fighting with your demons. You would do better to build up what is good about you.

Happily, Levine's toxic qualities can easily be turned around to give us some guidance about how to stay friends.

She lists the following: neediness, volatility, moodiness, bluntness, invasiveness, and insecurity.

Each has more positive face that is worth developing.

First: instead of toxic neediness, try reciprocity. As Levine put it: "Friendships need to be reciprocal. Even an ideal relationship may not be balanced every day or even every year. But there's a give and take that evens out over time."

Reciprocity exists on many levels. From gifts and favors to information and feelings... friends are constantly involved in exchanges. If one or the other friend fails to reciprocate, the friendship will be compromised.

Second: instead of volatility and moodiness, try emotional constancy. We have so often been told that it is good and healthy to express emotion that we have ignored the value of emotional constancy or temperance. People who throw tantrums or create dramatic scenes are not good friend material.

Being even-tempered is the opposite of moodiness. Make it a point to remain on an even emotional keel. No one is going to want to have lunch with you if he does not know which of your many personalities is going to show up.

Third: instead of bluntness and invasiveness, try discretion and tact. Respecting your friend's zone of privacy will make you a better friend.

When you disclose something to your friend and he does not reciprocate, do not turn into the grand inquisitor. He does not owe you a response. If he does not reciprocate that means that you have gone too far. The best approach is to change the subject.

Were it not for the fact that the therapy culture has been teaching people to blurt out what is on their minds, we would probably not have to emphasize that you need to think before you speak and that you should consider the effect your words might have on your listener.

If speaking your mind is going to offend your friend, you can either forget it or reformulate it. If you make it a habit to speak your mind freely and openly you will soon find yourself friendless.

Fourth, instead of insecurity, try confidence. Levine identifies two extreme behaviors as toxic. Bragging too much and being too reticent.

The difficult part is finding the mean between these two extremes. A person who is confident and secure can speak when need be and be silent when need be. He can speak his mind without giving offense and can be silent when that is appropriate.

He is not begging for attention or acting as though he does not deserve any.

In Love With Polanski's Genius

I hope you were not too shocked to see so many artists and philosophers rallying to the defense of Roman Polanski.

Leading this motley crew was a leading French philosopher-hustler, Bernard-Henri Levy, who launched a petition drive to secure Polanski's release from the Swiss prison where he is currently languishing. Link here. Also, see this story from the Guardian. Link here.

Forgetting for a few seconds the merits of Levy's case, the arguments he outlines in his petition are pathetically weak. We have a right to expect that someone who claims to be a philosopher would know how to think straight, but with Levy, that is not the case.

We are especially grateful to law professor Ann Althouse for showing that Levy has no idea of what he is talking about. For not having fallen prey to the siren song of B-H Levy Prof. Althouse shows that: he does not understand the law; he does not know how to think; he is effectively making a fool of himself. For Althouse's post, link here.

In the world of philosopher-kings, artists are supposed to be natural-born co-rulers. As sophisticated European idealistic thinking would have it, there are two kinds of human beings: those who play by the rules and those who create their own rules. Then, there are those who adapt to reality and those who create their own reality.

Philosophers, artists, and filmmakers fall into the latter categories. The rest of us are so lacking in imagination and advanced thought that we suffer through our travails in the former.

Those who are tasked with creating the new reality and formulating the new rules are superior beings, Supermen, as Nietzsche would have had it.

Too large for this world, they cannot be constrained by the everyday customs and manners the rest of us live by. They demonstrate their superiority by breaking the rules, by feeling neither shame nor guilt for doing so, and by persuading people to idolize them for doing so.

If you have read Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, you know that breaking the rules does not mean eating soup with the wrong spoon. It means committing heinous crimes, crimes that affront the ruling elites, and that count as revolutionary actions designed to subvert the moral order.

If the Western moral order has been charged with repressing perverse sexual impulses, the Superman must violate those taboos, thus asserting his superiority while undermining the moral order.

I will grant that the average Hollywood celebrity who signs a petition calling for the release of Roman Polanski does not know all of this. But, then again, ignorance is their normal state, and ignorance is never an excuse.

Great European thinkers, among whom one would be hard put to place Bernard-Henri Levy, take these ideas very, very seriously. They know perfectly well that the only way that they can promote their philosophies is by defending criminal actions that offend, shock, and call into question our values.

Keep in mind that French intellectuals have drunk deep at the trough of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. They have idealized his writings and even his life.

Since de Sade happened to be residing in the Bastille in the days leading up to its liberation in 1789, he has become a hero of the French Revolution.

To be clear, the kind of sadism that de Sade practiced sometimes involved drugging the victims. Surely, it did not always involve the victim's consent.

After all, what is the value of a radical gesture if it is just play-acting? If the civilized moral order can accommodate your desires then they are not the kinds of desires that that order was designed to repress.

I hope that that is not too theoretical. If you would like a more down-to-earth translation, I offer the words of one Roman Polanski, uttered on the occasion of his flight from American justice. Since many will find his language offensive, I have used ellipses.

In his words: "Judges want to f... young girls. Juries want to f... young girls. Everyone wants to f... young girls."

The superior man can do what he imagines that everyone else wants to do. Because of his superiority, he can get away with it, and they can't.

Obviously, guilt or shame has no place in this equation, because he has done nothing more than to act on a desire that everyone has and that no one else is strong enough to obey.

Thus, by this logic, a man who runs away from a court appearance can count himself as courageous.