ShrinkWrapped

A Time to Reflect

I am planning to take a break from Blogging until after the New Year.  As luck would have it my last post, Changing A Mind: Mission (Near) Impossible Addendum provoked an ongoing and thought-provoking discussion.  I plan to follow that discussion (while keeping my Blogosphere reading to a minimum) and join in from time to time. 

A vacation often allows one to "recharge" and I hope to come back with some fresh ideas and the occasional insight.

May you all have a Happy and Healthy New Year and may the next year bring us all happiness, good health, and peace.

Merry Christmas

... to all my Christian friends and readers.

Changing A Mind: Mission (Near) Impossible Addendum

In repsonse to my post yesterday on how difficult it is to change one's mind, a number of commenters made some very valuable points reinforcing both how, for some people, death can be preferable to challenging their world view, as well as the sense that changes are never restricted to one area but tend to set off a cascade of change. 

For most of my life I was a fairly typical, left-leaning, liberal Democrat.  I started every day with the New York Times and never questioned that what they were reporting was the important news of the day.  If it appeared in the Times, it was important and true; if it didn't appear in the Times, it didn't matter or hadn't happened.  Prior to the Blogosphere there was almost no way to test any of my assumptions.  While Talk Radio had begun to redress the leftward tilt of the MSM in the 1990s, the proper repsonse from a Liberal Democrat was to dismiss Rush Limbaugh as a right-wing ideologue, not worthy of consideration (and never listened to, in fact, since exposure to such unacceptable ideas could potentially cause damage of some unspecified sort.)  In any event, over the years a number of my baseline assumptions began to come into question.

Off the top of my head I would consider the following noninclusive list to be the basic assumptions of New York Times liberalism from the time of the Vietnam War.  Many of these assumptions have slowly migrated to the left over time; the interesting thing is that many current Democrats would disagree with many of the assumptions, yet fail to see that their support of the Democratic party in effect supports policies based on these assumptions.

• America is a racist country

• America is sexist

Changing A Mind: Mission (Near) Impossible

For those of us who consider ourselves at war with Islamic fascism it is often extremely difficult to understand how our political opponents can fail to see what is so clear to us.  At the same time, those who think that our invasion of Iraq was a terrible blunder in no way related to the war on terror are unable to understand why we don't see such obvious "facts" as that Bush lied, and the war is all about oil, and terrorism is essentially a police problem to which a military response is inappropriate at best, and down right dangerous to us (by creating many more enemies than we can possibly kill) at worst.  Most of the time, even when these questions are addressed in a common language, people tend to talk past or at each other, rather than to each other.  There is almost no real debate and minimal chance of changing anyone's mind.  Those of us who have not been infected with the thought disorder known as post-modernism and believe that there exists an actual reality that we can reasonably and objectively approach; if that is the case, what is it that prevents people from recognizing facts that are right in front of their eyes?  Actually, it is more accurate to ask, what makes it so hard for people to accept facts that are in conflict with their pre-existing beliefs?  If we can understand this, we will have a much better understanding of what makes it so difficult for a person to change their mind.

There are several important points that must be understood to grasp why changing a mind is such a difficult task:

1) The mind is extremely conservative.  Once a person has established his models of how the world works, his paradigms, he will unconsciously filter all new data in ways which tend to reinforce his paradigms.  Information that supports his world view is readily accepted without reservation.  Information that would tend to question his paradigm is greeted with extreme skepticism.  Multiple efforts are made to falsify the offending data and as soon as a reasonable way is found to discount it, it is dismissed.  In a pinch, the data can just be ignored. 

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind XIX

This week the Sanity Squad turn our collective eye toward the gossamer phenomenon of Barak Obama, the Iranian elections, and the prospects of Civil War in Palestine.

Join Siggy, Neo, Dr. Sanity and myself as we attempt to spin order out of the chaos of the modern world.  Download or listen to The Sanity Squad: Ready or Not.

Compare and Contrast

The recent Iranian elections have been largely seen as a repudiation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his mentor, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, and their particular brand of radical, millennialist Shia Islam.   The big winner apparently is former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, often referred to as the leader of the "moderate fundamentalists."   

There does seem to be an opportunity for the rhetoric to become somewhat more subdued, yet the key question is whether the changes in Iran portend a true change in the current collision course between America and Israel and the Iranian led HISH (Hezbollah-Iran-Syria-Hamas) Alliance.

Yesterday, NBC reported on the current status of American "gunboat doplomacy" int he Persian Gulf:

U.S. plans naval buildup in Gulf to counter Iran
CENTCOM plans to use 'gunboat diplomacy,' officials tell NBC News NBC VIDEO

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Central Command is aggressively planning a naval buildup in the Persian Gulf, including the addition of a second aircraft carrier, in response to a series of aggressive actions by Iran, U.S. military officials told NBC News on Tuesday.

The domestic reaction to the news suggests that the incompatible world views that have been assumed on both left and right are fully engaged in regard to the Middle East, and it is worth reviewing the opposing assumptions implied by such world views.

Stupid Politician Tricks

There is a populist strain to the Democratic Party which appeals to the resentments and envy of worried and anxious voters and promises some short term palliation in exchange for long term damage.   One of the areas in which Americans feel most insecure is health care.  All but the very wealthy understand that a severe illness can not only destroy one's health but can also destroy one's financial security.  This is a real problem, in part caused by the success of American medicine in treating illnesses which were once thought to be beyond human intervention. 

On Sunday, Teddy Kennedy on FNS, among his other familiar comments, referred to the 35,000,000 Americans who lack health insurance.  This is certainly a problem which needs to be addressed though the over-simplifications offered by the Democrats are likely to exacerbate the problem for all of us. 

The problem with American health care is not access, it is the cost.  Cutting edge health care is expensive and the only way to hold down the cost of health care is to ration its availability.  We have decided to ration American health care by price.  We have a two or three tier system with the top tier, available to most Americans, doing an excellent job, despite its obvious faults, in treating medical problems.  Private health insurance allows for adequate (superior when compared to most countries on the planet) health care for a majority of the population.  Better insurance allows for more choices but even the most basic insurance makes available state of the art technology in a timely fashion.  No one has to wait more than a few days for an urgent MRI or CT Scan.  Universal health care, run by government bureaucracies, is a disaster waiting to happen.  It essentially rations health care by making it equally unavailable to all (though the wealthy can almost always find ways around such restrictions, often by traveling to countries with less restrictions.)  England and Canada have shown that rationing health care by making it equally unavailable to everyone provides excellent health care to the healthy and poor health care to the sick. 

Primitive Rage and War

Psychoanalysis offers a systematic description of how the mind is organized and how it works.  There are many different theoretical strains in the field and the theories are heavily influenced by the milieu in which they arise.  American Psychoanalysis has been powerfully influenced for the last 20-30 years by our increasing understanding of pathological Narcissism, understanding which has been spurred by the theories of Heinz Kohut.   European Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, has been dominated by the theories of Melanie Klein.   The Kleinians believe that at the core of our mental processes are powerful, archaic, and primitive mental states which are dominated by hate, envy, greed, and rage. 

[It has always been a source of fascination to me that patients can do well in treatment with Kleinians, Kohutians, neo-Freudians, et al; this has always implied to me that the curative aspects of our treatment are only partially related to our theoretical understanding of the process.]

Kleinian Psychoanalysts are constantly on the look out for hints of the raging, psychotic infant at the core of their patients.  I suspect this is a reflection of the European experience of the 20th century as well as a profound cause of the current European diffidence in confronting the problems facing the West.

In America we are more concerned with how we feel and how we function in the world; we care about others but are not pre-occupied with what they will think of us.  The Europeans are very concerned, perhaps primarily concerned, with how others react.  The "other" in Europe quite notably is seen as filled with envy and hatred of the withholding maternal object.  In Europe the state has become the maternal object of last resort and as such, the agents of the state (its elites, for example) and the state itself, are objects of avarice, frustration, despair, and rage.  Of course, this argument has also contributed to our diffidence in conducting the war, a diffidence that has made the job in Iraq much more difficult and uncertain.

Much of the opposition to the American led war in Iraq stems from those who are fearful that our behavior will evoke and provoke the primitive rage they imagine exists throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

Change and Stasis

True creativity is a rare trait.  The number of people who have discovered truly new insights into the nature of reality are so few as to be memorialized as giants.  From the tiny number of people who discover such revolutionary and dramatic insights, a still small army of bright and talented people can then develop the ideas and make them meaningful and important to all of us.  This is essentially how technological progress ends up benefiting all of us, as fundamental science makes the transition to technology. 

As an example, building on previous work at Bell labs, William Shockley, in 1950, built the first of what became known as transistors.  56 years late, the grandchildren of those Bell lab pioneers are blogging, communicating with strangers around the world without having to know how they are doing it or what enables their computers to connect to so many.  The genius of liberal democracy wedded with capitalism has been to create conditions under which that small fraction can develop their ideas and ultimately share them with the rest of us, often in unpredictable ways.  In essence, America rewards revolutionaries.  True insights, in any field, threaten to overturn established paradigms, and change is always potentially destabilizing.  Whether we are discussing a mutative interpretation to a patient that threatens to cause him to question his unconscious verities, or scientific data that threatens to overturn established paradigms, change is difficult to negotiate.

The Value of Conspiracy Theories

Almost 10 years there was a tragic car accident which claimed the lives of three young people.  All accounts suggested the driver of the car was racing along at a very high rate of speed, clipped another car and spun out of control.  Information then emerged that the driver was intoxicated, with high blood alcohol levels, and had also been taking medications which may have potentiated the effects of the alcohol.  This kind of tragedy happens with unfortunate regularity.  Several times a year, the local papers report on car accidents involving intoxicated drivers and the tragic deaths of young people.  In most cases, the story ends there.  Families, friends, and school mates grieve; programs to combat drunk driving briefly make there way back into the news, and life goes on for the survivors.

The particular accident from ten years ago was different, however.  It did not disappear form the news and for a great many people became a source of ongoing distress.  As so often happens when a loved one is lost, there was disbelief and eventually a refusal to accept that such an idealized person could be lost in such a mundane way.

I am referring here to Princess Diana, perhaps the most notable recent example of the "cult of celebrity" that seems to have gripped Western culture in the last decades.  Princess Diana's powerful influence was undoubtedly caused by her mythic qualities.  She was a young "every woman" who became a Princess.  She was Cinderella made flesh and blood. 

When a person is idealized, their flaws are minimized or discounted.  She became the embodiment of the dreams of so many and was loved as a result. 

Following her death, as happens whenever an iconic figure dies, conspiracy theories emerged.  The British government has just finished a three year investigation into the crash and the conspiracy devotees have been disappointed: