America’s Adult Learning Crisis

© Charles D. Hayes

For three decades I've been writing about the merits and rewards of self-directed continuing education. Having spent so much time and effort trying to better understand the world before checkout time, I can attest without hesitation that the intellectual exhilaration to be had from a willful determination to learn adds immeasurably to the pleasure of living.  

At the same time, my hopes for broadening the reach of lifelong learning among adults borders on despair, because much of what is characterized today as patriotism, especially in hard-right politics, really amounts to a celebration of ignorance. Worse, an in-your-face brand of simple-mindedness is at war with science, the humanities, and most efforts to fight inequality. 

Low-information citizens get much of their authoritative sense of virtue from a stream of hearsay and contemptuous innuendo coming from those with whom they already identify. This renders them oblivious to critical but factual evidence about the nature of cause and effect.  

To be sure, these are otherwise wonderful people. They would give you the shirt off their back, shelter you in a storm, and feed you if you were starving—unless, of course, they somehow viewed you as other. And even then, they might make an exception, since up close you might not seem as bad as they have been led to believe. If we were at war, these people would be first in line to volunteer. 

You and I know them as parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbors. Where these individuals come up short is in understanding the human predicament on a much larger scale than their own small sphere. These low-information citizens don't read much, and if they listen to or watch newscasts at all, it's likely from a partisan source. 

Many of these citizens regard critical thinking as an obligation to be overtly judgmental of others. They develop most of their opinions by talking to people who mirror their own political certainty about things that, for all practical purposes, they know nothing about whatsoever because they never examine anything in depth. 

I know about this subject first-hand. I grew up in a low-information culture, and for years in my youth I was an active participant. Active participation in low-information culture means that one is belligerent for nonsensical reasons and forever on alert for acts of disrespect by those considered outsiders. 

In my region of the country in the 1940s and '50s, racism was rampant, social conformity was expected, and a fundamentalist religious community was thought necessary to sustain morality. The sad reality is that things haven't changed all that much in some parts of the country; this kind of social ethos is still representative in many localities all over America. The bigotry and racism is still there. In most cases, it's not as blatant as before, but in some, it's as bad as ever. 

Millions of uneducated people claim that their religion and their worldview is the only virtuous path to the truth, whatever that might be, and their only rationale for holding such beliefs is one borne of local consensus. This identity-based way of life leads people to form an us-and-them mentality, and it fosters a kind of conceit that closes group membership at the mere appearance of differences or questioning of the status quo. Any and all cultural criticism is viewed as sacrilegious, subversive, or treasonous behavior.  

Attitudes like these result in an exaggerated sense of self-importance that manifests itself in religious defensiveness, Constitutional illiteracy, ethnic prejudice, and partiality toward military aggression, pseudo-history, economic misinformation, and political paranoia.  

Now, it doesn't take a university study to figure this out. If you suspect you live in a region of the country that sounds like the above, go to your nearest street corner or grocery store and ask the people you meet there a few simple questions. You will likely meet some very articulate and well educated citizens. But you will also meet many individuals whose political opinions are so farfetched from reality that they sound paranoid or schizophrenic. Chances are, the less they know about the real world, the more strident and boisterous their views will be.  

Elsewhere I have written extensively about the need for an existential education, not just for a few of us, but for everyone. An existential education simply amounts to learning enough about humanity and the human condition to disabuse a person of the notion that one’s respective culture has reality nailed and that all of the other poor fools in the world are simply lost or potentially evil. An existential education enables us to deal with the angst that comes with the human condition without the need to blame others for our own insecurities. 

In his book Who Owns the Future, computer scientist Jaron Lanier argues that digital networks are decimating America's middle class. He maintains that our technology is eliminating jobs faster than it creates them in an environment where better technology results in more and more unemployment. In support of this view, books are being published every month sounding the alarm that America's middle class is dying economically. 

If we don't find the political will to address the growing needs of legions of low-wage workers, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to guess how this will play out with low-information citizens. The blame game could easily escalate to the point where people take to the streets. Arab springs may one day soon be eclipsed by American winters.  

This is indeed ironic because there is a lot to be legitimately upset about. Washington DC has become a bastion of corruption for which both of our major political parties are responsible. Simply put, we may be in for a tsunami of misplaced anger and an attempt to topple our government without the goodwill and knowledge to map out a system of redress that works for all Americans. Aggressive, wide-ranging education for all adults and soon-to-be adults may be the only remedy. Let’s hope it doesn’t take a catastrophe to inspire such a movement.

 

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The False Allure of Gridlock

© Charles D. Hayes

Pretend for a moment a medical checkup reveals that you may be on the verge of a heart attack if you don't receive medical attention. The matter is urgent. You have one of two options: bypass surgery or a new regime of drug therapy. Both approaches have a proven track record, and you find the choice to be a tough one. But it turns out your opinion doesn’t even count. You see, in this scenario, the country you live in has only two doctors, and the two can't agree on which approach to take. One doctor’s vote can block the other’s. Your only option is to wait and wait and wait. You could die before a decision is reached.

 

This is precisely the predicament many people find themselves in today. Millions of our citizens are being negatively affected by orchestrated gridlock: legislative stalemate, funds for education cut, construction projects on hold, political appointments blocked, unemployment payments denied, crumbling infrastructure with no money allocated for maintenance, and scores of unfunded or underfunded government programs that are vital to our middle class and to people who are barely hanging on economically. These situations range from inconvenient to life-threatening.

 

I have friends who take a great deal of satisfaction in the idea of legislative gridlock as a viable political strategy. There was a time in America when I believed their views were justified because it was intended as a temporary tactic, not a permanent solution. Divided government works if politicians want it to work and if they act accordingly. Democracy depends upon compromise and, in point of fact, cannot exist without it.

 

But when ideology becomes immersed in identity and fuses with the notion that we are right simply because of who we are, the process is no longer democratic. When the parties declare that if you oppose us you are evil, and that the sole objective henceforth is to stop the opposition, regardless of what is proposed, there is nothing to do except wait for cardiac arrest.

 

Our history makes it plainly clear that neither political party has a lock on the truth of how best to govern. Both liberal and conservative approaches are necessary at times. Some plans work and some don't. But to take the position that everything one side proposes has to be stopped—even if the government is shut down and needless suffering among the citizens will be the result—is a form of political mockery that undermines the democratic process.

 

Democracy works only if the desire for solutions to our problems can trump ideology. Ideology is something all of us have that can be measured in degrees. But when the rigidity of one’s politics becomes a closed system, any hope of achieving consensus is lost. Our three branches of government are supposed to provide checks and balances, and yet today ideology is so stringent that Congress makes every effort to prevent many appointments to the judiciary from even taking place.

 

Democracy is a dangerous political system because there is always the risk that it will allow things to happen that will abolish it. Balancing power is a precarious pursuit simply because of what power is. When citizens don't pay attention to political reality, a vacuum exists and power rushes in to fill it, as essayist Isaiah Berlin so often explained.

 

Our elected lawmakers add thousands of tweaks to the legislation they produce to rig the system on behalf of special interests, who then give their clientele exceptional treatment. When criticized for such tactics, the corporate interests call it "freedom," and if pressed further, "moral truth." There’s a simple reason that Obamacare is under unrelenting siege by legislators, who are themselves under pressure from lobbyists: Obamacare hamstrings the ability of the health insurance industry to profit at the expense of medical treatment.

 

That things are not as they first appear is one of life's most important lessons. At the same time, it is also one of the hardest lessons to act on—especially when it comes to politics—because we are too often blinded by emotion. People imprisoned by ideology are easy to recognize when they show up on television news as suicide bombers, but they are much harder to spot when they parrot views we agree with.

 

Most of the problems we face are much more nuanced and complicated than they are made to seem by both liberals and conservatives. Media pundits and politicians offer simplistic explanations to complex problems too often. If we were to delve into these matters in deeper detail, we could discover things that shed new light on the issues and perhaps reveal new solutions. Yet most of our citizens get caught up solely in the emotion and look no further than how wrong the other side is, based upon superficial hearsay.

 

We can have gridlock in which those with heart conditions get no treatment, or we can try more than one procedure. I would prefer to let either liberals or conservatives try what they think is the right approach (without keeping the other side from voting), and then hold them accountable at election time, rather than let myriad problems continue to stagnate from gridlock.

 

The sad truth is that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all want pretty much the same things in life; they just disagree about solutions. Contrast their behavior today with the way we cooperate in wartime when we have a common enemy. If we can ever awaken to the realization that our problems are our common enemy, instead of each other, we might actually solve our problems through democratic means and move ahead.

 

Television interviews frequently feature pundits who offer smug satisfaction about political gridlock, claiming it is better than the alternative. These people obviously are not having chest pains. Supporters of gridlock have one thing in common: they all benefit from things as they are.

 

If ideology continues to obstruct our ability to function, our future as a viable nation is seriously in doubt. 

 

 

 

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Racism Egregiously Misunderstood

© Charles D. Hayes

When I was growing up in the South during the 1940s and ’50s, I had no idea I was internalizing a racist attitude. During this period, Gordon Allport, one of the preeminent social psychologists of the twentieth century, was studying the nature of prejudice, and in 1954, he published The Nature of Prejudice, which remains a classic. He defined prejudice as follows: “Prejudice is a pattern of hostility in interpersonal relations which is directed against an entire group, or against its individual members; it fulfills a specific irrational function for its bearer.”

 Today it is not unusual to hear declarations by white men claiming no responsibility for slavery because, they argue, they have never owned slaves. Others make adamant assertions that they are free of racial bias. Although my memories are mercifully vague, I don’t doubt that I spouted similar views as a young man. But years ago, when I realized how wrong I had been about the real nature of racial prejudice, the subject became a major focus of my scholarship, and I have been studying the pathology of prejudice ever since.

A common mistake in characterizing the nature of prejudice is to attempt to describe it as a conscious sense of awareness— a front-page choice that requires overt acknowledgment. To say, for example, “Since, at this moment, I bear this or that race no prejudicial thoughts, I am therefore not prejudiced” is a complete misunderstanding of racism.

Bias is often hidden. Culturally internalized bias doesn’t stand out as a discernibly educated opinion—it looks like straight-up reality. When we view the circumstances before us, our perception appears to be, as Allport described the process, a “single act of cognition.” If you are a bigoted cop, you will have no trouble rationalizing racial profiling because you will be able to give all kinds of reasons for profiling that have nothing at all to do with your hidden assumptions for doing so. As an ex-cop, I know this to be true from countless observations and personal experience.

That Mayor Michael Bloomberg attributes a decline in New York’s City’s murder rate solely to its stop-and-frisk policy is absurd. There are myriad reasons for the falling rates of violent crime. Even in large cities that don’t follow the practice, murder rates are down. Stop and frisk is an example of discrimination in its most refined form because, without a second thought, the mayor has given a pass to the humiliation minorities incur from being randomly detained and searched.

Seeds of contempt find fertile soil in acts of disrespect. Simply put: Stop and frisk legitimizes hidden bias. Supporters of stop and frisk argue that 94 percent of crimes against black people are committed by black citizens. Big deal. They neglect to mention that 86 percent of crimes against white people are committed by white people. Moreover, if you were to randomly stop and frisk more and more white people, their arrest numbers would go up accordingly. 

If you are a prejudiced employer, you aren’t likely to perceive you are turning someone down for employment because of the person’s race. What will happen is that your subconscious will come into play, and it will offer rationalizations for not hiring the individual that simply seem like common sense. But in reality, those rationalizations might very well be conclusions based on a personal history of thousands of subtle observations and inferences.

Prejudicial judgments are something we internalize from life experience, and they can be so subtle that we don’t realize we are learning anything. When in our youth we hear friends or family members make prejudicial statements, we notice their body language at a level somewhere beneath our conscious awareness. Then at some point in the future, such experiences will have been repeated so often that they’re likely to be set in cement and will require a jackhammer of dissonance to alter.

Allport observed that prejudice is most often acquired via blind conformity. He noted that “not every overblown generalization is a prejudice,” adding that “prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.” Understanding this is crucial. Most people who have not studied how our minds operate assume their perception is unadulterated reality. Research has made clear, however, that it’s anything but.

Learned prejudice is like read-only software. It can take a long time to become written into a program, but once it’s set in gray matter, altering the code will take an enormous emotional and intellectual effort. You probably know scores of people, as I do, whose views on racial matters could not be changed with waterboarding.

Assertions by individuals who claim to bear no responsibility for racism bring to mind the work of Henry David Thoreau, who accepted the premise: That government is best which governs least. When used by itself in political arguments, the assertion completely misses Thoreau’s point about government. What he went on to advocate was better government, and the great misfortune in failing to realize the substance of his argument comes simply from not understanding Citizen Thoreau. If most people were like him, citizenship would be viewed differently and so would our expectations of government.

Thoreau assured us that we are clearly not responsible for what happened in the past, but we are unequivocally responsible for what is. If we grow up in a system that is unjust by design, Thoreau considered it our duty to make it right, because to benefit from an unjust system without working to correct it is to be an accomplice.

For Thoreau, just because we never owned slaves doesn’t absolve us of the current legacy of inequality that owes itself to centuries of oppression. We have made progress in race relations among many diverse groups of people, but it takes many generations of families who’ve made incremental but necessary advances into the middle class to provide the foundational stability for the future success of the generations who follow. Personal failure without an established family to fall back on is a roadblock to success. Social capital is extremely important. And if you don’t believe this, you simply haven’t thought it through or examined the statistical evidence.

Children are not born prejudiced. Prejudice has to be learned. Myriad psychological studies have demonstrated that children internalize the subtleties of race early on. We should find it hurtful and morally unacceptable that we cannot correct an environment in which young black children prefer white dolls because of what they’ve learned about living. Beneath their consciousness they’ve noted that white is good and black is not.

It’s hard to overstate how important it is to fully understand the way our worldviews are viscerally connected to our attitudes about race and identity. At a subconscious level, we compare ourselves continuously to those whom we perceive as different. Indeed, the fact that we are intuitively adept at discerning slight signs of otherness prompted Sigmund Freud to write extensively about the narcissism of minor differences.

All human beings are keen about noticing dissimilarities. This is why we tend to vote our identities and not our pocketbooks, as evidenced by the irrational antics of those who can’t relate to the president of the United States in any given administration. Patriotism, as Allport noted, is “often a mask for bigotry,” and “extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.”

The current political obsession with freedom has very little to offer regarding the responsibilities of citizenship. The freedom slogans we hear so often today say nothing, whatsoever, about the role individuals must play in order to obtain and sustain a just democracy. Bigotry feeds on illiteracy. It’s long past time we stopped being slaves to ignorance and began to relate to all Americans as Americans, regardless of race, religion, creed, or color. 

 

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Belief and the Residue of Honor

© Charles D. Hayes

Wouldn't it have been great if, when we were growing up, there had been an audible signal when each of our beliefs achieved the rigidity of concrete? Imagine hearing inspirational music with announcements declaring, "Listen up, this is important. This is going to be your opinion from now on." Of course, this doesn't occur. Instead, our respective cultures play a strategic role in shaping our views without notice for most of our lives.

We don't grow up making up our minds about the world independent of our communities. Quite the contrary: we carry many of our customs, beliefs, prejudices, and aspirations with us to our graves. Each new generation, however, rejects some things learned from their elders while internalizing others wholeheartedly. The pendulum of liberal-versus-conservative politics is always at sway in the wind, but it never ventures so far in one direction that it doesn't at some point reverse course.

America would benefit tremendously if each and every one of us would routinely take the time and effort to examine our own beliefs genealogically and follow them all of the way back to ideological bedrock. It is incredibly powerful and insightful to discover how and why we view the world as we do. Much of what we come to believe as straight-up reality is the residue of past events and customs that bear little resemblance to the world we live in today.

I grew up in the South, in Texas and Oklahoma, in the 1940s and ’50s. As a teenager, when I went to movies and saw an example of, say, a New York cab driver shouting obscenities at a male passenger or a pedestrian and nothing happened as a result, it didn't seem real. This didn't seem possible in my community because you could not shout insults in another man's face without an obligatory fistfight. Being publicly humiliated required immediate redress.

 There was no music or voice-over announcement when I absorbed the notion that an in-your-face insult had to be answered with a physical response. Nevertheless, this ethos is still so much a part of my psyche that no amount of intellectual rigor can rid me of the felt need to respond to an egregious insult in this manner. At my age, though, I imagine the offender might yet go unscathed.

Now, when you take customs like this to their ideological foundations, things get really interesting. In their book Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, Dov Cohen and Richard E. Nisbett report research showing that when men of the South are insulted, they experience rapidly escalating increases of testosterone and cortisol. And yet, this is not usually the case with men raised in the North. Stated simply: we absorb our culture with congealed emotion that sets up like cerebral cement.

Historically the culture of defending oneself as a matter of principle traces back to the antebellum notion of Southern honor. From there, it goes all the way back to herding cultures and then back further still to the male dominance expressed in sacred religious texts. In other words, this ethos is about pious behavior ensconced in the values of protecting the flock against any and all comers with a posture aggressive enough to ward off all those who might be tempted to trespass or bring harm.

If you are old enough to recall the 1950s and ’60s, you will recognize the residue of herding culture psychology combined with a hybrid notion of Southern honor and the stoic resolve of Native Americans as fundamental to a major theme of Western movies: A rugged, unshakable stranger comes to town and is not to be offended or affronted without grave consequences that, more often than not, result in a gunfight. The core cultural thread that holds this attitude together is the unspoken declaration that it is a man's world and men are meant to be in charge. Millions of Americans still feel the influence of this cultural pressure on our identity.

This ethos continues to prevail across the country, especially in politically red states, where an established sense of patriarchal authority reigns with regard to how people—especially women—should behave. The gentility of the Old South, in particular, is steeped in a historical connection with the philosophy of herding cultures and the protection and sense of ownership of both women and slaves. Above reproach, ladylike behavior and demonstrated subservience by both women and slaves amplified the resident white gentlemen’s sense of honor. All actions or behaviors to the contrary were, and still are, suspect.

When we hear people say things like, "I have nothing against homosexuals, except when they shove it in my face," what they are really expressing is the angst of a threatened worldview. Their identity is at risk, and this is a really scary situation for them. If they discover a rip in the fabric of what they consider reality, especially what they revere as moral truth, then the fissure has the potential to grow wider and could ultimately include their religion, their politics, and even their simple prescription for what constitutes a meaningful life. Moreover, the older one is, the greater the threat, since the thought of having lived one's whole life in existential error is as psychologically devastating as facing the end of the world. 

 If people are increasingly defying norms and behaving more and more in ways other than are commonly considered acceptable, or if their actions fly in the face of local expectations, such behavior will be experienced as existentially frightening by those who revere custom. An endangered worldview portends mortal peril, and the visceral response is to fight such change as something evil.    

In the antebellum South, it's hard to overestimate the amount of influence men were expected to have over the behavior of women, especially when it comes to being seen as protecting them and their reputation. Thus, every aspect of feminism was and still is a threat to traditional patriarchy, and those who conform and behave as expected resent those who resist.

Take the issue of abortion. What interests me most is that many of the people who are most vocal about being pro-life appear to hold their belief, not so much because of an actual concern for unborn children, but more out of a desire to protect a parochial and patriarchal worldview. Now I'm sure there are exceptions, but regardless of your gender, if you are aggressively pro-life ask yourself this question: If you take this issue clear to its core, do you really care all that much about unborn children, or could this have more to do with the way you were raised and how you were taught women are supposed to behave? How much concern do you show for children, other than your own, when the subject of abortion is set aside? How do you reconcile the deep irony in the scientific admonition that the exponential growth of human population threatens our very existence?

On the other hand, if you believe absolutely in a woman's right to choose whether or not to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, where do you think this assumption originates and how did you come to believe it? What sense of a woman's freedom do you think enables you to readily discount the life of an unborn child? At what point do you think ending the life of a fetus is wrong?

 Reflection of this kind takes a formidable amount of soul-searching. Our desire to be honest with ourselves has to be stronger than the concrete in which our foundational beliefs are set, if we are to venture far enough to see the issue from another point of view, let alone change our minds.   

 This is precisely why learning about our history is so important for deciding who we really are and how we are to behave. We typically use all sorts of expressions that bear little resemblance to their origins. For example, it is not uncommon today for people to refer to someone during an argument as an SOB. But few, I suspect, mean this in the way it was used in the Old South, when the worst possible insult was to literally demean another person's mother with the term. When we fail to understand how and why we hold our beliefs about the world, we are too easily manipulated politically and the emotional fallout shows itself as a surplus of arrogance and contempt. 

Most of the things that we believe constitute our worldview are deeply imbedded in our sense of identity. Very often the main reason we take sides on an issue has much more to do with the fact that our respective identity group has already taken the position and we feel obliged to join in. This, in my view, helps no one because, until we do the kind thinking that gets us beyond the simple notion of identity, we have little hope of achieving the kind of objectivity that would assure a sense of honor for ourselves as individuals and our respective groups.

 A genuine sense of moral objectivity becomes possible only when we delve deeply into the genealogy of our beliefs and discover things that, had we known earlier, would likely have caused us to honorably change our viewpoint. But here is the really hard part: Even when we do change our minds, intellectual effort alone is not enough to neutralize the deep-seated emotion in which our beliefs are set. To truly change our minds, we have to override the old conviction with a passion more powerful than the emotion that enabled it to establish itself as belief in the first place.

 To accept one's culture without question is to spend life as a prisoner of the past.

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CEOs Assert the License to Loot

© Charles D. Hayes

Three decades ago, futurist John Naisbitt asserted that "it is easier to ride a horse in the direction it is already going." A slightly modified version can aptly be applied to the egregiously exaggerated value of CEOs in America. That is to say, it's easier to be viewed as a wunderkind executive, if the business one has been selected to run is already booming.

 

There are, in my opinion, few more counterfeit notions than the overstated hype about CEO expertise on the global business stage. To command obscene compensation requires that there be an ongoing public relations effort to keep the mythic notion of exceedingly rare talent in the air. It ought to be called "The Great Duping of America," because this is precisely what has happened and is continuing to occur as a way to prevent the rate of exploitation from being impaired.

 

No doubt there are many CEOs with good management skills, but it is a stretch far beyond credulity to say their special expertise is worthy of the right to loot a public enterprise and to persist in doing so even when the venture is losing money. This is going on right before our eyes, and yet we watch silently in awe like nothing more than a bunch of uninformed fools. It's as if we have, as Erich Fromm put, it "swallowed the principles of power."

 

In this case, we’ve tacitly endorsed the right of certain individuals to collect unlimited compensation based on a brand of inflated expertise so special and so utterly unique that few of us are able to say precisely what it is. Not to mention the corporate missteps and blunders that occur daily, or the criminal malfeasance behind the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, for which virtually all of the executives responsible have gone unpunished, though, of course, they did get their bonuses.

 

The plain truth, if we simply think it through, is that when business is on the upswing, you could pick as the new CEO any warm body off the street with a demonstrated penchant for good judgment, and business would continue to thrive. For every Steve Jobs there are scores of performers who are mediocre at best, unless their particular business happens to be stuck in an upward cycle. We have a tendency to remember the successful examples and forget the failed performances. 

 

Reality is harsh, though, as the many CEOs who are not so well endowed with good judgment prove day in and day out. A Google search on the term CEO incompetence will produce more than a million hits. These executives can make blatant management errors, and yet the prevailing fairy tale of extraordinary expertise still awards them astronomical compensation.

 

One of the advantages of getting old is that pretentiousness gets easier to spot. I say, there is no more excuse for stratospheric reward at the top of business than there is for slave wages at the bottom. The license for executives to loot is no more necessary or justifiable in a nation that calls itself great than is the license for businesses to exploit labor with the full expectation that taxpayers will subsidize via food stamps the employees whose compensation is below the poverty line.

 

Shame on the successive generations of us who grew up learning and discussing the parable of the emperor who had no clothes, but who demonstrate through our actions today that we have learned nothing from it. It might be accurate to say that America has become the laughing stock of the developed world, except that our ignorance-based subservience to powerful myths of excellence and Ayn Rand notions of self-interest on steroids is anything but funny.

 

The Cold War fear of Communism conditioned millions of our citizens to recoil in a kind of panic-paranoia at the mere suggestion of anything containing the word social. The result is that millions of people can be relied on to vote against their own interests and, worse, to stand by and actually cheer on the looting, as Wall Street skims the cream off the stock market each day using supercomputers with which no individual investor can compete.

 

If America is to save its middle class, we must put ideological fantasy aside and face the reality once and for all that nations with a strong middle class have never existed anywhere on earth without an enormous ongoing investment in both hard and soft infrastructure.

 

The conservative ethos for frugality and stopping wasteful spending is of great value, but we should apply it judiciously across the board without exception. Instead, America's military industrial complex, the private prison industry, and our healthcare and our financial systems have been purged of the ability to accomplish anything on a broad economic scale except to satisfy the greed of a few well-placed individuals. This is not freedom. These people aren't really winners. But the rest of us are indeed losers.

 

It's insane to believe we can maintain a viable economy and a strong middle class with lower and lower taxes at the same time a class of privileged executives, empowered by their governmental and legislative connections, ransack corporate finances whether they are successful managers or not. Their real managerial expertise is too often beside the point. It's quid pro quo all the way, as these executives and their boards plunder the public trust with enough sleight of hand that everyday citizens mistake larceny for strategy.

 

Today John Naisbitt's horse representing America's middle class is headed for the abyss, unless average citizens begin to demand a change in direction. 

 

 

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Wingnuts of America, I Salute You

© Charles D. Hayes

In the movie Gladiator, at the opening of the games, an arena combatant says, "We who are about to die salute you." Having entered my eighth decade on the planet, I can relate to his assertion, hopefully with a bit more time left than an imminent contest. I am, though, nearing checkout time, and I am concerned about the future that subsequent generations will inherit when my mine has fought its last battle. That said, here are some political behaviors and beliefs that I find encouraging:

 

o   If you are one of those people who have nothing but contempt for the government and who never tire of trashing everything public, while championing everything private—with the exception of the Pentagon— by all means keep it up.

o   If you never miss a chance to disparage immigrants, especially those whose labor makes it possible for you to eat inexpensive fruit and vegetables, I encourage you to pick up the pace and increase the audible decibels of your rhetoric.

o   If you constantly harp about ending a woman's right to choose whether or not she will give birth to a child against her wishes, for whatever reason, please don't stop. Instead, put more effort into upping the level of vitriol about reversing Rowe v. Wade.  

o   If you are one of those people who think Ayn Rand hung the moon with her declaration that selfishness is our greatest virtue, please spread the word and give my regards to John Galt.

o   If you think that one person, one vote is an antiquated notion and that whatever you can do to gerrymander and rig election laws to prevent your political opponents from voting is legitimate, then by all means continue and send out frequent press releases.

o   If you think Wall Street has been shackled with unnecessary regulations, please raise your voice and make yourself heard. Start gathering donations for the next bailout.

o   If you if think gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage, please don't miss an opportunity to make your point with all of the supporting reasons you can muster about how it will adversely affect your own marriage.

o   If you think we need a military that is bigger than it is now, please tell us why at every chance you get.

o   If you think we should do away with the minimum wage so that more people can be employed at slave wages, please print up some handbills and put an ad in your local newspaper. Then get a burglar alarm for your home. 

o   If you think insurance companies should be completely in charge of medical treatment, speak up.

o   If you believe there should be no restrictions, whatsoever, on the private ownership of firearms, including background checks, please say so. Show us pictures of your bazooka.

o   If you believe that America is a bastion of socialism, where government deregulation is all we need to reenergize the economy, tell your legislators, but don't forget your neighbors.

o   If you believe that Social Security and Medicare should be abolished, please shout it out. Then subscribe to the Hemlock Society newsletter because you may need it.               

 

If you agree with any and especially all or most of the points above, I salute you. I do so because this means there is hope for the future. There is hope because you and your party are hell-bent on self-destruction. It means that your narrow views and the bigotry and contempt you spew forth toward those you deem to be pathologically different (calling it plain old common sense) is finally being seen for the shallow thinking that it represents.

 

American demographics are changing the political landscape toward a more thoughtful and tolerant society. If you persist with your vitriol, your political party will soon be small enough to drown in a bathtub.   

 

Over time, perhaps, some of you will wake up and realize that you don't have ideas so much as ideas have you—that the totality of your worldview comprises shallow assumptions that you cling to in spite of never having studied any relevant subject in depth. Worse, your opinions are not well reasoned. Instead, they amount secondhand insecurities borrowed from ignorant individuals whose major concerns in life are best described as identity-based paranoia. The world is moving on and away from overt racism and bigotry, which in the past were routinely passed off by your fellow travelers as patriotism. These attitudes are anything but.

 

The vast majority of extreme right-wing rhetoric that has been so prominent in America for the past two decades is a strain of populist contempt that bears no relation, whatsoever, to the ideas upon which America was founded. The movement to make abortion illegal has much more to do with protecting an authoritative masculine worldview than with an actual concern for children. This is easy to confirm if you get close enough to see what most of the proponents really value when it comes to the choices they make in life.   

 So go on. Sip your tea, wear funny hats, shoulder muskets, and carry placards with hateful slogans, because you and your ideas belong with the flintlock era. Once again, I salute you farewell and wish you and your ilk good riddance. Don't let the Constitution hit you in the face on your way out the door.

 

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Putting Worldviews in Perspective

© Charles D. Hayes

Imagine visitors from another planet landing on the earth and drawing up a profile of human beings to send home. Surely one of their main reporting points would be that this is an incredibly diverse species with an immeasurable range of individuals, and yet, if the neural matter in each of their heads doesn’t form similar patterns, they are prone to set about killing one another. As a footnote the visitors would likely observe that once certain brain patterns set up and become deeply ingrained they are difficult or nearly impossible to change or alter.

 

Unless they regarded such behavior as normal, I suspect the aliens would leave earth trying to figure out how a species that seems to defend individual initiative so strongly would strive so hard to emulate the regimented behavior of insects. It would puzzle them that so many individuals could insist on bee-like or ant-like behavior from their fellow man and would readily condemn those who are reluctant to conform as being unpatriotic or subversive in some way. Returning to their own planet, our visitors could easily speculate that if these human beings were only secure enough in their own views to be able to tolerate contrary views, the killing might stop.  

 

My own inquiry suggests that once a person’s fundamental beliefs are formed, they are very much like snapshots or still photos, and extraordinary efforts will be required to justify a reshoot. On the one hand, this propensity ensures our survival because it enables us to make instantaneous decisions based on confirmation with our photographic assumptions. But this propensity also threatens our existence for the very same reason. We are too quick to make up our minds, since we require only a hint of confirmation from our stored mental picture to confirm the views we already hold. In too many instances we make no room for alternatives or exceptions, and we ignore or reject contrary evidence.

 

All human beings, regardless of where we are on this planet, are born into reality shelters that we commonly refer to as our culture. The late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that cultures amount to codified hero systems in which members are aided in seeming to transcend death through deeds and their reverence for icons and symbols. And thus we grow up with a take on reality given to us in such nuanced and discreet ways that we remain unaware that we are internalizing an off-the-shelf worldview. If we aren’t careful, it can stultify and set up like software that can't be overwritten or reprogrammed.

 

After more than 30 years of dedicated self-education, and now at age 70, I’m confident that educator Neil Postman was right when he said, “Education is a defense against culture.” It’s that and more. We live in our heads. What we do with the knowledge that our respective cultures insist we put there, and how we deal with it, set the tenor, tone, and trajectory of our lives. What we learn and come to know is important, but it’s what we strive hard to understand beyond our culture that determines the essence of our character, what we do with our lives, how we relate to others, and how and for what we are likely to be remembered.

 

That things are often not as they appear is one of life’s most important lessons—so glaringly self-evident, in fact, that few of us doubt it. Unfortunately, even fewer of us heed the lesson. From an early age, we are taught that appearances are deceiving, and yet we do not hesitate to take a firm position on matters we’ve never really looked into beyond a superficial appraisal. We are quick to make baseless snap judgments that diminish our potential for achieving a just democratic society, even as those judgments add to our personal angst and inflame our contempt for matters we haven’t yet investigated.

 

A willingness to learn can trump our predisposition to act tribally and selfishly. It can dispel our mistrust of those whose politics, religions, traditions, and lifestyles we’ve not previously made an effort to understand. It adds quality to our lives, making the term golden years something more than a cliché. A willingness to learn and to continue learning is our best chance to leave the world a better place.

 

Computers are not much help unless we have many rewritable programs. In similar fashion, our lives are much less enjoyable if the software in our heads has solidified and our minds can't be changed. It is an unfortunate trait of our species that we are predisposed toward an ethos of the fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion, and that we will argue vociferously over subjects we know nothing, whatsoever, about.

 

All one has to do to verify this is read a sufficient number of letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers. Popular talking points serve as substitutes for in-depth knowledge, and arrogance stands in for a willingness to do one's homework before commenting. Limited worldviews lead to misunderstanding and to the warring conflict that follows.

 

Extraterrestrial visitors could understandably have a hard time getting their minds around our egotism and our unwillingness to learn beyond our cultural indoctrination. I can imagine them scratching their heads on the way home, wondering if there are any other species in the universe who reach adulthood and think they already know everything they need to about everything important without a purposeful intention to continue learning.

 

My Books and Essays on Amazon

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September University.org Website

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