What Others Think of You

Consider this post a footnote on yesterday’s post.

When I suggested that the therapy culture was recommending that people ignore what others think of them, the better to get in touch with their creativity and their feelings, I thought that the point was sufficiently obvious not to require documentation.

If you live in America you have heard over and over again that it’s bad to worry about how you look to others. If you are or have ever been an adolescent you have had this message drummed into your vulnerable mind.

Truth be told, I did not have any evidence at hand for my assertion and did not have the time to search it out.

And then, lo and behold, on one of my periodic perambulations through the Internet I came across a column on a site called Lifehacker. Link here.

The author Melanie Penola reports on a new book by someone named Julien Smith. To some extent, the column makes a good point. If you are sensitive to the point where you refuse to take a stand for fear of offending other people, it is not a good thing.

It is also a sign of a defensive and pusillanimous character.

To go from there to the conclusion that, as the title suggests: “Stop Caring About What Other People Think and Get Back Your Self-Respect” is a leap too far.

The truth is, if you have isolated yourself by not caring about what other people think, you will never have the presence of mind or the confidence to take a stand.

People who can effectively assert themselves are people who are confident that their stand is not going to threaten their membership in a group.

Professional non-conformists rarely have this quality. They are more likely to stand up and scream when they do not need to and to shrink into the corner when they need to assert themselves.

The Whole World Is Watching

Today’s culture wars did not begin in the 60s. They date back centuries.

In the 19th and 20th centuries culture wars (and some real wars) broke out between Continental Europeans and the inhabitants of the Anglosphere.

It is not an accident that Freud and many other of the first psychoanalysts had a visceral dislike of England and an outright hatred of America.

Nor is it an accident that these great minds made Victorian culture, and its Puritan predecessor, symbolize everything that was wrong in the West.

As it happened, mental health was often defined in terms that were congenial to Continental European cultures. The values associated with England and America were determined, with grand pseudo-scientific flourishes, to be pathological.

Where the French and Germans and even the Austrians prided themselves on being in close touch with their vital human impulses, their intrinsic soulfulness, their appetite for decadent pleasures, and their aesthetic superiority, the British, in particular, were being mercilessly mocked for their obsession with appearances.

Keeping up appearances became a joke, even in England itself. How could anyone be so superficial, so caught up in images? Serious critics denounced decorum and propriety as soul-deadening enterprises.

Caring about how you looked to others was seen as a rank denial of your inner truth, the real you. Only if you could plumb the depths of your soul would you discover the wellsprings of your true Self, and you could then express the real you to the world.

On the surface, this sounds very good, even plausible. Unless, of course, you do what the great philosopher David Hume, and you go looking through your mind for your true Self. Even before the culture wars broke out in earnest, Hume set the philosophical foundations for British empiricism when he declared that there was no such thing as this true Self.

Hume notwithstanding, these ideas were sufficiently plausible to have found a fertile breeding ground in America. They were propagated by artists and intellectuals, but they were made into a way of life through the agency of psychotherapy. Miraculously, Britain remained largely immune to this siren song.

Psychotherapy took this set of moral values and convinced an unsuspecting populace that they were scientific fact and even medically approved treatment. Therapy and its culture made a set of cultural values into a form of mental hygiene.

Who could dispute the authority of science and medicine? Very few people could or did.

Schools and the media communicated the ideas to the vulnerable among us, to adolescents. They told young people to be themselves, to be strong and independent enough to ignore what other people thought of them.

The told these susceptible young people to do their own thing, to express their creativity, and not to care how others saw them.

From these precepts it was not very difficult to produce a culture that valued overindulging alcohol and drugs, and that encouraged hookups.

Fewer and fewer people cared about what they looked like when they were drunk or stoned, or even when they were marching on the now-proverbial walk of shame.

Losing control became a point of pride, a sign that you were so vital and so soulful, your instincts and impulses so powerful, that you could not control them.

If you are not supposed to repress your appetites for sex and Doritos, why should you repress your appetite for controlled substances.

They made you feel good, and, after all, wasn’t it all about how you felt, not how you looked to other people.

Therapy has taught Americans that it is downright unhealthy to care what other people think, to worry about how other people see us. We need to get in touch with our inner truth, who we really are. Only then can we rise above social convention, repressive customs, and flower into vital human beings. Or better, into living breathing works of art.

Of course, the importance of reputation does not recede into the woodwork because you have chosen not to believe in it. When you ignore reputation, you will simply find yourself dazed and confused when you have done something to compromise yours or when it comes under attack.

Short term pleasures; long term pain.

Cultural revolutionaries insist that the fault lies with a retrograde culture that fails to appreciate your truth. They believe that people should sacrifice reputation and good name to be martyrs to a higher truth.

If you want to be a functioning member of society, if you want to maintain some measure of control over your behavior, if you want to have good and fruitful relationships with other people, these nice-sounding precepts are poison.

As always, theory is nice, but it’s the practice that counts.

Put aside, even if only for an instant, all the talk about vital energies and creative impulses. Let’s talk about appetite. Not the sexual variety, but the alimentary version.

How powerful is your appetite? Should you free it from the repression that it labors under? Isn’t indulging your appetite a sign that you have overcome unjust societal restrictions on your capacity to experience pleasure?

Given the values that the therapy culture has been promulgating should we be surprised that more than a few Americans are involved in constant conflict with their appetites, and that far too many have been on the losing side of this conflict.

We Americans are the most obese people on the fact of the earth. If you think that this is a good thing, thank the therapy culture.

Those Americans who are not obese seem to be obsessed with dieting, thus with appetite control and appetite suppression. A culture that abhors repression has somehow left people without the means to control their appetites. Thus, the recourse to appetite suppressants.

The therapy culture sees life as a struggle between you and your appetites. But, is it right? When you feel tempted to down yet another bag of chips, is it really just about you and your appetite?

I think not. It is more about eating with your fingers, on the couch, in circumstances that allow you to surmount the restrictions imposed by table manners. In the Anglosphere, food consumption is not a matter of calorie counts or specialized diets. It‘s about table manners.

In other words, it’s not about food and it's not about the mind; it’s about the ritual. It’s about an appetite that has been domesticated and socialized. In much the same way that a relationship domesticates and socializes sexual appetite.

If food consumption is a social ritual, it ought to be performed in company, with others present, as a bonding experience.

When you are being watched by others, when you must interact with others, you are likely to behave better and to engage in more healthy eating habits. You are not likely to pig out at the family dinner. And, by the way, the presence of other people will temper your appetite.

Instead of indulging your appetite or struggling to suppress its imperious demands, you will actually be enjoying your meal.

It’s as simple and easy as that.

But what about those who have gotten themselves involved in a losing struggle with their appetite? How can they regain control over their appetite without going into therapy and discovering the hidden truth about their mother’s breasts?

The better approach is to imagine how you look while you are scarfing down all of those Twinkies. Take a picture of yourself stuffing your mouth with junk food. Under normal circumstances you will feel so ashamed of yourself that you will lose the better part of your lust for Twinkies.

The same applies to those who indulge their appetite for junk and who then, in retrospect, feel so guilty that they feel that they must do penance by making themselves regurgitate it all into the nearest facility.

Do you want to gain control over that habit? Try picturing yourself on our knees in front of the facility voiding the contents of your distended stomach.

As with much bad behavior, you can gain control over it and set yourself on the right track by picturing how you would appear to other people.

The therapy culture might denounce this approach as a fascination with the superficial. Nevertheless, it is far more effective than the alternative.

You might think that ignoring the way you look to others will make you more vital and more creative. In truth, it will make you a slave to your appetites.

Recent research from Newcastle, as reported in Scientific American, has offered another version of this approach. The research also gives us a way to measure the benefits of feeling like you are being watched. It offers another way to gain the advantage that accrues to you when you think that other people are watching, even when no one is there. Link here.

The studies suggest that you can gain the same benefit by putting up pictures of faces with eyes looking at you. It’s a strange thought-- but what are blogs for if not strange thoughts-- that we might cover our walls with portraits of our ancestors because when we feel that they are looking at us it motivates us to behave better. And we might replace those portraits with expressionist abstractions, because then we need not feel that we are being watched, and thus, we will feel freer to indulge.

This sidelight tells us that it is not necessary to think that the whole world is watching. It suffices to imagine that people who matter are watching. If you can imagine what they would think of you if  they could see what you are doing, you will made a giant leap toward better character.

The human mind, in its genius, adjusts its behavior for the better whenever it feels that it is being watched. Even when the eyes in question exist only in a picture, their imaginary gaze is sufficient to provoke a mental mechanism that instills good behavior and puts the brakes on bad impulses.

By good behavior we mean behavior that is more sociable, more redolent of good character.

Feeling that you are being watched allows you to control impulses, because it tempers and socializes impulses and instincts

Imagining that they exist independently outside of socialization is one of the great cultural illusions of the past few centuries.

Creative Innovators

As I reported a few days ago, Vicki Abeles has produced a film called, “Race to Nowhere.” In it she decries what she sees as the American tendency to burden children with too much homework. My post linked here.

In her uninformed view too much hard work tends to stifle creativity and innovation. Given her belief that the nation’s strength lies in its creative innovators, she considers this a bad thing.

Unfortunately, the film is luring unsuspecting parents into giving their children less homework and more freedom, instilling in them an anti-ethic of creative self-expression. For that and many other reasons, it is well worth another debunking.

In truth, this idea dates to the 1950s. Well before there were culture wars, a certain number of leftist intellectuals were hard at work undermining American success and social cohesion.

They argued that we were all becoming “organization men,” and were so obsessed with conformity that we were losing our individuality and creativity.

It sounds like a good idea, until you consider that this theory was being used to attack the generational cohort that had won World War II.

When veterans came home from Europe and the Pacific, they applied the values they had learned in military service to the task of building a new America.

A group of deep thinkers decided that these values were unhealthy. They sold the idea that unless we became creative innovators we would lose our mental health and well being.

Everyone agrees that all cultures need innovators. To go from there to saying that we should strive to make all children into creative innovators is one leap too far.

A group comprised of creative innovators is simply not a group. It’s institutionalized anomie, which is decidedly not very good for your mental health.

Today Shirley Wang reports on the latest research on social norms. Social psychologists are just getting around to asking why people follow group norms. They want to know how norms get established, how they change, and how they influence the way we behave, think, and feel. Link here.

The subjected has been neglected over the years, largely because scholars have been obsessed with creative innovation and other expressions of individuality. Wedded to the idea of free self-expression they overlooked the value of conformity.

Why do people conform to social norms? The answer is perfectly clear. Wang explains: “Norms serve a basic human social function, helping us distinguish who is in the group and who is an outsider. Behaving in ways the group considers appropriate is a way of demonstrating to others, and to oneself, that one belongs to the group.”

Belonging to a group provides considerable psychological benefits. Thus, everyone wants to know how to show that he or she belongs.

The culture wars have taught us to ridicule people who strive to conform, but everyone’s emotional well-being depends on the ability to practice proper social behaviors and attitudes. Your well being does not depend on your ability to express yourself creatively.

The point is obvious, but we have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into saying that creative innovation is the path to mental health that we have ignored the obvious.

Conformity is the basis of all social groupings. It does not, and should not, preclude innovation. Nearly all groups leave a place for non-conformists.

Unfortunately, they pay for their innovation with feelings of isolation and anomie. No matter how creative you are, feeling alone, isolated, and disconnected will damage your emotional well-being.

Being an outsider is difficult. It is not something that can or should be encouraged in schools or in the home. There is no redeeming social value in producing a generation of aspiring artists living in squalor.

Some people are natural-born innovators. To them it comes naturally. No one wants to force them to conform, but one wants them to learn to socialize, even if they are not going to become perfect conformists.

No innovator should be allowed to think that creativity excuses him from having good manners and practicing social niceties.

Of course, creative types are non-conformists until the moment when the culture adopts their trend. If an innovator leads the world in wearing his hat differently, once everyone adopts the same style, he is no longer a non-conformist.

I would emphasize that if creative innovators want to make a career out of their talent, they still need to develop a sophisticated level of social skills.

I know of more than a few talented artists who have seriously compromised their career prospects because they do not know how to work constructively with dealers and collectors.

If artists display arrogance and insolence, if they make every business transaction into a drama, if they do not know how to get along with collectors, they will not have successful careers.

Some great artists are not discovered until after their death. When this happens, most people think that the world was not ready for such great work.

The more pedestrian truth might be that when they were alive these same artists were insufferable boors. Their behavior was making it impossible for people to see their works.

Now, why do cultures adopt some innovations and not others? Why does one creative idea fall to the wayside while another catch on?

Here we have reached the zone that currently preoccupies social scientists.

New ideas, even new wrinkles on old customs, do not just catch on because an innovator has recommended them. In and of itself strangeness does not have very much appeal. New ideas become customary when they are adopted by someone who is more prominent, more influential, more powerful, and better connected than the innovator.

No creative innovator can do it by himself. If his idea does not get picked up by someone that people in the culture emulate, then it will die an ignominious death.

Ironically, these trendsetters and leaders tend to be “superconformists.” Only someone who embodies the culture’s values will inspire enough trust to inspire people to follow his lead and break with the normal way of doing things. .

Why are some innovations adopted while others are no? Wang suggests that: “the group often adopts their innovations because these new ideas or objects are an accessible way for members of the group to bond or signal solidarity. It could be a baseball cap worn backwards, or a pocket square. Each conveys a different identity.”

People do not become creative innovators because they find that it’s mentally healthy to do so. Their innovations are not adapted by the group because everyone finds them a great way to express individuality.

Quite the contrary, groups adapt new customs because they allow all individuals in the group to bond and to reaffirm their membership in the group.

"The Uses of Metaphor"

The Reading Room is a literary journal in book form. Its focus is international, not local, and it contains first-rate writing from around the world. I am honored to have had a column published on its website: http://www.readingroomjournal.com/ . This link goes to the Reading Room site. To find my article, click on the link called "Book Reviews" on the left side of the page.

My column is called "The Uses of Metaphor." It's a response to a piece that David Brooks wrote for the Times a couple of weeks ago. Link here.

Did We Humiliate Osama Bin Laden?

It may have been wishful thinking, but I assumed that Osama bin Laden’s body was more or less dumped in the ocean. This seemed to be a fitting, and humiliating end for a man who deserved nothing more. (See my previous post.)

Now, other voices have entered the fray, making for a debate. American sources say that bin Laden’s remains were treated with some degree of respect, while a number of Muslim clerics and scholars have said that he was humiliated.

American authorities have provided a summary of their actions:

“The deceased's body was washed and then placed in a white sheet.

“The body was placed in a weighted bag.

“A military officer read prepared religious remarks which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker.

“After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body eased into the sea from the USS Vinson.” Link here.

To me this feels like more respect than he deserved.

On the other side of the debate, an Iraqi Muslim scholar has declared that the body was disrespected. Thus, that bin Laden was humiliated.

This is from the AP report: “’What was done by the Americans is forbidden by Islam and might provoke some Muslims,’ said another Islamic scholar from Iraq, Abdul-Sattar al-Janabi, who preaches at Baghdad's famous Abu Hanifa mosque. ‘It is not acceptable and it is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea. The body of bin Laden should have been handed over to his family to look for a country or land to bury him.’"

Doesn't this sound like he is referring to a respected member of his community. One can only wonder how many people you need to murder-- most of them being Muslims, as it happens-- before you lose your standing as a respected member of the community.

Perhaps, if some of these same clerics had treated bin Laden like a pariah, he would have had more difficulty recruiting suicide bombers.

And then this: "‘The Americans want to humiliate Muslims through this burial, and I don't think this is in the interest of the U.S. administration,’ said Omar Bakri Mohammed, a radical cleric in Lebanon.” Link here.

As you would expect, radical clerics take the opportunity to issue threats against America. That is their modus operandi. They want us all to beware of the wrath of offended Muslims.

But, isn’t that the whole purpose of terrorism, to propagate their religion and to continue to practice their customs by threatening anyone who would dare declare them to be unworthy of respect.

And isn't that why so few Americans are fully aware of the horrors that are visited on citizens in Muslim countries. If they are, and if the perpetrators of these acts feel no shame, the actions will surely continue.

Last night I watched Lara Logan describe in horrifying detail how she was sexually assaulted by a crowd in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Among the most striking parts of a harrowing interview was Logan's admission that she herself had not been aware of the extent to which Egyptian men harassed women. She said nothing of the additional fact that more than 80% of Egyptian women are subjected to genital mutilation.

These facts were widely available at the time, on this blog and in many other places.

If a journalist, someone whose job it is to know these things, ignore the most basic facts about the real life of people in Egypt, doesn't that say that the media has been far too timid, even too terrorized, to show the dark side of life in some Islamic countries?

Thoughts on the Death of Osama Bin Laden

It was rough justice, but it was justice indeed. United States Special Forces operatives have killed Osama bin Laden in his Pakistani compound.

Credit goes to the Navy Seals and to President Obama. When you are in charge of a successful operation you receive the credit.

Happily for everyone, bin Laden was not shipped off to Gitmo, and he did not receive a trial in lower Manhattan. No one read him his Miranda rights or called in the John Adams project.

But the best part, from my perspective, is that the Seals disposed of his body at sea. An ignominious end to a man who deserved nothing more. It leaves a good taste in your mouth.

Bin Laden was dishonored in death. As of now, all indications are that bin Laden’s body was fed to the sharks. I am hopeful that he did not have a formal funeral ceremony.

There will be no burial place, no tomb, no shrine for aspiring jihadis to visit.

It’s a good, strong step away from multiculturalism. Thanks to that warped ideology we have been told that we must give terrorists all respect and consideration. We must treat them with the rights reserved for American citizens. We must read them their Miranda rights and afford them due process.

After all, we have been told that we need to respect other cultures. Unfortunately, that means that if certain peoples murder their daughters for holding hands with a boy or mutilate their daughters for being daughters, then we are supposed to respect their local customs.

If people are that sensitive to dishonor, then we must not do anything which might offend their sensibilities.

If only we respect all cultures as equal, then they will return the favor.

It was a bad idea when it was first hatched and it remains a bad idea. You know that honor killings and female genital mutilation and suicide murder are morally reprehensible. If you want them to stop, one very good way is to shame the people who do them, to treat them with disrespect.

Terrorists, in particular, have no claim on respect. Their cause is depraved; their tactics are depraved; and they ought to be treated as such.

We call such people monsters, and that means that their behavior is so far beyond the pale that they can no longer lay claim to the normal respect we would accord our fellow human beings.

When we call them monsters we are saying that we will not treat them as human.

Terrorists terrorize to gain respect. It would be a respect borne out of fear, a respect for the culture they are affirming. If we are going to win a psychological war against these terrorists, we should withhold that respect. It is not enough to kill them; we need also to humiliate them, to show them to be miserable failures.

It would counteract their recruiting efforts. Young men join the jihad because they believe it will give them respect. They believe that every successful terrorist attack enhances the respect that they enjoy. Killing such people is one solution; humiliating them will show them that being a terrorist does not grant you anything resembling respect.

In the world of psychological warfare,  you never want these jihadis to become martyrs. You do not want their memory to be honored. You can do so by not treating their bodily remains with respect.

Now, we are going to enjoy a few days of triumphal boasting. The death of bin Laden may or may not be a milestone in the war on terror, but it certainly removes a millstone from around America’s collective neck.

Is this really a turning point in the war on terror? I do not know. Stratfor has been suggesting that we do well not to exaggerate its significance from an operational standpoint. They are probably right. Bin Laden's death matters more for the symbolism than the reality.

Islamic terrorism is not going to go away any time soon. And the Middle East is still embroiled in chaos and conflict.

As I say, if the death of bin Laden is a turning point, the primary reason will have been the fact that the body was thrown off the boat with the trash.

It should not be surprising, but the media will make the death of bin Laden into an iconic moment, a victory for Barack Obama.

For the past couple of years, Obama’s supporters have been hard at work explaining away his failures. Here, now, they have a successful operation, and they will surely use it to proclaim Obama the man of the hour. They will also use it to affirm that their own judgment of him has been vindicated.

Coupled with last week’s “reveal” of Obama’s birth certificate and the weakness of the Republican field, the death of bin Laden seems, for now, to make Obama’s re-election far more likely than it seemed a week ago.

This brings us into the realm of political psychology. How will bin Laden’s death effect Obama’s political fortunes?

Writing on the Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner explains the psychology:

“Think back to high school. The quarterback on the football team had a legendary game over the weekend, and made everyone associated with the school so proud they could split their pants. On Monday, he’s treated like a hero.

“But, interestingly, people find themselves thinking better of him not only for his athletic exploits. Suddenly, everything about him seems a cut above.

“His English teacher, who never saw the QB as being particularly bright, or interesting, wonders if maybe his paper on The Merchant of Venice was actually pretty insightful.

"The devout non-jocks who feel alternately superior and intimidated by the QB reassess his past behavior and decide he’s not such a jerk after all.

“The girl who brushed him off last month — he’s got a bit of acne, and he slouches sometimes, and he swears — finds herself strangely attracted to him.

“The QB is the beneficiary of what’s known as the halo effect.

“President Barack Obama has just notched what might arguably be seen as the biggest victory of his presidency: the killing of Osama bin Laden. I am curious as to what sort of halo effect this might generate. How will Obama’s positions and abilities be reassessed — whether on the budget or taxes or gas prices or health-care reform or one of 100 other topics — in light of a military/intelligence victory that took place on his watch?

"The halo effect is often short-lived — but will it, in this case, live long enough to power Obama through an election cycle?” Link here.

Dubner is quite correct. Obama’s electoral fortunes rest now on how long the “halo effect” is going to last. I am sure that Obama’s political operatives wish that bin Laden had been killed in October, 2012.

I suspect that the state of the economy will have more influence than the death of bin Laden, but, as I am told, I’ve been wrong before.

To sum up: the death of bin Laden is great for America and great for Barack Obama. But the re-election of Barack Obama, in my humble opinion, would be bad for America.

That’s called a mixed blessing.