A Single Story

What if we heard more than one story?  What if we heard stories from more than one participant?

I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican?

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

As we discovered when the cold war ended and the wall came down, the folks on the other side were just like us.  Their hopes for the future and for their children were the same as ours.  It was power players and politicians on both sides who had bent things so badly, and that 'official' version was the only story that we'd heard.

Liberal and conservative stories might be a good starting place.  When you remove the power players, the goals of the two groups are virtually identical.

What's next

National GDP has made regular progress, and incomes rose ... but only for the wealthy.  The economic middle class is in decline and the poor are trapped.

Folks who work for an average income have made continuing advances in productivity but not in wages.  Their employers are doing well. Stockholders are doing well. Corporate profits are doing well. Working folks haven't seen much improvement, however, since the changes that began in the late 70's.  Today, 21% of our children live in destructive poverty.

Do your own inquiry.  For a starting point, you might look at The GAP, or Poverty is a Weapon of Mass Destruction, or perhaps The century's deadliest idea.

It's possible

For mankind, this is all impossible, perhaps.
But with God ... oh my friend, with God all things are possible.
 All things.
 All.

It's possible to have a worldview bigger than your culture.

It is possible to be a Christian and have an open mind. 

It's possible to believe in God and in science. 

It is possible to be pro-women and pro-life.

It's possible to have privilege and still face discrimination.

It's possible to be poor and to have a great heart and mind. 

It is possible to believe in both liberty and law. 

It's possible to love your neighbors and not share all their opinions. 

It's possible to be brilliant without a college degree. 

It is possible to be Muslim and suffer at the hands of terrorists. 

It is possible to be a foreigner who loves the American dream.

It is possible to be different and the same.

It's possible to listen to those that think differently than you, to understand why, and to learn from them.

Let great love win.  It's possible, and it's the better choice.

Inflammatory vs. Informative

The news media tends to play for attention.  It depends on attention for income.

We've all noticed how issues are exaggerated, twisted, slanted, and misrepresented.  Edited and out of context quotes are common and perhaps deliberately misleading, even from some mainstream sources.  Exaggerated news gets ratings, and ratings are directly tied to revenue. It's quick, it's sensational, it's shallow.  It's a business, not a service.



Then there is clickbait; those shocking 'news' items designed to generate advertising revenue. NASA forecast (left) is a deliberate lie; it didn't happen.

Then there's the one (right) that says police found 19 bodies in a freezer; also a lie. It was originated by Now8News several days ago, and it has been circulated by other similar sites.  Previous fake news by Now8News includes claims Walmart bananas carried deadly parasitic worms; a man fed his unfaithful fiancee’s remains to her unsuspecting parents; a man was discovered cannibalizing a teen inside a haunted house attraction; and that police found bodies in a Satanic dungeon under a Chuck E. Cheese.  They get points for creativity, I suppose, but the behavior should perhaps be constrained in some fashion.

Does it affect us?

In a statistical analysis of the top 20 real and top 20 fake election stories posted and shared on Facebook, fake news out-performed actual news in the final months before the election.  False stories about the Pope endorsing Trump and about ISIS supporting Clinton were among hundreds that were shared millions of times.

Did that affect the election?  Probably not, according to a Stanford study, but troublesome nonetheless.  Social media hosts are inquiring into the problem of fake news; no solutions yet.

Between fake news and biased mainstream news, where do we turn?

Here's a reasonable review of real news sources for both depth and bias.  The more difficult task, perhaps, is understanding our own preferential bias and degree of objectivity impairment.  UPDATE: Since President Trump's inauguration, CNN has become somewhat blind to news and focuses almost solely on criticizing the president. For the time being, they are not particularly helpful.  FOX has matured and advanced in popularity.

Find your own accepted news sources in the illustration; what might that profitably provide to us by way of a look at our own leanings, our own objectivity, and the depth of our own understanding?

Update: Breitbart lost another hundred advertisers bringing their total loss to around 1200.  Companies discovered their advertising being posted on the Breitbart site via the click-distribution Google provides and quickly pulled out in order to avoid being associated with the misinformation and alt-right extremes.

Update 2018:  With the new administration, most news media have moved left.  Moderate centrists have moved to liberal, and the nonsensical right-leaning media, particularly Fox News, have moved to a more right-moderate position.  MSNBC is reasonable for now.  CNN is sometimes left-irrational.

Rush Limbaugh remains extreme right, however, and regularly ranked between 50% and 84% inaccurate.  With four marriages and repeated drug problems, his popularity is not admiration of character but perhaps comedic appeal.  He's worth $500 million.  What does that tell us about ourselves as an audience?

Simone de Beauvoir: gypped

Life can be an incredible gift.  There's an essential foundation to it all, most noticeable perhaps by its absence.

Simone de Beauvoir, in the third volume of her autobiography while considering her life and its approaching end concludes she was gypped, cheated by life.

"I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more.  All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places and suddenly nothing.  They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment.  At most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There isn't much she didn't see.  But that unique sum of things, the experience that I live, with all its order and randomness -- the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomble in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns of Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, the orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken -- there is no place where it will all live again.  If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to ... what?  A hill?  A rocket?  But no, nothing will have taken place.  I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold mine at my feet: a whole life to live.  The promises have all been kept.  And yet, turning an incredulous gaze to that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped."  

She was a well-educated writer, philosopher, activist, and social theorist credited with being a significant voice in the formation of western culture, especially feminism.  She was a focused atheist and the founder of existentialism; she lived accordingly and without restraint.  Curious what such a life might look like?

From Wikipedia ... de Beauvoir had a turbulent, often scandalous life. Although de Beauvoir had a long time relationship with Sartre, she was known to have a number of female lovers. ... these relationships, some of which she began with underage students while working as a professor, later led to a biographical controversy. A former student, Bianca Lamblin, in her book, Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée, wrote that, while she was a student at Lycée Molière, she had been sexually exploited by her teacher de Beauvoir, who was in her thirties at the time. In 1943, de Beauvoir was suspended from her teaching job, due to an accusation that she had, in 1939, seduced her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine.   Sorokine's parents laid formal charges against de Beauvoir for debauching a minor, and as a result she had her license to teach in France permanently revoked. She and Jean-Paul Sartre developed a pattern, which they called the "trio", in which de Beauvoir would seduce her students and then pass them on to Sartre. De Beauvoir and Sartre would both take part in political campaigns to abolish the age of consent laws for sexual relationships in France.

Simone de Beauvoir was indeed cheated out of every truly good thing in life. Some of what she wrote was perhaps worth review, but the fruits thereof are troublesome; her life was one of the most unconscionable of the twentieth century. Her work is part of college curricula and persists in modern thinking.

In her autobiography she reports that she stopped believing in God at the age of fourteen.  She caught her mother giving direction to her confessor, and began to see the whole thing as a lifeless sham. Noticing the conflicted hypocrisy of her own father and others, and abandoned it all including its values and principles.

The final stroke, she reports, was reading a work of Balzac's literature forbidden by the church ... she found it, and through it the world, so fantastic and beautiful that she could only come to feel angry with the lifeless organization that would try to take it from her.  In the absence of any context greater than self, she lived a life that at the end left her feeling defrauded by it all.

Our Narcissistic Culture

Children raised in a harsh and abusive
environment will be shaped by it.

Many Americans are asses, apparently.  In an interesting series of studies, we come off like a sick, narcissistic culture.  That's according to folks from around the world as well as our own opinion of ourselves.

As Miller et al point out,  the narcissism ratings associated with the “typical” American -- by both fellow Americans and study participants living outside the U.S. alike -- reached clinical standards for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Here’s their take, with PNC (short for “perceptions of national character”) referring to the average American:

In fact, in all three studies (Studies 1, 2, and 5) that used American samples, the mean PNC ratings for NPD were above the diagnostic threshold for this disorder, meaning that Americans in general were rated by their compatriots as meeting criteria for pathological narcissism as articulated in the DSM–5. … The same was true for perceptions of Americans provided by non-American participants.

 (Narcissism and United States’ culture: The view from home and around the world)

DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these traits:

• Exaggerated self-importance
• Expects to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
• Exaggerates achievements and talents
• Only understood by equally superior people
• Requires constant admiration
• Expects favor and unquestioning compliance
• Unable or unwilling to recognize the worth of others

Narcissistic personality disorder crosses the border of healthy confidence into thinking so highly of self that you put yourself on a pedestal and value yourself more than you value others. Narcissists tend to be egocentric and can be cruel, manipulative, and falsely affirming. They use guile, artifice, and pseudo-intimacy in order to convince someone they deserve preferential treatment.  Study it to understand what you're facing.

There are no medications for treating narcissistic personality disorder.  Some recommend a conversation 'out behind the barn'.

We do have narcissists among us, of course, at home, at school, at work.  Children raised in such an environment will be shaped by it. 

Narcissists may rise in workplace hierarchies because of their ability to elicit approval and admiration.  The traits are embedded in our culture, at least to some degree, via discrimination, class distinctions, and worldview formation via MTV, reality TV, cliques, and the like.

Narcissistic behavior may be countered depending on the degree of the individual's malformation.
Such behavior is perhaps not genetic but is rather an adaptation to life, a coping mechanism.
While having the psychological categorization is perhaps useful, those who qualify
span the spectrum of arrogance and manipulative selfishness.  They
might more usefully be understood as socially maladapted.
Seeing it with clarity allows you to put up appropriate,
effective, and necessary boundaries.

Shutting down a narcissist: 

Review your own behavior in detail; ensure you're not contributing to the problem (anger, name calling, criticising, kitchen sinking, etc.).  Prepare in detail with a practiced response.

Look them in the eyes.

When a narcissist's ego intrudes, look them directly in the eyes. Respond with a slow nod and then slowly shake your head from side to side.  It tells them that you see them for who they are.

Say no.

Narcissists use your shared relationship against you. Don't give them control. Don't be afraid to calmly and reasonably say no; it tells them you're not intimidated.  Do so with little or no explanation; any explanation you offer opens opportunity for an escalated rebuttal.

Offer feedback rather than criticism.

Narcissists can't take criticism, accurate or otherwise. If you criticize them, you'll become the target of their anger.  Instead, tell them you just don't understand their point of view, and perhaps ask them to explain.  Done thoughtfully and in a calm manner, it disables their primary weaponry.

Use the narcissist's name deliberately.  

When you address a person by name, you focus the situation, you connect them to their behavior. For example, you might say, "Mike, I don't understand your thinking on that one," perhaps adding something like, "Mike, can you explain how you came to that conclusion?"  

Attempt understanding, perhaps.

In a quiet moment, imagine how you might feel if you were never at peace, crippled by a chronic need for approval and admiration.  Thinking it through might help you to not take their actions personally.

At the same time, stay objective and focused.  A gracious but firm stance is actually a caring gesture.  And remember, you're not likely to be the only victim.  Interfering with such behavior may be a help to others.  If there are children involved ....

If over time your actions are successful and the relationship tones down to reasonableness, consider continuing the pursuit of issues calmly and with honest negotiation.  If not, leave the walls up.  If it escalates to abusive behavior, disconnect.

👴  A non-standard solution: from Foreign Afflictions: Mental Disorders across Country Borders, we see, "... when Murphy asked one of the Inuit how the group typically dealt with such an individual, he replied that, “somebody would have pushed him off the ice when no one was looking.”"  An understandable response, but not recommended, of course.

You can perhaps imagine how one might from years of experience and inquiry have arrived at this perspective.  Discernment rarely emerges without broad-based experience.  True for us all, and for wisdom as well.