Saturday, April 1, 2017

Baby Boomers = generation of sociopaths?

I have expressed my prejudices re baby boomers before (i.e. generation of narcissists), but someone wrote a book about how they're sociopathic. From the Huffington Post:

In his new book, A Generation of Sociopaths, writer and venture capitalist Bruce Gibney puts forth the controversial hypothesis that baby boomers ― specifically the large subset of white, middle-class boomers ― are, both individually and as a group, unusually sociopathic. Gibney cites mental health data showing boomers have significantly higher levels of antisocial traits and behaviors ― including lack of empathy, disregard for others, egotism and impulsivity ― than other generations.

As a result, boomers have used their substantial voting power to create a society and government that don’t work very well. Or, as Gibney puts it, boomers’ “private behaviors congealed into a debased neoliberalism.”

The author regarding the impact of boomers' dogged self-interest:

There’s obviously been a substantial deceleration of economic growth. The Great Recession arguably began in 2001 and we’ve never entirely recovered ― so that’s 16 years of lost opportunity. 

The second big thing on the economic front is the intergenerational passing of burdens, and the most salient one is the debt. Gross debt to GDP 40 years ago was 34 percent, and today it’s around 105 percent. It’s projected by [the Congressional Budget Office] to exceed the World War II highs by the early 2030s. When boomers start taking control and influencing policies, the policies get worse on the debt, so that now we haven’t seen these levels of debt in more than 70 years.

There are consequences to these levels of debt. ... But that’s not really relevant for the boomers. This is not their problem and they have not been serious about it. The debt wasn’t discussed as a serious issue during the 2016 presidential election, but Social Security was ― because we know that this program is going to be partially insolvent by 2034. And this is the only thing that Trump and Clinton could agree on: Social Security ― untouchable. Medicare ― untouchable. These things are sacred. They couldn’t even agree where to stand on the stage together, and they agreed on Social Security.  

People who know me personally know I rarely pass up an opportunity to take potshots at baby boomers. It's not even the selfishness that gets on my nerves, because really everyone is selfish. It's the delusional self-aggrandizement. Boomers all think they're self-made success stories, just because they happen to have been born perfectly timed to profit from one of the biggest economic booms in known history. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats, but a lot of boomers credit their success to being a particularly skilled captain. I think it's great (for me) when these people apply that hubris to their trades in the stock market, but it generally makes them boorish dinner companions.

Sociopath, though? No, I stick by my initial assessment of narcissists. I'd like to think that the average sociopath is much more self-aware than the average baby boomer.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

The Rationality of Tolerance

Even when I was little, I had a healthy skepticism for people's professed moral positions. Maybe I just didn't understand (and still don't) the nuances of morality well enough, but to me most people's moral codes seemed horribly inconsistent and regularly skewed to their own self-interest or to the care and benefit of those closest to them. Of course now we have social research cottage industry about the darkside or limitations of empathy. Also, it seems more obvious (at least to me) when there's been a regime change, and the same people who decried the dubious tactics of the previous ruling class adopt the same in order to augment and perpetuate their own power.

Religion, often the seedbed of social moral norms, often has some of the greatest hypocrisies, or at least religious people often act far from what they profess to be their moral obligation to others. I have most experience with Mormons and the LDS faith, so that is where most of my experience is with this as well, and it's such a stumbling block to the church's efforts and to members' experience with the church that they've been doing a social media campaign addressing differences and loving others unconditionally.


But the judgment and rejection that some experience in the LDS church, I believe, is just a reflection of broader societal problems -- writing entire groups of people off as being less worthy of care, being quick to disenfranchise others, judging people harshly based on one singled out aspect of their personality or one single event in their life, etc. None of it is really a rational way to behave, but I see otherwise perfectly rational people try to rationalize these feelings all the time, and even dig in when challenged about them. Mob mentality seems to reign much more powerfully now than I remember at any other point in my lifetime.

I know I've written about tolerance before, but I just see stuff like this and think that empathy seems so limited if it still allows this sort of behavior to happen (and often encourages or is the source of this sort of in/out group thinking). Whereas, think about how much better the world would actually be if people were able to withhold judgment and instead seek to understand and appreciate each others' differences or even just leave each other mostly alone, but try to allow a place for everyone to develop and express their unique talents somewhere in someway in this world. Just because that was not how we were evolved to think, in our tribe-first primitive social brain mentality, doesn't mean that it's not the best way to think now. 

Friday, March 3, 2017

Playing a trump card

A reader recently explained why he bothers staying within the lines:

I find it strange, as I do not hide I am a sociopath. People ask why I am the way I am, and I tell them. I get the response aren't you afraid people will try ruining you?

My response is always the same. I am high functioning because it supports the lifestyle I have. If someone takes that life away from me I don't have to care anymore. Do you want to be the person I focus on first?

It makes me laugh a little to read that because there was this guy in the first couple years who found out who I was. I had found out who he was first, back when I wasn't deluged with emails every day (sorry for the late/nonexistent replies everyone!!!) I just googled his email and got a few hits for hacker forums, etc. So I mentioned it to him in my reply, not to freak him out, but just because I found his situation to be interesting and wanted to understand it better. Whatever his diagnosis was (I think he finally settled on schizoid), there was a bit of paranoia in there, and he made it his life's mission for the next 9 months to figure out who I was -- tit for tat. He was successful, not because of anything I did but because of a little slip-up that someone that I knew did in a comment on the blog. After that, he was about two steps away from blackmailing/extorting me. One of the smaller reasons for doing the book and trying to stay in a "glass closet", in which a lot more people would know my identity, was getting out from under this guy's thumb. And sure enough, this was his response after the book came out:

I see you have been outed. It was difficult at times, but I kept your identity a secret for a very long time. Please, return the favor by deleting all emails to/from me, if you would be so kind. If and when your new-found popularity causes problems for you, I would prefer to have as little involvement as possible.

I replied "I have no idea what you're afraid of. ;)" That's the problem with secrets and shaming as leverage -- people only take the hit once, and if they manage to make a comeback, you're in a very vulnerable position. 

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Legitimate form of life

I tweeted this article about how Oliver Sacks conceives as difference not as a disability, but as a different set of abilities, but I wanted to share some more thoughts on it.

Maria Popova writes:

A voracious lifelong reader, Dr. Sacks had grown enchanted by the H.G. Wells short story “The Country of the Blind,” set in an isolated society where blindness prevailed for three centuries and where a lost Western traveller finds himself the aberrant one, afflicted with sight. Drawing on the Wells story, his own childhood experience of visual migraines that temporarily blunted his color perception, and his neurological work with a painter who had suddenly become colorblind, Dr. Sacks bridged two of his great literary and intellectual heroes — Wells and Darwin — and wondered whether there might exist, not in fiction but in geography, a real isolated culture where total colorblindness — or achromatopsia — had become a basic condition among the population.

Because such mutations are most easily contained in cultures isolated by sea, he reasoned that if such a society existed, it would have to be on an island. After tracking down the appropriate colleague to ask, he was surprised and thrilled to learn that one such island did indeed exist — Pingelap in the Caroline archipelago of Micronesia, where total colorblindness had been coloring the genetic pool for two centuries.
***
Like all genetic deviations from the mean, colorblindness on Pingelap had emerged due to a formidable brush with randomness. In 1775, a typhoon decimated 90% of the people living on the island. Most of the remaining survivors eventually succumbed to a slow death of starvation, so that of the one thousand islanders only twenty remained. Several centuries earlier, the original settlers had brought to Pingelap the recessive gene for colorblindness, but because the population had been large enough, the odds of two carriers marrying and the gene manifesting in their children had been fairly low. Now, with a tiny but fertile group left with no recourse but inbreeding to repopulate the island, the recessive gene suddenly flourished into growing domination and total colorblindness was soon a common condition.



Oliver Sacks writes:

Colorblindness had existed on both Fuur and Pingelap for a century or more, and though both islands had been the subject of extensive genetic studies, there had been no human (so to speak, Wellsian) explorations of them, of what it might be like to be an achromatope in an achromatopic community — to be not only totally colorblind oneself, but to have, perhaps, colorblind parents and grandparents, neighbors and teachers, to be part of a culture where the entire concept of color might be missing, but where, instead, other forms of perception, of attention, might be amplified in compensation. I had a vision, only half fantastic, of an entire achromatopic culture with its own singular tastes, arts, cooking, and clothing — a culture where the sensorium, the imagination, took quite different forms from our own, and where “color” was so totally devoid of referents or meaning that there were no color names, no color metaphors, no language to express it; but (perhaps) a heightened language for the subtlest variations of texture and tone, all that the rest of us dismiss as “grey.”

Sacks brings a colleague, Knut Nordby, who happens to also be colorblind, and experiences the island very differently than Sacks:

For us, as color-normals, it was at first just a confusion of greens, whereas to Knut it was a polyphony of brightnesses, tonalities, shapes, and textures, easily identified and distinguished from each other.

The world wasn't just tailored made for the colorblind, the colorblind people also seemed to have a unique advantage over their counterparts:

The achromatopic children seemed to have developed very acute auditory and factual memories… [They] were oddly knowledgeable too about the colors of people’s clothing, and various objects around them — and often seemed to know what colors “went” with what… We could already observe in these achromatopic children in Mand how a sort of theoretical knowledge and know-how, a compensatory hypertrophy of curiosity and memory, were rapidly developing in reaction to their perceptual problems. They were learning to compensate cognitively for what they could not directly perceive or comprehend.

The best part of the video is at 2:55 where he tells the story of them asking how the colorblind could even tell when a banana was ripe, since they couldn't distinguish between green and yellow. They brought a green banana, and they sort of contemptuously thought -- this illustrates our point, they can't tell this banana is green. But the banana turned out to be ripe. They explained -- you're narrow minded, you would have said this banana wasn't ripe because you would only be focused on color, but they were focused on everything else about the banana -- texture, smell, etc. Similarly, a lot of people who rely on empathy have a hard time understanding how those without it could make the same sorts of judgments or choices for which the empaths rely on it so heavily. Not only can we make the same judgments and choices, we sometimes can get there more accurately without the empathy, because the emotions are not clouding our moral judgment.

The video continues, we do stigmatize people because people have characteristics that put them in conflict with others, but once the population has a large percentage of that type of person, they just seem normal. I think of the debate I got in with someone about which is more dangerous -- maleness, or sociopathy. In my mind there's an easy argument to make for maleness. If you took a female empath and made her a sociopath, she would be much less statistically likely to be a violent criminal than if you made her into a man. That's just the statistical difference between males and females in terms of propensity towards violence. But of course no one seriously advocates for the elimination of men from the human race. Since they are so prevalent, we think of their violent tendencies as being rather normal.

Sacks puts it this way:

There is a sort of critical level, so that if a tenth or a quarter of the population have some condition, it has to be accepted as a legitimate form of life and won’t be marginalized and, sometimes, won’t even be noticed.

Join Amazon Prime - Watch Over 40,000 Movies

.

Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.