Love and Happiness: Good Advertising Words, Not Real Emotions
Oh, threats of hell and hopes of paradise!
One thing at least is certain -- this life flies;
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
- Omar Khayyam, Persian polymath, poet, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and physician (1048-1131)
Love, happiness. Nice words. What does "nice" mean? Well, "positive." Except sometimes, such as when "What a nice outfit!" hides enough sarcasm to drown a rat.
How about the other words? Love. What does love mean? Again, it's positive, of that we can be certain. But is it? How positive would you consider love to be if a man loves his neighbour's young son? Don't stalkers love the movie stars or ex-lovers they follow around everywhere?
What does the word "love" even mean? A wife and husband may love each other, but their love always differs one from the other. In fact, on close examination, every case of love is different from every other. The word usually takes more space in dictionaries than any other word in the English language. How can we love if we don't know for certain what the word means? We do know that most of the time we like hearing it when others tell us they love us. It's a warm fuzzy with no substance behind it.
What is happiness? Most people have an idea, until you try to pin them down to words to describe it. The first dictionary I checked had this as its first meaning: "state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy." The dictionary uses a description that isn't definite. Characterized by a range of emotions. A range? Even the dictionary won't pin itself down to a meaning we can all latch onto.
I submit that love and happiness are not emotions at all. Religions use words such as "God" and "mother" to elicit warm feelings in their followers. Advertisers use "love" and "happiness" to arouse similar feelings, which people then associate with their product or service.
"Love" and "happiness" are advertising and entertainment lingo that mean little, but that make people feel good and want to buy products or watch movies. Have doubts? Watch a few television commercials and see how many have people who are obviously "happy" or "in love." Broad smiles that make people look beautiful as well as happy are so common in advertising today that it's impossible to land a gig in a magazine ad or a television spot unless you have perfect pre-whitened teeth you are prepared to show off in a big grin the way women used to show off certain parts of their bodies to sell product.
I know, I am presenting good ideas in a coarse manner. I want you to understand how you are manipulated into believing things by comforting words that give you warm feelings but that have virtually no verifiable meaning.
In religion, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of what God (presented as male) will do for you is what a devoted mother would do. If you are old enough to have left the home of your mother, no problem, as God will look after you. All you have to do is to believe, to have faith that God is with you always.
I'm not saying there is no God. There is, I have experienced God and have sufficient evidence that I could convince any jury in a court of law. But I have evidence of God, whereas most religions have no evidence that is irrefutable. I don't look for followers of my religious ideas because I have no intention of profiting from their donations. Religions do. Advertisers and advertising agencies do. They are professionals and they are good at what they do.
You need to know when you are being swindled, hoodwinked. If you don't, it will cost you money and emotional energy, a part of your life. The science that studies these sorts of things is sociology. The people who use their knowledge and skills to twist minds--including those behind the leaders of major political parties--are essentially propagandists and brainwashers. They understand human nature and take advantage of those who don't.
I won't ask you to believe what I have said, because of what I have learned over many years in sociology and education. Learn for yourself. As I said, I don't want to make money off you or convince you of anything you can learn for yourself.
So, learn it. Then you will see how easily people around you are manipulated into thinking and believing what certain experts want them to believe. They believe what they are told to believe. The more often they are told they should believe a message, the more likely they are to believe it. Now you know why the same commercials appear so often on television on the same night, for example. Tell people something often enough and a certain percentage of them will believe it as fact. Even if the message is an outright lie.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to understand all the ways children need to develop, not just the limited amount they learn in school. If you know kids with problems, you know kids who have not developed in all ways. They can be fixed, but it's better to prevent them from having problems in the first place by knowing what they need. The book tells you how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Friday, August 06, 2010
My Man Betrayed Me
My Man Betrayed Me
Question: My partner's recent affair is causing me to lose sleep. He apologized, but is it possible to save the marriage?
Answer: If you can't live with what he did, then get out of the relationship. Remaining...will hurt you both.
- Colette Baron-Reid, Canadian intuitive, counsellor, speaker, author (b. 1958)
The questioner, no doubt fictitious, a composite of many women Baron-Reid has counselled, and her reply appeared in a column titled "Self Esteem" in the summer 2010 issue of Zoomer magazine.
The article led with a photo of a woman, alone, arms crossed, looking dejected yet angry, propped up on one side of a king size bed with a gap between the pillows so wide a Doberman could have curled up in there without troubling her. In fact, the look on the woman's face suggested a Doberman might have been welcome for protection. Or for offence.
This woman was upset, in abundance. But why? What had her man done wrong that violated something?
Had he broken his marriage vows? Not likely. Most marriage vows are not specific about fidelity. Some say "keeping only..." but those words are anything but clear. In most marriages, the husband doesn't promise to never have sexual relations with another woman. In fact, recent studies where anonymity was assured indicate that husbands have sex with at least one other woman in 85 percent of marriages.
Many will claim that fidelity is implied in the marriage vows, that a man knows he has promised to be "faithful" to his wife. As a judge would say, where is the evidence of that promise?
Should the woman feel cheated? Studies in the US show that 75 percent of wives have sex with at least one other man during the term of their marriage. I don't claim to be a math expert, but those numbers show something is very wrong.
First of all, and by no means a minor factor, is the fact that humans are mammals and like most other mammals have sexual urges that go beyond the marriage partner. Men have hormonal urges to spread their sperm (their genes) to as many available females as possible. Women have similar hormonal urges, only in their case to gather sperm from the best available males offering.
If anything, a husband who doesn't want to have sex with any woman other than his wife is unnatural. Or, in today's lingo, he would be "gay." That term doesn't necessarily mean homosexuality as it's used often as a reference to reputation.
Is every man who is faithful to his wife unnatural? Not necessarily. Some may be so sexually satisfied by their wives that they have no interest in or need to look at greater female challenges.
How many women fill that role. Many women believe, and studies can be presented to support the claim, that men never let sex get far from their minds. Their brain is locked behind a zipper. By reputation, if not by fact, that is not true of women. On the other hand, that 75 percent of unfaithful wives stands out as evidence that sex isn't buried that far down in most women.
This looks like an unworkable or unmanageable problem. It isn't necessarily.
Put four small children in a sandbox and eventually two or more of them will start scrapping. Parents interfere to show the kids social skills that apply to the situation. We don't think it unusual that kids will have differences of opinion in a confined space because they don't know the rules of social interaction that apply to that context.
What are the social rules of conduct of marriage? Where are those rules written down. Where are they taught?
Ask ten men what their specific role as husband is and most will find themselves speechless. Ask ten women who their role as wife is and several will have answers (based on what they actually do), at least answers that satisfy them. Now ask the ten husbands of those wives with answers what they understand the role of their wives to be. Again, don't expect much.
Most men expect their wives to be...Superwife. Whatever that means. Most women expect their husbands to be...something better than the man they married.
Talk about an unsolvable problem. But is it a problem when the players don't follow the rules of the game even if they don't know what the rules are and they were never asked to agree to them?
While you are speaking with those ten men and women, ask them to define "marriage," what the relationship called marriage really is supposed to be. The chances of your getting even one good answer are low. Is it, in fact, more than legalized, socially acceptable free sex? Everyone agrees it should be more, until they are asked what.
If the level and amount of legal and socially acceptable free sex works for one partner but not for the other, which feels cheated? In a relationship, does it not seem likely that the partner who feels cheated will eventually find a way to "fill the gap" with someone else, perhaps someone who serves no other meaningful purpose than satisfying the natural need for sex?
Few would disagree that sex constitutes a very important part of a marriage. Yet in how many marriages do both partners agree on the kind of sex, the amount and frequency of sex, even on the "cleaving only unto each other" part? And, in the cases of the few who agree, where would that agreement be? Is there a clause in the agreement to accommodate changes in the ability of one partner to provide for the sexual needs of the other, or the changes of interest in sex of either, or the need for variation in sexual expression of a couple over a marriage of, say, half a century?
Sex as a problem in marriage is only a problem so long as the two partners don't talk about it and reach an agreement, with both partners being honest with themselves and the other in the discussions. When one partner asks the other to defy nature, to ignore and overcome natural urges of chemicals that affect the brain as well as sex organs, it will be difficult for the agreement to stick.
Sex is only one component of marriage. If two partners don't talk about and agree about sex, they likely won't talk about other aspects of their marriage either.
Of this we may be certain: if one partner sets the rules and expects the other to follow them strictly, obediently and without failure, over time the rules will be broken and the relationship will fail.
Not that many years ago at least one partner of a marriage had died before both reached age forty. Today most people will live past 80 and many will live to see their 100th birthday. Something needs to change. If we don't talk with each other about our needs and expectations, they will not be met by our partners.
Remember the woman in the photo I mentioned at the start of this article? While her husband confessed to an affair, apologized and asked forgiveness, if nothing in the wife's behaviour changes from what caused him to look for sex with another woman in the first case, the problem with the marriage will persist. The woman in the picture thinks she did nothing wrong and has not given a thought to what she could have done differently to avoid the marriage breakdown. She believes it was all his fault.
In her mind, that's the way it plays out. Her ignorance of what constitutes marriage protects her from self recrimination. In real life, it never works that the other is always at fault. In most cases of marriage breakdown, neither partner knew what was expected of them, so they had nothing by which to assess their own performance as a partner and they believe the problem is the fault of the other. They only had their own feelings to evaluate their partner with.
If marriage today is a contract, then both parties need to know the details, the clauses, the expectations of the other, the needs of the other and what they should do if they find their needs are not being met.
Imagine the implications of a marriage contract being renewable every five years.
Bill Allin in the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to have their children develop in all the ways they need, not just physical and intellectual. The book has hands-on materials for parents and teachers.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Question: My partner's recent affair is causing me to lose sleep. He apologized, but is it possible to save the marriage?
Answer: If you can't live with what he did, then get out of the relationship. Remaining...will hurt you both.
- Colette Baron-Reid, Canadian intuitive, counsellor, speaker, author (b. 1958)
The questioner, no doubt fictitious, a composite of many women Baron-Reid has counselled, and her reply appeared in a column titled "Self Esteem" in the summer 2010 issue of Zoomer magazine.
The article led with a photo of a woman, alone, arms crossed, looking dejected yet angry, propped up on one side of a king size bed with a gap between the pillows so wide a Doberman could have curled up in there without troubling her. In fact, the look on the woman's face suggested a Doberman might have been welcome for protection. Or for offence.
This woman was upset, in abundance. But why? What had her man done wrong that violated something?
Had he broken his marriage vows? Not likely. Most marriage vows are not specific about fidelity. Some say "keeping only..." but those words are anything but clear. In most marriages, the husband doesn't promise to never have sexual relations with another woman. In fact, recent studies where anonymity was assured indicate that husbands have sex with at least one other woman in 85 percent of marriages.
Many will claim that fidelity is implied in the marriage vows, that a man knows he has promised to be "faithful" to his wife. As a judge would say, where is the evidence of that promise?
Should the woman feel cheated? Studies in the US show that 75 percent of wives have sex with at least one other man during the term of their marriage. I don't claim to be a math expert, but those numbers show something is very wrong.
First of all, and by no means a minor factor, is the fact that humans are mammals and like most other mammals have sexual urges that go beyond the marriage partner. Men have hormonal urges to spread their sperm (their genes) to as many available females as possible. Women have similar hormonal urges, only in their case to gather sperm from the best available males offering.
If anything, a husband who doesn't want to have sex with any woman other than his wife is unnatural. Or, in today's lingo, he would be "gay." That term doesn't necessarily mean homosexuality as it's used often as a reference to reputation.
Is every man who is faithful to his wife unnatural? Not necessarily. Some may be so sexually satisfied by their wives that they have no interest in or need to look at greater female challenges.
How many women fill that role. Many women believe, and studies can be presented to support the claim, that men never let sex get far from their minds. Their brain is locked behind a zipper. By reputation, if not by fact, that is not true of women. On the other hand, that 75 percent of unfaithful wives stands out as evidence that sex isn't buried that far down in most women.
This looks like an unworkable or unmanageable problem. It isn't necessarily.
Put four small children in a sandbox and eventually two or more of them will start scrapping. Parents interfere to show the kids social skills that apply to the situation. We don't think it unusual that kids will have differences of opinion in a confined space because they don't know the rules of social interaction that apply to that context.
What are the social rules of conduct of marriage? Where are those rules written down. Where are they taught?
Ask ten men what their specific role as husband is and most will find themselves speechless. Ask ten women who their role as wife is and several will have answers (based on what they actually do), at least answers that satisfy them. Now ask the ten husbands of those wives with answers what they understand the role of their wives to be. Again, don't expect much.
Most men expect their wives to be...Superwife. Whatever that means. Most women expect their husbands to be...something better than the man they married.
Talk about an unsolvable problem. But is it a problem when the players don't follow the rules of the game even if they don't know what the rules are and they were never asked to agree to them?
While you are speaking with those ten men and women, ask them to define "marriage," what the relationship called marriage really is supposed to be. The chances of your getting even one good answer are low. Is it, in fact, more than legalized, socially acceptable free sex? Everyone agrees it should be more, until they are asked what.
If the level and amount of legal and socially acceptable free sex works for one partner but not for the other, which feels cheated? In a relationship, does it not seem likely that the partner who feels cheated will eventually find a way to "fill the gap" with someone else, perhaps someone who serves no other meaningful purpose than satisfying the natural need for sex?
Few would disagree that sex constitutes a very important part of a marriage. Yet in how many marriages do both partners agree on the kind of sex, the amount and frequency of sex, even on the "cleaving only unto each other" part? And, in the cases of the few who agree, where would that agreement be? Is there a clause in the agreement to accommodate changes in the ability of one partner to provide for the sexual needs of the other, or the changes of interest in sex of either, or the need for variation in sexual expression of a couple over a marriage of, say, half a century?
Sex as a problem in marriage is only a problem so long as the two partners don't talk about it and reach an agreement, with both partners being honest with themselves and the other in the discussions. When one partner asks the other to defy nature, to ignore and overcome natural urges of chemicals that affect the brain as well as sex organs, it will be difficult for the agreement to stick.
Sex is only one component of marriage. If two partners don't talk about and agree about sex, they likely won't talk about other aspects of their marriage either.
Of this we may be certain: if one partner sets the rules and expects the other to follow them strictly, obediently and without failure, over time the rules will be broken and the relationship will fail.
Not that many years ago at least one partner of a marriage had died before both reached age forty. Today most people will live past 80 and many will live to see their 100th birthday. Something needs to change. If we don't talk with each other about our needs and expectations, they will not be met by our partners.
Remember the woman in the photo I mentioned at the start of this article? While her husband confessed to an affair, apologized and asked forgiveness, if nothing in the wife's behaviour changes from what caused him to look for sex with another woman in the first case, the problem with the marriage will persist. The woman in the picture thinks she did nothing wrong and has not given a thought to what she could have done differently to avoid the marriage breakdown. She believes it was all his fault.
In her mind, that's the way it plays out. Her ignorance of what constitutes marriage protects her from self recrimination. In real life, it never works that the other is always at fault. In most cases of marriage breakdown, neither partner knew what was expected of them, so they had nothing by which to assess their own performance as a partner and they believe the problem is the fault of the other. They only had their own feelings to evaluate their partner with.
If marriage today is a contract, then both parties need to know the details, the clauses, the expectations of the other, the needs of the other and what they should do if they find their needs are not being met.
Imagine the implications of a marriage contract being renewable every five years.
Bill Allin in the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to have their children develop in all the ways they need, not just physical and intellectual. The book has hands-on materials for parents and teachers.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Trivia You Don't Need To Know About Television (but you will want to know anyway)
Trivia You Don't Need To Know About Television (but you will want to know anyway)
Don't blame Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird for the lack of decent programs to watch on the main networks of television today. John only invented the hardware, black and white TV, back in 1926.
While our televisions can transmit digital signals with up to 1080 lines of data, John's little outfit only managed 30 lines. It looked like a peep show moving picture viewer, which made sense because these were popular in his day. It was cobbled together with scraps of wood, darning needles, string and sealing wax. No chewing gum and binder twine--materials commonly attributed to devices assembled in emergencies in agricultural country in those days--because he wasn't a farmer.
While we think of TVs as being electrical and electronic today, John's was also somewhat mechanical. He used a spinning metal disk with spirals of holes to take images apart for transmission. Kind of a fancy old fashioned box camera.
John showed off his colour television a mere two years later. But commercializing cameras and making affordable receivers delayed the popularity of colour for another two decades.
For many people, watching television in the mid 20th century meant viewing moving things in black and white. So what? People who grew up watching black and white television are more likely to dream in black and white than people who grow up today watching only colour TV. As media guru Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message." And it sticks, even in our dreams.
The U.K.'s BBC was the first network to broadcast regularly using Baird's system. By 1936--well into the Great Depression, remember--about 2000 household had Baird televisions. They cost about £26 each, equivalent to today's US$7700. Not the kind of data we have been led to think of when we think of the Great Depression.
Television extravagance has not abated. Today you can buy Panasonic's giant (103 inch, nearly 230 cm--greater in diameter than most basketball players are tall) plasma monster for $70,000, should you happen to not have suffered much from the current economic slowdown. While Panasonic has the biggest set, that doesn't include projection TVs.
Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the first all-electronic TV, was passionate about his invention. Lest anyone accuse his television of being a product of the devil, he stated firmly that it was a gift from the Lord. "God will hold accountable those who utilize this divine instrument." Where is Farnsworth when we need him today as a TV critic?
Here's a fact you will wish you never knew. By the age of 14, the average child in the United States has seen 11,000 murders on television. Let that sink in. The debate never ends about whether life eventually takes on less importance to a child as he sees death so often it becomes commonplace.
TV commercial time has gone up a bit in cost over the years. Bulova Watch paid nine dollars for a 20 second spot for the first ever commercial, in a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies on July 1, 1941. Today a 30 second spot in a Superbowl broadcast--traditionally the most expensive advertising time on TV--will cost around three million bucks.
With all the ways we have of storing video data these days it came as a shock when NASA announced it had lost all the videotapes of the TV broadcast from the Apollo 11 mission ("That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.")
The longest running talk show is either Ireland's Late Late Show, which started in 1962, or The Tonight Show, which began in 1954. The reason for debate is that the latter show didn't settled into a regular format until Johnny Carson took over, a few months after the Irish show launched.
To demonstrate that copyright for television was an issue long before today's battles, when Sony launched the first VCRs in the 1970s the film studios took it to court for promoting piracy. The U.S. Supreme Court favoured Sony in the litigation, but the public was not so fond of Sony's Betamax format. While JVC's VHS failed in Japan as Sony dominated the market there, VHS (more accurately advertising for VHS recorders) won the hearts of people in North America. VHS eventually had four formats in different countries and they couldn't play on machines with a VHS format other than their own.
Are TV's days numbered? While networks switch to digital format for large TVs and about half the cell phones sold today have the ability to receive television signals, billions of streams of TV signals are received on computers each month.
Queen Elizabeth II has her own channel on YouTube. No, she doesn't sing, dance or take her clothes off. I checked.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what lessons their children need to learn about social skills and emotional coping, stuff kids desperately need but usually don't get at home or in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: Discover, February 2009]
Don't blame Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird for the lack of decent programs to watch on the main networks of television today. John only invented the hardware, black and white TV, back in 1926.
While our televisions can transmit digital signals with up to 1080 lines of data, John's little outfit only managed 30 lines. It looked like a peep show moving picture viewer, which made sense because these were popular in his day. It was cobbled together with scraps of wood, darning needles, string and sealing wax. No chewing gum and binder twine--materials commonly attributed to devices assembled in emergencies in agricultural country in those days--because he wasn't a farmer.
While we think of TVs as being electrical and electronic today, John's was also somewhat mechanical. He used a spinning metal disk with spirals of holes to take images apart for transmission. Kind of a fancy old fashioned box camera.
John showed off his colour television a mere two years later. But commercializing cameras and making affordable receivers delayed the popularity of colour for another two decades.
For many people, watching television in the mid 20th century meant viewing moving things in black and white. So what? People who grew up watching black and white television are more likely to dream in black and white than people who grow up today watching only colour TV. As media guru Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message." And it sticks, even in our dreams.
The U.K.'s BBC was the first network to broadcast regularly using Baird's system. By 1936--well into the Great Depression, remember--about 2000 household had Baird televisions. They cost about £26 each, equivalent to today's US$7700. Not the kind of data we have been led to think of when we think of the Great Depression.
Television extravagance has not abated. Today you can buy Panasonic's giant (103 inch, nearly 230 cm--greater in diameter than most basketball players are tall) plasma monster for $70,000, should you happen to not have suffered much from the current economic slowdown. While Panasonic has the biggest set, that doesn't include projection TVs.
Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the first all-electronic TV, was passionate about his invention. Lest anyone accuse his television of being a product of the devil, he stated firmly that it was a gift from the Lord. "God will hold accountable those who utilize this divine instrument." Where is Farnsworth when we need him today as a TV critic?
Here's a fact you will wish you never knew. By the age of 14, the average child in the United States has seen 11,000 murders on television. Let that sink in. The debate never ends about whether life eventually takes on less importance to a child as he sees death so often it becomes commonplace.
TV commercial time has gone up a bit in cost over the years. Bulova Watch paid nine dollars for a 20 second spot for the first ever commercial, in a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies on July 1, 1941. Today a 30 second spot in a Superbowl broadcast--traditionally the most expensive advertising time on TV--will cost around three million bucks.
With all the ways we have of storing video data these days it came as a shock when NASA announced it had lost all the videotapes of the TV broadcast from the Apollo 11 mission ("That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.")
The longest running talk show is either Ireland's Late Late Show, which started in 1962, or The Tonight Show, which began in 1954. The reason for debate is that the latter show didn't settled into a regular format until Johnny Carson took over, a few months after the Irish show launched.
To demonstrate that copyright for television was an issue long before today's battles, when Sony launched the first VCRs in the 1970s the film studios took it to court for promoting piracy. The U.S. Supreme Court favoured Sony in the litigation, but the public was not so fond of Sony's Betamax format. While JVC's VHS failed in Japan as Sony dominated the market there, VHS (more accurately advertising for VHS recorders) won the hearts of people in North America. VHS eventually had four formats in different countries and they couldn't play on machines with a VHS format other than their own.
Are TV's days numbered? While networks switch to digital format for large TVs and about half the cell phones sold today have the ability to receive television signals, billions of streams of TV signals are received on computers each month.
Queen Elizabeth II has her own channel on YouTube. No, she doesn't sing, dance or take her clothes off. I checked.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what lessons their children need to learn about social skills and emotional coping, stuff kids desperately need but usually don't get at home or in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: Discover, February 2009]
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Parental Wisdom: Lacking Respect or Missing in Action?
Parental Wisdom: Lacking Respect or Missing in Action?
Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.
- Marianne Williamson, American peace activist, author, lecturer, minister (b. 1952)
Where is wisdom in the inevitable transformation that is taking place on our planet? Is it stronger than ever, though apparently disguised. Has it vanished? Do we even recognize wisdom today as we did in the past?
Most people would agree that Albert Schweitzer was wise. Here's an example:
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
- Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
We could explain so much about our world today using this thought. Where is that kind of wisdom? While Schweitzer's observation has always been true of our species, the fact that today the leaders of industry knowingly poison the air they breathe and the water they use in their own bodies for the sake of profit should raise alarm. They have put profit ahead of survival, which is clearly in opposition to the instinct of every living thing.
Leaders of industry hold out the promise of jobs as bait so that politicians and bureaucrats will allow them to commit acts that no other civilization in history has done to itself. They argue that, in effect, "my way must be right because I thought of it." They argue that making their industry eco-friendly will be economically unfeasible, though the evidence on the ground shows that this argument is patently false.
We believe them because we somehow attribute to them wisdom. Or we want the money that derives from the jobs they will create. Today, as in the past, wealth trumps reason. Does that mean that wisdom no longer exists?
These lessons we teach to our children, whether intentionally or not.
Historically, wisdom was the purview of the elderly. Elders traditionally had experience doing much the same activities as the younger generations were doing. Experience derives from making mistakes then learning from them. That learning could be taught, which made the teachers--the elderly, experienced ones in society--considered wise.
A century ago 85 percent of the population of North America lived in rural areas and derived their income directly or indirectly from agriculture. Today 85 percent of the populations of Canada and the United States live in cities. The continuity of experience has been broken. Today's young adults don't want to learn skills of farming. Many city dwelling adults today have not accustomed themselves to social and emotional survival methods required in city life, so cannot teach them to their children.
Within the memory span of older people living today women entered the workforce (during the Second World War when men were away fighting), it became acceptable for women to wear pants rather than dresses or skirts to work, women have learned the trades of welding, plumbing, auto mechanics and others, women have become bosses and employers rather than entry level employees and women have even become heads of states in large countries. The continuity was broken. We accept these changes but have little idea how they impact our personal and family lives.
Office "pencil pushers" of the past now press buttons on keyboards. The more skilled among them program software to operate to the specific needs of companies. Today's older people have stories to pass along to younger generations, but those stories are considered by young people to lack usable information, thus don't count as wisdom. Old folks just don't "get it."
Young people in North America now text their friends 300 times a day, on average, while their grandparents may still be reluctant to pick up a phone to call someone because they "may be busy." While many of today's parents of teenagers grapple with the thought of teaching "sex" to kids younger than 16 years, close to half our kids have sex before their thirteenth birthday and the number who have sex before their ninth birthday is closing in on double digit percentages.
Somehow our adult generations have come to believe that ignorance is important in children. They call it "innocence" as if they can stop kids from behaving in certain ways as they can stop certain behaviours of family pets.
The disconnect here is that childhood is the time people are supposed to learn about adulthood, not be protected from learning about it. The whole purpose of childhood is as a training period for adulthood. Conventional "wisdom" says that the world is too ugly for children to be exposed to, yet evidence shows it is actually more peaceful, organized and orderly than ever before in history. What parents believe becomes what children accept as fact.
Children know that they should know the facts about certain things, even if they are not certain of exactly what they should know. It's a gut feeling. A child of 12 who has sex understands that he or she should know more about what they are doing than they do, but has no idea where to learn the needed information, from whom or even what they should know. What they do know is how to put tab A into slot B, as every child knows, and nature provides them with the hormones to make the convergence more compelling.
An interviewer on a U.S. national radio network asked me not long ago, on air, when I lost my virginity. When I told him he all but called me a liar because he expected me to say age 12 or 13. He said so and his on-air colleagues agreed. This is the world of today.
Parents and grandparents who are not fully connected to that world or who are in denial of the facts will not connect with children who are constantly growing and experiencing outside of home. In turn, the children will not see their parents or grandparents as wise, maybe not even credible. Not only will many adults not tell the kids the facts they want to know, they refuse to tell them and they deny what the kids are living every day. And what they are learning, often inaccurately, every day.
How can we expect young people to consider their parents or grandparents wise when they aren't? "Innocence" equals ignorance. Denial equals stupidity. Stupidity is prolific. When kids can't get answers from their parents they turn to others who will answer. Just as with making friends, the people who are easiest to get answers from are the most dangerous and undependable. For example, drug dealers hang around outside many elementary schools today, ready to give free advice as well as "samples."
Wisdom exists today, but those who want access to it must search for it. The internet has answers to all questions. Some of the answers are wrong, even dangerous. But some are dead-on right. Rather than teach children how to evaluate what they may find on the internet, many parents deny their kids will look at such things and others put kid-control programs on their computers.
Today kids can find computers all over the place and the average six-year-old can figure out the passwords their parents put on. Denying kids access to information they want makes them believe their parents are stupid or oppressive, not wise. Indeed, parents who do not avail themselves of the opportunities to teach their children what they want to know and what they need to know--the primary objective of parenthood after having sex and giving birth--do not deserve to be considered wise.
Wisdom exists today, but not in conventional places or sources. For example, you learned something by reading this article that your parents could not have imagined a generation ago.
Pass it on.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what to teach their children, and when, to help them develop socially and emotionally as well as they expect schools to help them develop intellectually. It's not what most parents think.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.
- Marianne Williamson, American peace activist, author, lecturer, minister (b. 1952)
Where is wisdom in the inevitable transformation that is taking place on our planet? Is it stronger than ever, though apparently disguised. Has it vanished? Do we even recognize wisdom today as we did in the past?
Most people would agree that Albert Schweitzer was wise. Here's an example:
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
- Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
We could explain so much about our world today using this thought. Where is that kind of wisdom? While Schweitzer's observation has always been true of our species, the fact that today the leaders of industry knowingly poison the air they breathe and the water they use in their own bodies for the sake of profit should raise alarm. They have put profit ahead of survival, which is clearly in opposition to the instinct of every living thing.
Leaders of industry hold out the promise of jobs as bait so that politicians and bureaucrats will allow them to commit acts that no other civilization in history has done to itself. They argue that, in effect, "my way must be right because I thought of it." They argue that making their industry eco-friendly will be economically unfeasible, though the evidence on the ground shows that this argument is patently false.
We believe them because we somehow attribute to them wisdom. Or we want the money that derives from the jobs they will create. Today, as in the past, wealth trumps reason. Does that mean that wisdom no longer exists?
These lessons we teach to our children, whether intentionally or not.
Historically, wisdom was the purview of the elderly. Elders traditionally had experience doing much the same activities as the younger generations were doing. Experience derives from making mistakes then learning from them. That learning could be taught, which made the teachers--the elderly, experienced ones in society--considered wise.
A century ago 85 percent of the population of North America lived in rural areas and derived their income directly or indirectly from agriculture. Today 85 percent of the populations of Canada and the United States live in cities. The continuity of experience has been broken. Today's young adults don't want to learn skills of farming. Many city dwelling adults today have not accustomed themselves to social and emotional survival methods required in city life, so cannot teach them to their children.
Within the memory span of older people living today women entered the workforce (during the Second World War when men were away fighting), it became acceptable for women to wear pants rather than dresses or skirts to work, women have learned the trades of welding, plumbing, auto mechanics and others, women have become bosses and employers rather than entry level employees and women have even become heads of states in large countries. The continuity was broken. We accept these changes but have little idea how they impact our personal and family lives.
Office "pencil pushers" of the past now press buttons on keyboards. The more skilled among them program software to operate to the specific needs of companies. Today's older people have stories to pass along to younger generations, but those stories are considered by young people to lack usable information, thus don't count as wisdom. Old folks just don't "get it."
Young people in North America now text their friends 300 times a day, on average, while their grandparents may still be reluctant to pick up a phone to call someone because they "may be busy." While many of today's parents of teenagers grapple with the thought of teaching "sex" to kids younger than 16 years, close to half our kids have sex before their thirteenth birthday and the number who have sex before their ninth birthday is closing in on double digit percentages.
Somehow our adult generations have come to believe that ignorance is important in children. They call it "innocence" as if they can stop kids from behaving in certain ways as they can stop certain behaviours of family pets.
The disconnect here is that childhood is the time people are supposed to learn about adulthood, not be protected from learning about it. The whole purpose of childhood is as a training period for adulthood. Conventional "wisdom" says that the world is too ugly for children to be exposed to, yet evidence shows it is actually more peaceful, organized and orderly than ever before in history. What parents believe becomes what children accept as fact.
Children know that they should know the facts about certain things, even if they are not certain of exactly what they should know. It's a gut feeling. A child of 12 who has sex understands that he or she should know more about what they are doing than they do, but has no idea where to learn the needed information, from whom or even what they should know. What they do know is how to put tab A into slot B, as every child knows, and nature provides them with the hormones to make the convergence more compelling.
An interviewer on a U.S. national radio network asked me not long ago, on air, when I lost my virginity. When I told him he all but called me a liar because he expected me to say age 12 or 13. He said so and his on-air colleagues agreed. This is the world of today.
Parents and grandparents who are not fully connected to that world or who are in denial of the facts will not connect with children who are constantly growing and experiencing outside of home. In turn, the children will not see their parents or grandparents as wise, maybe not even credible. Not only will many adults not tell the kids the facts they want to know, they refuse to tell them and they deny what the kids are living every day. And what they are learning, often inaccurately, every day.
How can we expect young people to consider their parents or grandparents wise when they aren't? "Innocence" equals ignorance. Denial equals stupidity. Stupidity is prolific. When kids can't get answers from their parents they turn to others who will answer. Just as with making friends, the people who are easiest to get answers from are the most dangerous and undependable. For example, drug dealers hang around outside many elementary schools today, ready to give free advice as well as "samples."
Wisdom exists today, but those who want access to it must search for it. The internet has answers to all questions. Some of the answers are wrong, even dangerous. But some are dead-on right. Rather than teach children how to evaluate what they may find on the internet, many parents deny their kids will look at such things and others put kid-control programs on their computers.
Today kids can find computers all over the place and the average six-year-old can figure out the passwords their parents put on. Denying kids access to information they want makes them believe their parents are stupid or oppressive, not wise. Indeed, parents who do not avail themselves of the opportunities to teach their children what they want to know and what they need to know--the primary objective of parenthood after having sex and giving birth--do not deserve to be considered wise.
Wisdom exists today, but not in conventional places or sources. For example, you learned something by reading this article that your parents could not have imagined a generation ago.
Pass it on.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what to teach their children, and when, to help them develop socially and emotionally as well as they expect schools to help them develop intellectually. It's not what most parents think.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Stuff You Should Know About Fat
Stuff You Should Know About Fat
With two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese and obesity in alarming numbers finding its way into every nation, even poor families in poor nations, let's have a serious look at what the fuss is about.
To begin, let's establish a couple of things. First, if we take everything we eat and drink, then subtract from that nutrition what we use up in energy or function of our organs, convert to muscle or expel as body wastes, what gets left over is stored as fat. Fat is stored potential energy.
Second, no young child aspires to be fat as an adult. None aspire to be insurance salesmen, call centre employees or cubicle workers in offices either, but those are conscious choices a person makes later.
To return to the first point, obese people can't say they didn't notice they were putting on weight. That's the criticism many slim people have of the heavyweights: "they ate too much." While that point can't be debated, the more important point is what they could have done about it. The answer is: they didn't know what to do. In fact, nobody does. Lots of people make fortunes selling to people who want to lose weight, but none are guaranteed, some created yo-yo dieting, some could even be harmful.
I am reminded of an old joke about the owner of a donkey who was determined that he could train his animal to adapt to life without food if he used methods similar to what nature uses to train animals to adapt to other adverse conditions and environmental changes. A year after the man began his program of gradually lowering the amount of food he gave his donkey, a friend asked him how he had made out with the experiment. He replied, "Just my luck, I got him to the point where he could live completely without food and the stupid animal died."
What to do to overcome obesity or being overweight is precisely the same thing as what slim people do to avoid gaining too much weight. Trouble is, no one, including medical science, knows exactly what that is. As ironic as it sounds, obese people usually have more efficient absorption of nutrients in their guts than slim folks. Some could eat like birds and still gain weight. Many slim people could eat boatloads of food and still remain thin because their digestive systems don't work as efficiently.
Diet? Sure but look at the abundance of diet advice we get in newspapers, magazines and on television--especially look at how each suggestion conflicts with other suggestions by "experts"--and you can quickly see that no one really knows. Studies have proven that so-called yo-yo dieting (diet, gain weight, diet, gain weight, repeatedly) has a more negative impact on body organs than simply carrying around too much weight. Even maintaining extra weight is healthier than losing weight rapidly.
Exercise off what you eat? Sure, but who is prepared to exercise for that much time in a day, setting aside all other commitments in the process? Society mitigates against it anyway. What would you think of a person who exercised--who even walked--for three hours each day? Could you spare that much time out of your day, every day? If you did, what would you have to sacrifice from your present life?
Why not just eat less? Have you ever tried to do that over a long period of time? Most people who have tried it learn to despise dieting because they always feel hungry.
How about eating different foods? Some kinds of food--such as high fibre--flushes stuff through your gut so fast that it doesn't have time to absorb some of the nutrition in the food. That might be okay if you knew how to balance what you lost by taking supplements a few hours before you ate the fibre and afterwards emptied your bowel. But, despite the advertising that gives you the impression that it knows what a balanced diet is, no one knows for certain. Study evidence conflicts. If you plan to diet, choose your vitamin and mineral supplements carefully, then commit to the bet of your life.
Californians seem to have something going for them. In a study of obesity rates in the U.S. from 1976 to 1999, obesity and overweight numbers increased across the board. However, as of 2007, California was the only state where the obesity rate did not increase. The study did not say exactly what had changed in California that could account for the change. No one is guessing that having a former Mr. Universe as governor has made the difference.
If you are overweight and you lose some of that excess, you will live longer, studies show. But likely only a few months longer. Excess weight reduces a woman's chance of getting pregnant. The U.S. National Institutes for Health believes that obesity accounts for why women under 25 are the fastest growing group experiencing infertility. Losing ten percent of body weight results in an improvement in your sex life.
People who often eat dinner or breakfast at restaurants or fast food outlets double their risk of becoming obese.
Leptin, our body's built-in way to convince us to stop eating when we are full doesn't work in supplement form on most overweight people. Their bodies have become insensitive to it.
Why do people eat more than their bodies need? My personal belief is that eating is a pleasure that never fails over the short term. Food never demands a divorce, gives you a hangover, threatens you or nags you. Only over the long term might it betray you with unwanted fat. But then, that applies to all kinds of activities we do when we are young that we survive, get thrills from, but pay for 20, 40 or more years later when our bodies age faster than those who played it safer.
About ten percent of our fat cells die every year. New ones grow again. Our total number of fat cells remains the same throughout our life. Dieting, even having the stomach stapled, has no effect on the body's number of fat cells. However, new fat cells do not begin their lives bloated with fat. They only grow as the body needs to store more fat. New fat cells begin as skinny fat cells.
The only permanent way to reduce the total number of fat cells in the body is by liposuction. Even liposuction does not remove fat from around body organs, so whatever risk fat presents to them remains unless it is reduced in some other way. Liposuction may make you look good, but not necessarily any healthier.
Obesity occurs commonly within families, but science is not certain if that has to do with DNA (nature) or family eating, exercising and related environmental problems (nurture).
Your brain is comprised about 70 percent of fat. Losing that fat is not recommended. Bottlenose dolphins use a fat sack in their heads to amplify sound as part of their sonar hearing ability. Human fatheads have not advanced to that stage so far as I know.
Whale bodies are surrounded by fat, in some cases up to 45 cm (20 inches) thick. They use it as insulation against the cold of the oceans. In our body fat tends to hold heat in as well, often making us sweaty when slim people feel cool. Camels in the desert don't want to conserve heat, which is why they concentrate their fat in one or two humps on their backs. People who lose lots of weight often complain they feel cold because they have lost subcutaneous fat that previously kept them warm (sometimes sweaty).
Still confused about fat? At least you have more knowledge about it now, and you have lots of company. One factor all serious health professionals agree about is that losing weight safely should be a long term project involving serious lifestyle changes.
In conclusion, it's worth noting that fat is essential to life. When stored body fat reaches zero percent, you die. That's why anorexia nervosa sufferers die even when they are being force fed in hospitals. Like everything else in life, the key is moderation. Even when dieting. Let the first three letters of that word be your guide to caution.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who are healthy and well balanced in mind as well as in body.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
With two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese and obesity in alarming numbers finding its way into every nation, even poor families in poor nations, let's have a serious look at what the fuss is about.
To begin, let's establish a couple of things. First, if we take everything we eat and drink, then subtract from that nutrition what we use up in energy or function of our organs, convert to muscle or expel as body wastes, what gets left over is stored as fat. Fat is stored potential energy.
Second, no young child aspires to be fat as an adult. None aspire to be insurance salesmen, call centre employees or cubicle workers in offices either, but those are conscious choices a person makes later.
To return to the first point, obese people can't say they didn't notice they were putting on weight. That's the criticism many slim people have of the heavyweights: "they ate too much." While that point can't be debated, the more important point is what they could have done about it. The answer is: they didn't know what to do. In fact, nobody does. Lots of people make fortunes selling to people who want to lose weight, but none are guaranteed, some created yo-yo dieting, some could even be harmful.
I am reminded of an old joke about the owner of a donkey who was determined that he could train his animal to adapt to life without food if he used methods similar to what nature uses to train animals to adapt to other adverse conditions and environmental changes. A year after the man began his program of gradually lowering the amount of food he gave his donkey, a friend asked him how he had made out with the experiment. He replied, "Just my luck, I got him to the point where he could live completely without food and the stupid animal died."
What to do to overcome obesity or being overweight is precisely the same thing as what slim people do to avoid gaining too much weight. Trouble is, no one, including medical science, knows exactly what that is. As ironic as it sounds, obese people usually have more efficient absorption of nutrients in their guts than slim folks. Some could eat like birds and still gain weight. Many slim people could eat boatloads of food and still remain thin because their digestive systems don't work as efficiently.
Diet? Sure but look at the abundance of diet advice we get in newspapers, magazines and on television--especially look at how each suggestion conflicts with other suggestions by "experts"--and you can quickly see that no one really knows. Studies have proven that so-called yo-yo dieting (diet, gain weight, diet, gain weight, repeatedly) has a more negative impact on body organs than simply carrying around too much weight. Even maintaining extra weight is healthier than losing weight rapidly.
Exercise off what you eat? Sure, but who is prepared to exercise for that much time in a day, setting aside all other commitments in the process? Society mitigates against it anyway. What would you think of a person who exercised--who even walked--for three hours each day? Could you spare that much time out of your day, every day? If you did, what would you have to sacrifice from your present life?
Why not just eat less? Have you ever tried to do that over a long period of time? Most people who have tried it learn to despise dieting because they always feel hungry.
How about eating different foods? Some kinds of food--such as high fibre--flushes stuff through your gut so fast that it doesn't have time to absorb some of the nutrition in the food. That might be okay if you knew how to balance what you lost by taking supplements a few hours before you ate the fibre and afterwards emptied your bowel. But, despite the advertising that gives you the impression that it knows what a balanced diet is, no one knows for certain. Study evidence conflicts. If you plan to diet, choose your vitamin and mineral supplements carefully, then commit to the bet of your life.
Californians seem to have something going for them. In a study of obesity rates in the U.S. from 1976 to 1999, obesity and overweight numbers increased across the board. However, as of 2007, California was the only state where the obesity rate did not increase. The study did not say exactly what had changed in California that could account for the change. No one is guessing that having a former Mr. Universe as governor has made the difference.
If you are overweight and you lose some of that excess, you will live longer, studies show. But likely only a few months longer. Excess weight reduces a woman's chance of getting pregnant. The U.S. National Institutes for Health believes that obesity accounts for why women under 25 are the fastest growing group experiencing infertility. Losing ten percent of body weight results in an improvement in your sex life.
People who often eat dinner or breakfast at restaurants or fast food outlets double their risk of becoming obese.
Leptin, our body's built-in way to convince us to stop eating when we are full doesn't work in supplement form on most overweight people. Their bodies have become insensitive to it.
Why do people eat more than their bodies need? My personal belief is that eating is a pleasure that never fails over the short term. Food never demands a divorce, gives you a hangover, threatens you or nags you. Only over the long term might it betray you with unwanted fat. But then, that applies to all kinds of activities we do when we are young that we survive, get thrills from, but pay for 20, 40 or more years later when our bodies age faster than those who played it safer.
About ten percent of our fat cells die every year. New ones grow again. Our total number of fat cells remains the same throughout our life. Dieting, even having the stomach stapled, has no effect on the body's number of fat cells. However, new fat cells do not begin their lives bloated with fat. They only grow as the body needs to store more fat. New fat cells begin as skinny fat cells.
The only permanent way to reduce the total number of fat cells in the body is by liposuction. Even liposuction does not remove fat from around body organs, so whatever risk fat presents to them remains unless it is reduced in some other way. Liposuction may make you look good, but not necessarily any healthier.
Obesity occurs commonly within families, but science is not certain if that has to do with DNA (nature) or family eating, exercising and related environmental problems (nurture).
Your brain is comprised about 70 percent of fat. Losing that fat is not recommended. Bottlenose dolphins use a fat sack in their heads to amplify sound as part of their sonar hearing ability. Human fatheads have not advanced to that stage so far as I know.
Whale bodies are surrounded by fat, in some cases up to 45 cm (20 inches) thick. They use it as insulation against the cold of the oceans. In our body fat tends to hold heat in as well, often making us sweaty when slim people feel cool. Camels in the desert don't want to conserve heat, which is why they concentrate their fat in one or two humps on their backs. People who lose lots of weight often complain they feel cold because they have lost subcutaneous fat that previously kept them warm (sometimes sweaty).
Still confused about fat? At least you have more knowledge about it now, and you have lots of company. One factor all serious health professionals agree about is that losing weight safely should be a long term project involving serious lifestyle changes.
In conclusion, it's worth noting that fat is essential to life. When stored body fat reaches zero percent, you die. That's why anorexia nervosa sufferers die even when they are being force fed in hospitals. Like everything else in life, the key is moderation. Even when dieting. Let the first three letters of that word be your guide to caution.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who are healthy and well balanced in mind as well as in body.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Friday, July 02, 2010
Homo Stupidus: Our Present, Former Or Future Selves?
Homo Stupidus: Our Present, Former Or Future Selves?
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
- Charles Mackay, Scottish author, poet, songwriter (1814-1889)
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
- Kelvin Throop III, fictional science fiction character
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian economist (1908-2006)
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein, physicist and genius (1879-1955)
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.
- Ancient Zen saying
Quite different quotations. Quite different authors from quite different parts of the world and very different periods of time. Yet in the final analysis their messages bear great similarities.
The scientific name for our species, homo sapiens ("thinking man": the 's' at the end is for both the singular and the plural of this term), was devised by men who think. A large majority of us have no idea of the term's meaning. Most could care less what it means. Why? Because they do not burden themselves with such inconveniences as thinking.
Any thinking required to be done in their lives is done for them and provided by television, advertising, their employers, their parents or spouses, sometimes their children.
Those who define our species think. Even they can't be trusted however. With rare exceptions they all consider humans the most intelligent species on the planet. None have considered who devised the rules for the evaluation, whether the "winners" might be biased in their own favour, or whether the definition applied to every one of their species or just to a limited few. None consulted any other species for their opinions on the matter. They couldn't because we can't communicate with any of them.
We consider any other species of living thing that cannot speak our kind of language to be inferior, despite the fact that we cannot communicate with more than a couple other species ourselves and only with them in a very basic and inadequate manner. For 50 years we have been searching for extra-terrestrial intelligent beings, yet even SETI scientists believe that most beings more intelligent than ourselves would avoid us once they learned a bit about us.
We consider ourselves the epitome of development of living beings, despite that fact that most humans are capable of doing virtually nothing that any other animal on earth can do. Other than eat, poop and reproduce. Or that any plant can do, as every green plant creates oxygen we use to survive. Until very recently, with genetic engineering and nanotechnology, we created nothing, we only transformed what already existed.
In North America, barely six percent of us read more than three books per year. And that's generous because most people who don't read won't admit it to researchers. Many of the people who do read several books a year read on topics related to their occupations or about vocations they aspire to enter one day. Check the records of any public library to see how few people actually check out books they can read free, how many books the "readers" check out and what kinds of books they read. With the exception of students and others doing research papers, most nonfiction books collect dust on library shelves. Nonfiction means learning something new, whereas fiction allows readers to escape into other lives and places. For many of us, studying something new is verboten once we leave school.
In most countries that hold democratic elections, barely half of eligible voters cast ballots, often less. Exceptions include votes on hot button issues, elections where voters want to get rid of the old guard and constituencies where voting is compulsory. Why so few votes cast when everyone enjoys this right? In many cases people who do not vote claim that "They're all the same" or "It won't make any difference anyway." Ask those people what names they would expect to see on the ballots and what the candidates stand for and you rarely get an answer that makes sense.
Those of us who vote elect governments based on promises, usually promises of prosperity and more jobs. Both of these are extremely difficult for government to do and impossible to do without raising taxes, which voters don't like. Even though we know our government will never keep their promises, we continue to hope and vote accordingly.
The more "progressive" the democracy, the more debt load individual free citizens carry. In many cases, people pay twice the price of a big ticket item they buy due to interest rates on money they borrowed to buy it. A shocking number of people owe debts to credit card companies they cannot possibly ever repay because they can barely afford the minimum monthly payment.
But they look good. They drive the right cars. They live in the right neighbourhoods and belong to the right organizations.
Unless you work in your own home, look around you on the way to work and think about what is going on in the heads of the people making the same daily trek you are. Spend a bit of time watching people in the supermarket where you shop to see if what they are doing makes sense to you. Seriously, but take your time because stupid behaviour doesn't happen quickly. Watch people drive around the parking lot in a mall looking for the closest entrance, then walk for hours when they get inside. Compare what you see to what you would observe when watching an ant colony or a bee hive before you decide which species is the smartest.
Listen to conversations of people around you, no matter where they may take place. See how many of them involve any subject other than the weather or something they saw or could see on television. The most popular television stations in North America are the weather channels. Yet it's rare to see someone with an umbrella on a rainy day and common to see people with light shoes and no hats walking on snowy sidewalks in blowing weather.
Think about the people you have met over the past month. Have any of them asked you even one question that was not work related that would help them to learn something new? Intelligent thinking people ask questions.
That's the way it is today. What was it like in the past? Many people tend to believe that the world they live in is getting worse as they get older. It's not. They simply have not studied history enough to know that people were just as stupid, as violent, as careless and as ignorant of what they should know about life in the past as they are today. In fact, likely mores so than today. At least today we have more education worldwide to give us a basis on which to think.
Do conditions today predict anything for the future? In the past diseases and wars kept population levels down. Both of these factors are more limited today than at any time in the past. China, with the largest population in the world, limiting its population indicates that it will change its own future. If other countries take their future survival and health seriously--few do at present--the world may reach sustainable and manageable levels of population, pollution and resource management. Odds are that a massive die-off of people, perhaps related somehow to a failure of electronic technology on a global scale causing stock market crashes, less likely due to disease, will cause us to come together as nation members of one world community to take it's future seriously.
A massive shock of some sort is necessary to bring people around to thinking of the future in global terms rather than of their own present desires and pleasures. As uncontrolled as our world is at present, the shock is a certainty though its nature is in doubt.
Until that shock happens, we don't have enough "thinking men" among us to effect real and lasting change. The shock might come from our atmosphere and our water. As we debate global warming and climate change--who cares if the global temperature rises by half a degree in 50 years?--our industries continue to pour thousands of poisons into our air and our water. While we call them "greenhouse gases." That's the air we breathe and the water that keeps us alive. Darwin's claim that the most adaptable will survive crises will be tested. Check out the kinds of poisons industries are subjecting us and our children to.
Can we teach more of our people to think? Ask the teachers. They are the ones saddled with the impossible task of teaching children to think while working under such hobbling conditions most teachers could never make it happen. Our education systems are designed to produce consumers and employees, and they do it well. Ask any child why he or she should stay in school and get a good education and the answer will almost always be "to get a good job." Never "to have a better life." Jobs mean income to buy stuff our industries produce.
Real change can only happen in schools and homes. Real change in homes will be tough because we do not teach young people what they need to know to be good parents.
Education is the answer. Now, do you remember the question?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to effect real change in homes and schools so their children will be able to adapt to what life will throw at them in the future.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
- Charles Mackay, Scottish author, poet, songwriter (1814-1889)
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
- Kelvin Throop III, fictional science fiction character
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian economist (1908-2006)
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein, physicist and genius (1879-1955)
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.
- Ancient Zen saying
Quite different quotations. Quite different authors from quite different parts of the world and very different periods of time. Yet in the final analysis their messages bear great similarities.
The scientific name for our species, homo sapiens ("thinking man": the 's' at the end is for both the singular and the plural of this term), was devised by men who think. A large majority of us have no idea of the term's meaning. Most could care less what it means. Why? Because they do not burden themselves with such inconveniences as thinking.
Any thinking required to be done in their lives is done for them and provided by television, advertising, their employers, their parents or spouses, sometimes their children.
Those who define our species think. Even they can't be trusted however. With rare exceptions they all consider humans the most intelligent species on the planet. None have considered who devised the rules for the evaluation, whether the "winners" might be biased in their own favour, or whether the definition applied to every one of their species or just to a limited few. None consulted any other species for their opinions on the matter. They couldn't because we can't communicate with any of them.
We consider any other species of living thing that cannot speak our kind of language to be inferior, despite the fact that we cannot communicate with more than a couple other species ourselves and only with them in a very basic and inadequate manner. For 50 years we have been searching for extra-terrestrial intelligent beings, yet even SETI scientists believe that most beings more intelligent than ourselves would avoid us once they learned a bit about us.
We consider ourselves the epitome of development of living beings, despite that fact that most humans are capable of doing virtually nothing that any other animal on earth can do. Other than eat, poop and reproduce. Or that any plant can do, as every green plant creates oxygen we use to survive. Until very recently, with genetic engineering and nanotechnology, we created nothing, we only transformed what already existed.
In North America, barely six percent of us read more than three books per year. And that's generous because most people who don't read won't admit it to researchers. Many of the people who do read several books a year read on topics related to their occupations or about vocations they aspire to enter one day. Check the records of any public library to see how few people actually check out books they can read free, how many books the "readers" check out and what kinds of books they read. With the exception of students and others doing research papers, most nonfiction books collect dust on library shelves. Nonfiction means learning something new, whereas fiction allows readers to escape into other lives and places. For many of us, studying something new is verboten once we leave school.
In most countries that hold democratic elections, barely half of eligible voters cast ballots, often less. Exceptions include votes on hot button issues, elections where voters want to get rid of the old guard and constituencies where voting is compulsory. Why so few votes cast when everyone enjoys this right? In many cases people who do not vote claim that "They're all the same" or "It won't make any difference anyway." Ask those people what names they would expect to see on the ballots and what the candidates stand for and you rarely get an answer that makes sense.
Those of us who vote elect governments based on promises, usually promises of prosperity and more jobs. Both of these are extremely difficult for government to do and impossible to do without raising taxes, which voters don't like. Even though we know our government will never keep their promises, we continue to hope and vote accordingly.
The more "progressive" the democracy, the more debt load individual free citizens carry. In many cases, people pay twice the price of a big ticket item they buy due to interest rates on money they borrowed to buy it. A shocking number of people owe debts to credit card companies they cannot possibly ever repay because they can barely afford the minimum monthly payment.
But they look good. They drive the right cars. They live in the right neighbourhoods and belong to the right organizations.
Unless you work in your own home, look around you on the way to work and think about what is going on in the heads of the people making the same daily trek you are. Spend a bit of time watching people in the supermarket where you shop to see if what they are doing makes sense to you. Seriously, but take your time because stupid behaviour doesn't happen quickly. Watch people drive around the parking lot in a mall looking for the closest entrance, then walk for hours when they get inside. Compare what you see to what you would observe when watching an ant colony or a bee hive before you decide which species is the smartest.
Listen to conversations of people around you, no matter where they may take place. See how many of them involve any subject other than the weather or something they saw or could see on television. The most popular television stations in North America are the weather channels. Yet it's rare to see someone with an umbrella on a rainy day and common to see people with light shoes and no hats walking on snowy sidewalks in blowing weather.
Think about the people you have met over the past month. Have any of them asked you even one question that was not work related that would help them to learn something new? Intelligent thinking people ask questions.
That's the way it is today. What was it like in the past? Many people tend to believe that the world they live in is getting worse as they get older. It's not. They simply have not studied history enough to know that people were just as stupid, as violent, as careless and as ignorant of what they should know about life in the past as they are today. In fact, likely mores so than today. At least today we have more education worldwide to give us a basis on which to think.
Do conditions today predict anything for the future? In the past diseases and wars kept population levels down. Both of these factors are more limited today than at any time in the past. China, with the largest population in the world, limiting its population indicates that it will change its own future. If other countries take their future survival and health seriously--few do at present--the world may reach sustainable and manageable levels of population, pollution and resource management. Odds are that a massive die-off of people, perhaps related somehow to a failure of electronic technology on a global scale causing stock market crashes, less likely due to disease, will cause us to come together as nation members of one world community to take it's future seriously.
A massive shock of some sort is necessary to bring people around to thinking of the future in global terms rather than of their own present desires and pleasures. As uncontrolled as our world is at present, the shock is a certainty though its nature is in doubt.
Until that shock happens, we don't have enough "thinking men" among us to effect real and lasting change. The shock might come from our atmosphere and our water. As we debate global warming and climate change--who cares if the global temperature rises by half a degree in 50 years?--our industries continue to pour thousands of poisons into our air and our water. While we call them "greenhouse gases." That's the air we breathe and the water that keeps us alive. Darwin's claim that the most adaptable will survive crises will be tested. Check out the kinds of poisons industries are subjecting us and our children to.
Can we teach more of our people to think? Ask the teachers. They are the ones saddled with the impossible task of teaching children to think while working under such hobbling conditions most teachers could never make it happen. Our education systems are designed to produce consumers and employees, and they do it well. Ask any child why he or she should stay in school and get a good education and the answer will almost always be "to get a good job." Never "to have a better life." Jobs mean income to buy stuff our industries produce.
Real change can only happen in schools and homes. Real change in homes will be tough because we do not teach young people what they need to know to be good parents.
Education is the answer. Now, do you remember the question?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to effect real change in homes and schools so their children will be able to adapt to what life will throw at them in the future.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Friday, June 25, 2010
The Driver Behind You May Be Unconscious
The Driver Behind You May Be Unconscious
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
- Bruce Barton, American author, advertising executive, politician (1886-1967)
Almost all of us believe that something inside us is superior to the circumstances of our lives. It's what keeps us sane and away from killing each other. Not so many of us accomplish something splendid. The reason may be a disconnect between what we are capable of and what we believe we are capable of.
Hold that thought for a moment while we check out that driver behind you.
Have you ever fumbled with your car radio or to take something out of your glovebox or even had a conversation with someone in the car you were driving and suddenly realized that you had absolutely no memory of driving the past few minutes? Technically you were unconscious while driving.
Unconscious? Doesn't that mean in a coma or dead, or at least asleep? Yes, but not exclusively. To be conscious means to be fully aware of your surroundings. As you were obviously not fully aware of your surroundings while you drove in our example, you could not have been conscious. So what were you?
Social science has given up on the idea formerly called the "subconscious." Mostly because there is no evidence for it. One dictionary describes "unconscious" as "that part of the mind wherein psychic activity takes place of which the person is unaware." In this example you were aware of your radio search or your glovebox search or your conversation. But you were also aware in some very different sense--psychically--of your driving.
Could you be driving "mechanically" as some used to say young adults did after a few years of driving experience? Let's put it this way, would you be comfortable driving on a highway at full speed surrounded by people who were driving only "mechanically"? The ugly truth is that many of us do. That guy behind you may indeed be driving mechanically, or unconsciously, meaning that he may not be able to apply his full attention to any emergency that may arise (such as you having to come to a sudden stop because a dog wandered onto the highway).
You dream with your unconscious mind. When you dream many of the functions of your brain you normally consider part of your waking life are shut down. The frontal lobes, for example, those brain parts that allow you to distinguish between right and wrong and that keep you on "an even keel" when you are awake, don't function. That's why dreams can be crazy sometimes, because the brain's normal control mechanisms are shut down when you are asleep.
Science doesn't know for certain why we need sleep, though recent research suggests it help us to review our activities of the previous day so we can embed them in longer term memory--that is, we need sleep to consolidate our daytime learning. You, very likely, do not know how you managed to pilot your car down the road without being aware of what you were doing while searching for a different radio station. But you are certain you weren't asleep. But were you conscious?
Any activity of the brain that does not involve the full application of all critical brain functions is an activity you do while, technically, unconscious. While unconscious your body may be in bed resting or in a hospital room in a coma. It may also be doing--indeed parts of your brain may be doing--something other than that of which you are fully aware.
What do you think when you hear an argument in a murder case that the defendant was not fully aware of what he was doing when he killed his wife? If you are involved in a collision while you are technically unconscious, the investigating police officer will consider you just as liable. We all assume that we do everything consciously. Science says otherwise, though we all hope that part of science doesn't take the stand in a court case.
Murder cases and car collisions are extreme cases. Most of our lives are lived away from extremes. Yet people sometimes do little things they may not be aware of--things that annoy you greatly or that inconvenience you--without being fully aware (conscious) of what they are doing. You don't want them imprisoned for their faults because then you would have to be behind bars for doing similar things. So, what to do?
The human brain and consciousness are, as you can see, subjects that bear much more study. We understand very little about them. Yet they govern our lives, and the brains and consciousness of others impact our lives, every day. As much as they mean to us and as much as they affect our lives, we know almost nothing about them.
We accept that we are all imperfect beings. Now you have a clue why that is. It may not solve any mysteries for you but it may help you to understand why people do or say things that simply don't seem right or in character for them, things that seem out of place.
As with many human behaviours it's best to ignore the extremes because they do not represent who these people are. Who they are when they are fully conscious. They, in turn, can be expected to forgive your extremes of behaviour.
But, just in case, if the driver behind you seems distracted, maybe you should pull over and let him or her pass before something happens you may find messy and uncomfortable. You can still drive fully conscious.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know how their children can develop socially and emotionally in concert with their intellectual and physical development.
Learn more at http://billallin.c/om
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
- Bruce Barton, American author, advertising executive, politician (1886-1967)
Almost all of us believe that something inside us is superior to the circumstances of our lives. It's what keeps us sane and away from killing each other. Not so many of us accomplish something splendid. The reason may be a disconnect between what we are capable of and what we believe we are capable of.
Hold that thought for a moment while we check out that driver behind you.
Have you ever fumbled with your car radio or to take something out of your glovebox or even had a conversation with someone in the car you were driving and suddenly realized that you had absolutely no memory of driving the past few minutes? Technically you were unconscious while driving.
Unconscious? Doesn't that mean in a coma or dead, or at least asleep? Yes, but not exclusively. To be conscious means to be fully aware of your surroundings. As you were obviously not fully aware of your surroundings while you drove in our example, you could not have been conscious. So what were you?
Social science has given up on the idea formerly called the "subconscious." Mostly because there is no evidence for it. One dictionary describes "unconscious" as "that part of the mind wherein psychic activity takes place of which the person is unaware." In this example you were aware of your radio search or your glovebox search or your conversation. But you were also aware in some very different sense--psychically--of your driving.
Could you be driving "mechanically" as some used to say young adults did after a few years of driving experience? Let's put it this way, would you be comfortable driving on a highway at full speed surrounded by people who were driving only "mechanically"? The ugly truth is that many of us do. That guy behind you may indeed be driving mechanically, or unconsciously, meaning that he may not be able to apply his full attention to any emergency that may arise (such as you having to come to a sudden stop because a dog wandered onto the highway).
You dream with your unconscious mind. When you dream many of the functions of your brain you normally consider part of your waking life are shut down. The frontal lobes, for example, those brain parts that allow you to distinguish between right and wrong and that keep you on "an even keel" when you are awake, don't function. That's why dreams can be crazy sometimes, because the brain's normal control mechanisms are shut down when you are asleep.
Science doesn't know for certain why we need sleep, though recent research suggests it help us to review our activities of the previous day so we can embed them in longer term memory--that is, we need sleep to consolidate our daytime learning. You, very likely, do not know how you managed to pilot your car down the road without being aware of what you were doing while searching for a different radio station. But you are certain you weren't asleep. But were you conscious?
Any activity of the brain that does not involve the full application of all critical brain functions is an activity you do while, technically, unconscious. While unconscious your body may be in bed resting or in a hospital room in a coma. It may also be doing--indeed parts of your brain may be doing--something other than that of which you are fully aware.
What do you think when you hear an argument in a murder case that the defendant was not fully aware of what he was doing when he killed his wife? If you are involved in a collision while you are technically unconscious, the investigating police officer will consider you just as liable. We all assume that we do everything consciously. Science says otherwise, though we all hope that part of science doesn't take the stand in a court case.
Murder cases and car collisions are extreme cases. Most of our lives are lived away from extremes. Yet people sometimes do little things they may not be aware of--things that annoy you greatly or that inconvenience you--without being fully aware (conscious) of what they are doing. You don't want them imprisoned for their faults because then you would have to be behind bars for doing similar things. So, what to do?
The human brain and consciousness are, as you can see, subjects that bear much more study. We understand very little about them. Yet they govern our lives, and the brains and consciousness of others impact our lives, every day. As much as they mean to us and as much as they affect our lives, we know almost nothing about them.
We accept that we are all imperfect beings. Now you have a clue why that is. It may not solve any mysteries for you but it may help you to understand why people do or say things that simply don't seem right or in character for them, things that seem out of place.
As with many human behaviours it's best to ignore the extremes because they do not represent who these people are. Who they are when they are fully conscious. They, in turn, can be expected to forgive your extremes of behaviour.
But, just in case, if the driver behind you seems distracted, maybe you should pull over and let him or her pass before something happens you may find messy and uncomfortable. You can still drive fully conscious.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know how their children can develop socially and emotionally in concert with their intellectual and physical development.
Learn more at http://billallin.c/om
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Stop It, Lazy Selfish Greedy Bastards!
Stop It, Lazy Selfish Greedy Bastards!
"I love humanity. It's people I hate."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet and playwright (1892-1950) [also quoted in the Peanuts comic strip]
Farmers learn stuff that's down to earth. As I immerse myself in the deeply troublesome and awkward project of converting a lifelong city boy to struggling survival farmer (small variety, 8 acres), that has become my favourite saying--the "down to earth" one.
Before I continue with this article I must convey an important life lesson. There are two types of people: those who always put their own best interests first and those who frequently and comfortably put the best interests of others, individuals or groups or whole communities or societies, ahead of their own.
That may be the most important life lesson I have ever learned. It explains a huge amount about human behaviour. Personally, as a member of the latter group, it means that I can disregard any ideas of friendship or overtures of relationship of any kind with members of the former group.
Is that classification too harsh? Perhaps I can make it easier to understand by suggesting the behaviour of house cats as representative of what I will call the selfish group. If you have carefully observed the behaviour of cats, bells should begin to ring in your head now. Cats are the ultimate self-interested pets. Nature has programmed them to be survivors by putting themselves first.
That's not to say that cat owners are selfish or self-interested. On the contrary, they tend to be more altruistic kind of people. Dogs, on the other hand, better represent the altruistic group--again, that's not necessarily true of their owners. Dogs in the wild survive as individuals in an interdependent relationship with the pack. As the saying goes, dogs have owners while cats have staff.
People tend to behave much like one or the other of these two groups. No, I don't mean that they eat with their faces in bowls, let's leave that now.
Where I live, in eastern Canada, people with European heritage have lived for hundreds of years (First Nations people for over 3000 years in the oldest continuously occupied community in the New World). Only in recent decades has garbage been collected. Before that people took their trash to a dump, burned it or left it in a remote area of a field. Today I removed the last remnants of a burn barrel where previous (and oh so primitive) humanoids had tossed stuff that could never possibly burn.
Why would they put non-burnables in a burn barrel? Because they expected to move before they would have to deal with the consequences of their laziness. Much the same reasoning some people use when they toss beer bottles or cans out the windows of their cars as they drive down a road late at night rather than returning them to a recycling depot (the get their deposit back) at some later time.
My wife and I want to create a small farm that grows vegetables. You could call it a hobby farm except we don't plan to sell our veggies. We want to donate them to local foodbanks and shelters. Farming requires machines, ours needed a tractor with a plow. Lacking funding from a generous government or chemical manufacturer, we bought a used tractor, a classic model made in 1948. It worked beautifully, except the clutch would not disengage, which is decidedly awkward if you want to change gears.
For weeks I asked around but nobody knew how to adjust that clutch--"Take it to Bremner's (a local tractor dealer with an excellent reputation), they can fix any tractor problem." One day recently a man who usually functions with an oxygen hose at his nose (he didn't even get out of his car) stopped by our house as his wife left a fish her husband caught in one of his healthier moments. Even at our first meeting when it came out about my not being able to adjust the tractor clutch he offered to do it for me.
A few days later, without the oxygen, he hauled his 350 pound frame under the tractor, thrashed around for about an hour and came out with the clutch adjusted, something others had been unable to do. Despite needing his oxygen again, he stayed for tea then made his way home for pure O2. He wouldn't hear of taking a penny for his trouble. He was happy to help.
Everywhere you look you will find what some call the givers and the takers. Both may be easy enough to like until you need something, at which time the takers will vanish. Their lives are driven by self-interest, which is to say, greed.
The selfish ones are so easy to see around us that without evaluating life carefully you might get the impression that almost everyone is greedy and selfish. They aren't. The generous and altruistic people don't advertise themselves. They just are. The selfish ones make the news.
Believe it or not, despite the huge media efforts by industries to make us all into selfish, accumulative, consumer workaholics, more people today than ever before in history are giving to others, thinking of others, putting the best interests of others and the world ahead of their own. That's how civilization grows. That's how humanity progresses. That's how our planet will survive. We can't expect industries or the selfish to think of the welfare of everyone else.
Humanity could do with more selfless ones among us. People can change. What might help is if you are an altruistic person who is happy make this known to a selfish person who is unhappy. Selfish people are all basically unhappy, they seek thrills and gratification as substitutes for real happiness. It never makes them happy because they can never get enough. Greed is addictive.
Spread the word. Happiness is addictive as well. The more you give to the happiness and welfare of others, the happier you are. No one knows why. It seems, somehow, to be built into our genetic code to have the ability to be selfless while we retain the basic instinct to be greedy.
If we really want to beat nature, we can do it by helping each other. No other animal on the planet has the potential to do that the way we do. Birds and mammals are known to be nurturing and some are altruistic, but none can rise above what nature provided the way people can.
That's the only kind of defeating of nature that is win-win. That's the real potential of humanity.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow healthy and strong in all developmental streams, not just a limited few.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
"I love humanity. It's people I hate."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet and playwright (1892-1950) [also quoted in the Peanuts comic strip]
Farmers learn stuff that's down to earth. As I immerse myself in the deeply troublesome and awkward project of converting a lifelong city boy to struggling survival farmer (small variety, 8 acres), that has become my favourite saying--the "down to earth" one.
Before I continue with this article I must convey an important life lesson. There are two types of people: those who always put their own best interests first and those who frequently and comfortably put the best interests of others, individuals or groups or whole communities or societies, ahead of their own.
That may be the most important life lesson I have ever learned. It explains a huge amount about human behaviour. Personally, as a member of the latter group, it means that I can disregard any ideas of friendship or overtures of relationship of any kind with members of the former group.
Is that classification too harsh? Perhaps I can make it easier to understand by suggesting the behaviour of house cats as representative of what I will call the selfish group. If you have carefully observed the behaviour of cats, bells should begin to ring in your head now. Cats are the ultimate self-interested pets. Nature has programmed them to be survivors by putting themselves first.
That's not to say that cat owners are selfish or self-interested. On the contrary, they tend to be more altruistic kind of people. Dogs, on the other hand, better represent the altruistic group--again, that's not necessarily true of their owners. Dogs in the wild survive as individuals in an interdependent relationship with the pack. As the saying goes, dogs have owners while cats have staff.
People tend to behave much like one or the other of these two groups. No, I don't mean that they eat with their faces in bowls, let's leave that now.
Where I live, in eastern Canada, people with European heritage have lived for hundreds of years (First Nations people for over 3000 years in the oldest continuously occupied community in the New World). Only in recent decades has garbage been collected. Before that people took their trash to a dump, burned it or left it in a remote area of a field. Today I removed the last remnants of a burn barrel where previous (and oh so primitive) humanoids had tossed stuff that could never possibly burn.
Why would they put non-burnables in a burn barrel? Because they expected to move before they would have to deal with the consequences of their laziness. Much the same reasoning some people use when they toss beer bottles or cans out the windows of their cars as they drive down a road late at night rather than returning them to a recycling depot (the get their deposit back) at some later time.
My wife and I want to create a small farm that grows vegetables. You could call it a hobby farm except we don't plan to sell our veggies. We want to donate them to local foodbanks and shelters. Farming requires machines, ours needed a tractor with a plow. Lacking funding from a generous government or chemical manufacturer, we bought a used tractor, a classic model made in 1948. It worked beautifully, except the clutch would not disengage, which is decidedly awkward if you want to change gears.
For weeks I asked around but nobody knew how to adjust that clutch--"Take it to Bremner's (a local tractor dealer with an excellent reputation), they can fix any tractor problem." One day recently a man who usually functions with an oxygen hose at his nose (he didn't even get out of his car) stopped by our house as his wife left a fish her husband caught in one of his healthier moments. Even at our first meeting when it came out about my not being able to adjust the tractor clutch he offered to do it for me.
A few days later, without the oxygen, he hauled his 350 pound frame under the tractor, thrashed around for about an hour and came out with the clutch adjusted, something others had been unable to do. Despite needing his oxygen again, he stayed for tea then made his way home for pure O2. He wouldn't hear of taking a penny for his trouble. He was happy to help.
Everywhere you look you will find what some call the givers and the takers. Both may be easy enough to like until you need something, at which time the takers will vanish. Their lives are driven by self-interest, which is to say, greed.
The selfish ones are so easy to see around us that without evaluating life carefully you might get the impression that almost everyone is greedy and selfish. They aren't. The generous and altruistic people don't advertise themselves. They just are. The selfish ones make the news.
Believe it or not, despite the huge media efforts by industries to make us all into selfish, accumulative, consumer workaholics, more people today than ever before in history are giving to others, thinking of others, putting the best interests of others and the world ahead of their own. That's how civilization grows. That's how humanity progresses. That's how our planet will survive. We can't expect industries or the selfish to think of the welfare of everyone else.
Humanity could do with more selfless ones among us. People can change. What might help is if you are an altruistic person who is happy make this known to a selfish person who is unhappy. Selfish people are all basically unhappy, they seek thrills and gratification as substitutes for real happiness. It never makes them happy because they can never get enough. Greed is addictive.
Spread the word. Happiness is addictive as well. The more you give to the happiness and welfare of others, the happier you are. No one knows why. It seems, somehow, to be built into our genetic code to have the ability to be selfless while we retain the basic instinct to be greedy.
If we really want to beat nature, we can do it by helping each other. No other animal on the planet has the potential to do that the way we do. Birds and mammals are known to be nurturing and some are altruistic, but none can rise above what nature provided the way people can.
That's the only kind of defeating of nature that is win-win. That's the real potential of humanity.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow healthy and strong in all developmental streams, not just a limited few.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Who Is That Person In The Mirror?
Who Is That Person In The Mirror?
The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.
- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, American self-help author, writer, speaker (b. 1940)
Wayne Dyer ranks among the top few advocates of the "Change your mind, change your life" school of thought about life. I have admired his thinking for many years, though I have stayed away from his so-called New Age thinking about spirituality.
Yet I can't avoid the attraction of this quote, though he may have intended something different than what I take from it. I grant that if you look at life positively, life looks positive, you will feel positive about life. I grant that with few exceptions the media try to make our world look much worse than it is by using the Shock and Awe strategy to secure listeners, viewers and readers. But there is more to this quote than that.
When I look in the mirror I don't really see me. What I see is a right-left-reversed image of what others see when they look at me. Yet others see what they want to see when they look at me anyway, not necessarily the real me. The real me doesn't show up--has no way of making itself that "public"--either in the mirror or to others.
When I look in the mirror I see only the vessel I use as my travelling companion. Crippled at birth but recovered enough to walk and run close enough to what other kids could do to look "normal." Brain damaged at birth (breech, no blood to the brain for too long) but managed to reroute enough neural pathways over the succeeding decades to get by.
The man in the mirror had much to overcome. He received no nurturing, no teaching, nothing most of us expect from parents for the critical first six years of life. When he "went public" at age six, a feral child newly exposed to peers who had grown and learned in normal ways, it was as if he had just be born. At six years, this little fellow unknowingly had walls created around him intellectually, socially, emotionally and physically as his age peers grew while he just got a bit taller. He had, in effect, a deep well to climb out of if he were to survive in a world that cared no more about him than his parents had.
Some time during high school he learned to read, though he remained functionally illiterate until past age 44. He got a girlfriend whom he eventually married and with whom he had two children. Co-supporting his young family he secured a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in education--all the while still functionally illiterate, never having read a single book all the way through.
Why do I write about myself in the third person? I can't see any of that in the mirror. People I meet can't see any of that. In fact, I am no longer that person because I have changed so much.
In the process of climbing out of that pit, I got into habits of learning and improving myself I have retained throughout my life. When most people slowed down from learning at a rapid rate as they got older, I sped up because I could and didn't know there was an unwritten rule that you could stop when you wanted as an adult.
My father and mother knew virtually nothing about parenting. They taught me everything they knew about parenting. I used that little bit of learning about parenting to fail badly raising my own children. When my first wife left our family, I hurt. When she later died and my children decided they no longer found me of any value, I made up my mind to learn why. I knew it would be hard and it was. I knew much learning would be required and it was. What I didn't know along the way was that I would surpass what most other adults knew about parenting only to find myself blazing new ground, beating a path for those to follow.
I went from a know-nothing who could do little physically, had no skills and could only follow the lead of others to someone who takes the lead himself. That wasn't easy. Knowing nothing has its own problems, but leaders always have enemies who don't want to see others succeed where they can't or don't care to go.
I changed dramatically as a person. None of that change shows in the mirror. My life changed because I made up my mind that knowing more than most people about how children grow and develop meant little if I didn't spread the word. I kept climbing because leaders can be seen and heard better from greater heights.
I became someone much greater than I could ever have imagined as a child or as a young adult. I know that person better than the child or the young adult I used to be. I know that person intimately. I like him. None of that shows in the mirror.
Today the man in the mirror and I tolerate each other. The real me pays little attention to the mirror man because he isn't like me and he has changed only by aging. The real me changed by growing, spiritually, emotionally, socially, intellectually. The real me is still a motor moron because I depend so heavily on the man in the mirror and he is still that barely recovered cripple with a sometimes dysfunctional brain.
How much attention should we pay to the person in our mirror? That person does absolutely nothing to help us. He or she gets older and insists upon demonstrating the effects of that aging in the mirror daily. The person in the mirror never gets better, only older.
Pity the person who cares deeply about the image they see in the mirror. That image will inevitably change, but never for the better. The person who identifies closely with the image in the mirror is destined to eventually be both old and stupid. The person in the mirror never gets smarter either.
There is a saying: Aging is inevitable, getting old is voluntary. I don't care for that saying. I prefer to think that the person in the mirror gets older while I keep getting better.
I do get better. So should you. If you haven't already decided to get better, you can make the decision and act on it today. Simply making the decision makes you better. Knowing that you need to learn in order to get better, and that no matter how much money you earn and spend won't help, is a big leap forward in your quest to get better.
If you make the decision to get better before you reach the end of this article, you will already be better for it. Wow! Congratulations.
But hurry because....
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook of epic importance but easy to read on the subject of child development and learning and of parenting.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.
- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, American self-help author, writer, speaker (b. 1940)
Wayne Dyer ranks among the top few advocates of the "Change your mind, change your life" school of thought about life. I have admired his thinking for many years, though I have stayed away from his so-called New Age thinking about spirituality.
Yet I can't avoid the attraction of this quote, though he may have intended something different than what I take from it. I grant that if you look at life positively, life looks positive, you will feel positive about life. I grant that with few exceptions the media try to make our world look much worse than it is by using the Shock and Awe strategy to secure listeners, viewers and readers. But there is more to this quote than that.
When I look in the mirror I don't really see me. What I see is a right-left-reversed image of what others see when they look at me. Yet others see what they want to see when they look at me anyway, not necessarily the real me. The real me doesn't show up--has no way of making itself that "public"--either in the mirror or to others.
When I look in the mirror I see only the vessel I use as my travelling companion. Crippled at birth but recovered enough to walk and run close enough to what other kids could do to look "normal." Brain damaged at birth (breech, no blood to the brain for too long) but managed to reroute enough neural pathways over the succeeding decades to get by.
The man in the mirror had much to overcome. He received no nurturing, no teaching, nothing most of us expect from parents for the critical first six years of life. When he "went public" at age six, a feral child newly exposed to peers who had grown and learned in normal ways, it was as if he had just be born. At six years, this little fellow unknowingly had walls created around him intellectually, socially, emotionally and physically as his age peers grew while he just got a bit taller. He had, in effect, a deep well to climb out of if he were to survive in a world that cared no more about him than his parents had.
Some time during high school he learned to read, though he remained functionally illiterate until past age 44. He got a girlfriend whom he eventually married and with whom he had two children. Co-supporting his young family he secured a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in education--all the while still functionally illiterate, never having read a single book all the way through.
Why do I write about myself in the third person? I can't see any of that in the mirror. People I meet can't see any of that. In fact, I am no longer that person because I have changed so much.
In the process of climbing out of that pit, I got into habits of learning and improving myself I have retained throughout my life. When most people slowed down from learning at a rapid rate as they got older, I sped up because I could and didn't know there was an unwritten rule that you could stop when you wanted as an adult.
My father and mother knew virtually nothing about parenting. They taught me everything they knew about parenting. I used that little bit of learning about parenting to fail badly raising my own children. When my first wife left our family, I hurt. When she later died and my children decided they no longer found me of any value, I made up my mind to learn why. I knew it would be hard and it was. I knew much learning would be required and it was. What I didn't know along the way was that I would surpass what most other adults knew about parenting only to find myself blazing new ground, beating a path for those to follow.
I went from a know-nothing who could do little physically, had no skills and could only follow the lead of others to someone who takes the lead himself. That wasn't easy. Knowing nothing has its own problems, but leaders always have enemies who don't want to see others succeed where they can't or don't care to go.
I changed dramatically as a person. None of that change shows in the mirror. My life changed because I made up my mind that knowing more than most people about how children grow and develop meant little if I didn't spread the word. I kept climbing because leaders can be seen and heard better from greater heights.
I became someone much greater than I could ever have imagined as a child or as a young adult. I know that person better than the child or the young adult I used to be. I know that person intimately. I like him. None of that shows in the mirror.
Today the man in the mirror and I tolerate each other. The real me pays little attention to the mirror man because he isn't like me and he has changed only by aging. The real me changed by growing, spiritually, emotionally, socially, intellectually. The real me is still a motor moron because I depend so heavily on the man in the mirror and he is still that barely recovered cripple with a sometimes dysfunctional brain.
How much attention should we pay to the person in our mirror? That person does absolutely nothing to help us. He or she gets older and insists upon demonstrating the effects of that aging in the mirror daily. The person in the mirror never gets better, only older.
Pity the person who cares deeply about the image they see in the mirror. That image will inevitably change, but never for the better. The person who identifies closely with the image in the mirror is destined to eventually be both old and stupid. The person in the mirror never gets smarter either.
There is a saying: Aging is inevitable, getting old is voluntary. I don't care for that saying. I prefer to think that the person in the mirror gets older while I keep getting better.
I do get better. So should you. If you haven't already decided to get better, you can make the decision and act on it today. Simply making the decision makes you better. Knowing that you need to learn in order to get better, and that no matter how much money you earn and spend won't help, is a big leap forward in your quest to get better.
If you make the decision to get better before you reach the end of this article, you will already be better for it. Wow! Congratulations.
But hurry because....
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook of epic importance but easy to read on the subject of child development and learning and of parenting.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Your Momma Should Have Known
Your Momma Should Have Known
"Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes...The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work."
- Carl Zimmer
Nothing against your mother. The point is that your mother and everyone's mother should have been taught what you are about to learn, before you were born. The news is recent, but the information itself has been around since the beginning of our existence.
Caution: What you are about to learn may change what you think about life and how you understand the sometimes mysterious behaviour of others. You won't be asked to convert to any way of thinking. It will simply help you to understand.
Human behaviour, or human nature if you will, may present the greatest mystery and challenge anyone has ever faced. For examples, men ask "What do women want?" while women wonder "What makes men tick?" Neither is a huge mystery, it's just that we haven't taught each other what a few of us already know.
The study you will read about could not have been conducted on humans. At least not on living ones. You will soon understand why. It was conducted on rats. And on the brains of people who had recently died, some from suicide. Just to make it more enticing, love has a great deal to do with it.
In humans, love is a mystery. The word has more definitions than just about any other in the Oxford English Dictionary. The problem is that we can't get a handle on exactly what love is. Yet, in our own lives, we tend to quantify love. We don't measure love as such. We measure loving touch.
In general, we touch those we love more than those we don't love. When the romance of the early months of a new relationship filled with lots of loving touch fades and the touching reduces to little or nothing, we say that love was lost. People leave legal relationships seeking more and better love, but what they really seek is more loving touch. We tend to equate touch with love. We measure how much others love us by the amount they want to share loving touch with us.
Not so easy to test in a science lab. Especially when ethics intervenes when we want to prove that people change for the negative when they lack sufficient touch of others. Many labs have turned to rats as substitutes. The similarities between us and rats in these tests may make you uncomfortable, but they are real.
In one family of rats the mother was allowed to lick the fur of her babies, often and extensively. In another, the mother hardly licked her babies at all. As adults, the two groups of rats turn out very different. In the neglected group, the rats were easily startled by unexpected noises, they were reluctant to explore new places and their bodies produced lots of hormone when they experienced stress.
The licked and loved rats were not easily startled, showed great curiosity in exploring new places in their environment. And they "did not suffer surges of stress hormones," according to Carl Zimmer.
They did not suffer surges of stress hormones. I do. Like many others, I lack the gene that should cause my adrenal gland to produce a hormone that neutralizes the effects of epinephrin (commonly known as adrenalin), the chemical produced by the adrenal gland to prepare us for action in times of sudden stress, known as the fight or flight response. In other words, when my body senses stress, I not only get the surge of adrenalin but it hangs around in my bloodstream for hours, even for days.
Why do some people suffer severely from stress--even to the point of thinking about or actually committing suicide--while others seem able to handle stress with relative ease? The rats in the experiment above and in hundreds of other labs may show us the answer. The rats--and at least some of us--may not be able to handle stress as well as others because our brains and bodies are not prepared for what amounts to prolonged chemical warfare on us. Self-induced chemical warfare.
Two families of molecules control when our genes turn on and off, which ones and for how long. One, the methyl group, essentially plugs the path for genes to express themselves by producing proteins. The other, coiling proteins, wraps our DNA into spools so tight the genes can't become active. If either is too successful or lacking, something can happen with gene expression (or may be prevented from happening) that will affect our health and even our lives.
Our experiences can rewrite these two, collectively called the epigenetic code. Most of the writing or behaviour patterning is done before we are born. However, strong experiences after we are born--even extraordinarily strong experiences as adults--can rewrite the code.
Differences between the brain of the licked rats and the neglected ones were found in the hippocampus. The glucocorticoid receptor gene--the one that controls how long adrenalin stays in the bloodstream--for example, was capped off by methyl groups in the neglected rats and they had fewer receptors than the licked rats. Thus the neglected rats had fewer ways to stop adrenalin from doing its thing when it was no longer needed. They were permanently stressed out.
Neurobiologist Michael Meaney, of McGill University, and colleagues followed his rat studies by studying the brains of people who had recently died. Twelve had committed suicide and had suffered abuse as children, 12 had committed suicide but had not suffered abuse and the final 12 had died of natural causes. The suicide people who had suffered abuse had cortisol receptors capped by methyl groups and had fewer receptors, as they had found with the rats. Abuse in childhood had caused them to be permanently stressed as adults.
Another group studied suicide victims and people who died natural deaths and found methyl groups blocking the gene that produces the protein BDNF in the Wernicke area of the brains of the suicides. Environmental influences--everything after birth, including human interaction--can also affect adults.
Neuroscientist Eric Nestler, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, examined the brains of mice that had been put through so much stress in conflicts with other mice that they were depressed. He found differences in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved with the brain's reward system and helps to set values on things based on the pleasure derived from them. He found the DNA in that part wound tightly with coiling proteins. Nestler's group found the same kinds of epigenetic changes in the brains of depressed humans who had recently died.
Brain changes caused by coiling proteins and methyl groups should be able to be reversed, once we learn how. Nestler injected HDAC inhibitors into the nucleus accumbens parts of the brains of depressed mice to loosen the coils of DNA. Ten days later the mice were less hesitant about approaching other mice and other signs of depression were absent.
These studies suggest that previously intractable human troubles such as depression, suicide and a wide range of problems associated with constant stress (including those that impact the immune system) may be correctable. More study is needed and testing on humans will be tricky, maybe even risky at first.
Any change to the brain is risky. But it may be do-able. Medical science is still in the very early stages of learning about our most complex and sophisticated organ.
Soon taking a DNA sample of a newborn baby will be routine. The sample will be examined for variations from expected norms so the child can have a genetic adjustment made and avoid genetic problems and weaknesses that are an unfortunate part of life today.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children right from birth. This book shows us how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: The Brain, by Carl Zimmer, Discover, June 2010]
"Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes...The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work."
- Carl Zimmer
Nothing against your mother. The point is that your mother and everyone's mother should have been taught what you are about to learn, before you were born. The news is recent, but the information itself has been around since the beginning of our existence.
Caution: What you are about to learn may change what you think about life and how you understand the sometimes mysterious behaviour of others. You won't be asked to convert to any way of thinking. It will simply help you to understand.
Human behaviour, or human nature if you will, may present the greatest mystery and challenge anyone has ever faced. For examples, men ask "What do women want?" while women wonder "What makes men tick?" Neither is a huge mystery, it's just that we haven't taught each other what a few of us already know.
The study you will read about could not have been conducted on humans. At least not on living ones. You will soon understand why. It was conducted on rats. And on the brains of people who had recently died, some from suicide. Just to make it more enticing, love has a great deal to do with it.
In humans, love is a mystery. The word has more definitions than just about any other in the Oxford English Dictionary. The problem is that we can't get a handle on exactly what love is. Yet, in our own lives, we tend to quantify love. We don't measure love as such. We measure loving touch.
In general, we touch those we love more than those we don't love. When the romance of the early months of a new relationship filled with lots of loving touch fades and the touching reduces to little or nothing, we say that love was lost. People leave legal relationships seeking more and better love, but what they really seek is more loving touch. We tend to equate touch with love. We measure how much others love us by the amount they want to share loving touch with us.
Not so easy to test in a science lab. Especially when ethics intervenes when we want to prove that people change for the negative when they lack sufficient touch of others. Many labs have turned to rats as substitutes. The similarities between us and rats in these tests may make you uncomfortable, but they are real.
In one family of rats the mother was allowed to lick the fur of her babies, often and extensively. In another, the mother hardly licked her babies at all. As adults, the two groups of rats turn out very different. In the neglected group, the rats were easily startled by unexpected noises, they were reluctant to explore new places and their bodies produced lots of hormone when they experienced stress.
The licked and loved rats were not easily startled, showed great curiosity in exploring new places in their environment. And they "did not suffer surges of stress hormones," according to Carl Zimmer.
They did not suffer surges of stress hormones. I do. Like many others, I lack the gene that should cause my adrenal gland to produce a hormone that neutralizes the effects of epinephrin (commonly known as adrenalin), the chemical produced by the adrenal gland to prepare us for action in times of sudden stress, known as the fight or flight response. In other words, when my body senses stress, I not only get the surge of adrenalin but it hangs around in my bloodstream for hours, even for days.
Why do some people suffer severely from stress--even to the point of thinking about or actually committing suicide--while others seem able to handle stress with relative ease? The rats in the experiment above and in hundreds of other labs may show us the answer. The rats--and at least some of us--may not be able to handle stress as well as others because our brains and bodies are not prepared for what amounts to prolonged chemical warfare on us. Self-induced chemical warfare.
Two families of molecules control when our genes turn on and off, which ones and for how long. One, the methyl group, essentially plugs the path for genes to express themselves by producing proteins. The other, coiling proteins, wraps our DNA into spools so tight the genes can't become active. If either is too successful or lacking, something can happen with gene expression (or may be prevented from happening) that will affect our health and even our lives.
Our experiences can rewrite these two, collectively called the epigenetic code. Most of the writing or behaviour patterning is done before we are born. However, strong experiences after we are born--even extraordinarily strong experiences as adults--can rewrite the code.
Differences between the brain of the licked rats and the neglected ones were found in the hippocampus. The glucocorticoid receptor gene--the one that controls how long adrenalin stays in the bloodstream--for example, was capped off by methyl groups in the neglected rats and they had fewer receptors than the licked rats. Thus the neglected rats had fewer ways to stop adrenalin from doing its thing when it was no longer needed. They were permanently stressed out.
Neurobiologist Michael Meaney, of McGill University, and colleagues followed his rat studies by studying the brains of people who had recently died. Twelve had committed suicide and had suffered abuse as children, 12 had committed suicide but had not suffered abuse and the final 12 had died of natural causes. The suicide people who had suffered abuse had cortisol receptors capped by methyl groups and had fewer receptors, as they had found with the rats. Abuse in childhood had caused them to be permanently stressed as adults.
Another group studied suicide victims and people who died natural deaths and found methyl groups blocking the gene that produces the protein BDNF in the Wernicke area of the brains of the suicides. Environmental influences--everything after birth, including human interaction--can also affect adults.
Neuroscientist Eric Nestler, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, examined the brains of mice that had been put through so much stress in conflicts with other mice that they were depressed. He found differences in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved with the brain's reward system and helps to set values on things based on the pleasure derived from them. He found the DNA in that part wound tightly with coiling proteins. Nestler's group found the same kinds of epigenetic changes in the brains of depressed humans who had recently died.
Brain changes caused by coiling proteins and methyl groups should be able to be reversed, once we learn how. Nestler injected HDAC inhibitors into the nucleus accumbens parts of the brains of depressed mice to loosen the coils of DNA. Ten days later the mice were less hesitant about approaching other mice and other signs of depression were absent.
These studies suggest that previously intractable human troubles such as depression, suicide and a wide range of problems associated with constant stress (including those that impact the immune system) may be correctable. More study is needed and testing on humans will be tricky, maybe even risky at first.
Any change to the brain is risky. But it may be do-able. Medical science is still in the very early stages of learning about our most complex and sophisticated organ.
Soon taking a DNA sample of a newborn baby will be routine. The sample will be examined for variations from expected norms so the child can have a genetic adjustment made and avoid genetic problems and weaknesses that are an unfortunate part of life today.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children right from birth. This book shows us how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: The Brain, by Carl Zimmer, Discover, June 2010]
Monday, June 07, 2010
It's About Time: What You Don't Know But Should
It's About Time: What You Don't Know But Should
Humans invented the concept of time. It didn't exist, in the way we know time, before we came along. No other creatures on the planet have the same concept of time as we do. Or, if it did exist, who would know?
Is time real or imaginary? Einstein considered it real, counted it as a component of what he called the fourth dimension, space-time. Space-time figured prominently in projections based on his theory of relativity.
But so did gravity and some physicists (albeit far from a majority) wonder now if gravity is everything Einstein says it is. For example, where is all that Dark Matter that supposedly comprises far more of the universe than the matter we can detect? For that matter (excuse the pun, I couldn't resist), where is all the "real" matter that should exist but we're having difficulty finding since we became aware of the Big Bang and developed big telescopes? University of Maryland astronomer Stacy McGaugh's study shows that many galaxies have much less matter than should be there to account for their gravitational pull.
If gravity is not what Einstein said it is, then that messes up our concept of time. So does the average U.S. city commuter really lose 38 hours a year to traffic delays or is that just imagined? The answer (you're not going to like this, I didn't) is that most of what we believe about our lives is based on how we perceive it (what we imagine it to be) more than on reality. (Okay, I wouldn't have time to explain that even if I could.)
After nearly a century of using Daylight Saving Time (DST), we still aren't sure why we use it. Benjamin Franklin introduced it as a joke. He said that if we got up an hour earlier each morning we could get an hour's more work done in daylight and save candles in the evening. The U.K. adopted DST in 1917, most of the rest of the world followed. (Personally, I can't see sleeping through daylight in the early morning hours in summer when that's often the best time to work outside. The mosquitoes in our area agree.)
Daylight Saving Time accounts for a drop in electricity use. The U.S. Department of Energy claims power demand drops by 0.5 percent during DST, saving three million barrels of oil in the U.S. alone.
By the way, it's not Daylight Savings Time. It's Saving. Savings is an account you have at the bank. That is, you would if you had any money to keep in it.
One study watched how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked and mail clerks spoke and concluded that the fastest paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo and New York. (As an aside, I have often wondered if rats are insulted when we refer to the fast paced life of humans in cities as the Rat Race. If so, they had better get over it because half the population of the world lives in cities today, most in big cities.)
The psychologist who did that study found the slowest paced cities were Shreveport, Sacramento and Los Angeles. (Nothing in the report about the pace of life of rats in those cities.)
Back in the old days one second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. (We'll pause here while you fetch your calculator if you like.) A second can still be defined that way, but it will be a longer second. The friction of tides as a result of gravity by the sun and moon slow earth's travel, lengthening our day by three milliseconds each century. (Feel free to think of it as "mutual attraction" not gravity if my previous statements made you uncomfortable with that word.)
Let's put that into perspective. In the time of the dinosaurs the day was only 23 of our hours long. (You don't suppose they had a dinosaur version of Rodent Race that caused the dinos to die off.)
Speaking of things that slow earth's rotation, even the weather can do it. El Niño winds can cause earth's rotation to slow by a fraction of a millisecond over just 24 hours.
Technology can do better than that. In 1972 atomic clocks in more than 50 countries were made the final authority on matters of time. They're so accurate that they lose about a second in 31.7 million years. But in 31.7 million years our day will be a half hour longer, so won't all our atomic clocks be wrong?
Actually, no. To keep the clocks in synch with earth's rotation we now add a "leap second" every few years. The most recent leap second was added this past New Year's Eve. (I thought 2009 seemed longer for some reason.)
One clock does even better than the network of atomic clocks. The clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado, measures the vibrations of a single atom of Mercury and is accurate to less than one second of loss in one billion years. (Who knew an atom of mercury could shiver that long?)
We think of timekeeping as standard now. In fact we call it Standard Time. Until the age of trains that had to meet set schedules in the 1800s, every village had its own version of standard time. They used solar noon in their respective areas. As odd as it seems now, a few watches were made in those days of confused standard times for trains that kept track of two times, one the local standard time and the other "railway time."
The U.K. adopted Standard Time first through an act of Parliament. The U.S. came on board on November 18, 1883. Some people speculate that the adoption of Standard Time may have prompted Einstein to think about how space and time might be united in his theory of relativity.
Einstein said that gravity affects the passage of time. So a passenger in an airplane, flying where gravity is weaker, would age a few nanoseconds more than a person who kept his feet on the ground.
Quantum theory claims that the shortest possible period of time (known as Planck time after the German physicist whose work began the whole study of quantum theory) is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.
Most scientists today believe that time as we know it began with the Big Bang, created with the rest of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. If you care, stay tuned because that belief could change any time now.
Will time ever end? Three Spanish scientists claim it will. They say our expanding universe is not really expanding at all. Rather time is slowing down, making it seem to us as if the universe is expanding. According to their calculations, time will eventually stop, at which point everything we know will stop as well. (I was going to calculate when that would be, but I don't have time.)
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to develop all aspects of their lives at the right time.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: Discover, March 2009]
Humans invented the concept of time. It didn't exist, in the way we know time, before we came along. No other creatures on the planet have the same concept of time as we do. Or, if it did exist, who would know?
Is time real or imaginary? Einstein considered it real, counted it as a component of what he called the fourth dimension, space-time. Space-time figured prominently in projections based on his theory of relativity.
But so did gravity and some physicists (albeit far from a majority) wonder now if gravity is everything Einstein says it is. For example, where is all that Dark Matter that supposedly comprises far more of the universe than the matter we can detect? For that matter (excuse the pun, I couldn't resist), where is all the "real" matter that should exist but we're having difficulty finding since we became aware of the Big Bang and developed big telescopes? University of Maryland astronomer Stacy McGaugh's study shows that many galaxies have much less matter than should be there to account for their gravitational pull.
If gravity is not what Einstein said it is, then that messes up our concept of time. So does the average U.S. city commuter really lose 38 hours a year to traffic delays or is that just imagined? The answer (you're not going to like this, I didn't) is that most of what we believe about our lives is based on how we perceive it (what we imagine it to be) more than on reality. (Okay, I wouldn't have time to explain that even if I could.)
After nearly a century of using Daylight Saving Time (DST), we still aren't sure why we use it. Benjamin Franklin introduced it as a joke. He said that if we got up an hour earlier each morning we could get an hour's more work done in daylight and save candles in the evening. The U.K. adopted DST in 1917, most of the rest of the world followed. (Personally, I can't see sleeping through daylight in the early morning hours in summer when that's often the best time to work outside. The mosquitoes in our area agree.)
Daylight Saving Time accounts for a drop in electricity use. The U.S. Department of Energy claims power demand drops by 0.5 percent during DST, saving three million barrels of oil in the U.S. alone.
By the way, it's not Daylight Savings Time. It's Saving. Savings is an account you have at the bank. That is, you would if you had any money to keep in it.
One study watched how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked and mail clerks spoke and concluded that the fastest paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo and New York. (As an aside, I have often wondered if rats are insulted when we refer to the fast paced life of humans in cities as the Rat Race. If so, they had better get over it because half the population of the world lives in cities today, most in big cities.)
The psychologist who did that study found the slowest paced cities were Shreveport, Sacramento and Los Angeles. (Nothing in the report about the pace of life of rats in those cities.)
Back in the old days one second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. (We'll pause here while you fetch your calculator if you like.) A second can still be defined that way, but it will be a longer second. The friction of tides as a result of gravity by the sun and moon slow earth's travel, lengthening our day by three milliseconds each century. (Feel free to think of it as "mutual attraction" not gravity if my previous statements made you uncomfortable with that word.)
Let's put that into perspective. In the time of the dinosaurs the day was only 23 of our hours long. (You don't suppose they had a dinosaur version of Rodent Race that caused the dinos to die off.)
Speaking of things that slow earth's rotation, even the weather can do it. El Niño winds can cause earth's rotation to slow by a fraction of a millisecond over just 24 hours.
Technology can do better than that. In 1972 atomic clocks in more than 50 countries were made the final authority on matters of time. They're so accurate that they lose about a second in 31.7 million years. But in 31.7 million years our day will be a half hour longer, so won't all our atomic clocks be wrong?
Actually, no. To keep the clocks in synch with earth's rotation we now add a "leap second" every few years. The most recent leap second was added this past New Year's Eve. (I thought 2009 seemed longer for some reason.)
One clock does even better than the network of atomic clocks. The clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado, measures the vibrations of a single atom of Mercury and is accurate to less than one second of loss in one billion years. (Who knew an atom of mercury could shiver that long?)
We think of timekeeping as standard now. In fact we call it Standard Time. Until the age of trains that had to meet set schedules in the 1800s, every village had its own version of standard time. They used solar noon in their respective areas. As odd as it seems now, a few watches were made in those days of confused standard times for trains that kept track of two times, one the local standard time and the other "railway time."
The U.K. adopted Standard Time first through an act of Parliament. The U.S. came on board on November 18, 1883. Some people speculate that the adoption of Standard Time may have prompted Einstein to think about how space and time might be united in his theory of relativity.
Einstein said that gravity affects the passage of time. So a passenger in an airplane, flying where gravity is weaker, would age a few nanoseconds more than a person who kept his feet on the ground.
Quantum theory claims that the shortest possible period of time (known as Planck time after the German physicist whose work began the whole study of quantum theory) is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.
Most scientists today believe that time as we know it began with the Big Bang, created with the rest of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. If you care, stay tuned because that belief could change any time now.
Will time ever end? Three Spanish scientists claim it will. They say our expanding universe is not really expanding at all. Rather time is slowing down, making it seem to us as if the universe is expanding. According to their calculations, time will eventually stop, at which point everything we know will stop as well. (I was going to calculate when that would be, but I don't have time.)
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to develop all aspects of their lives at the right time.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: Discover, March 2009]
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Have We Created Societies of Social Welfare Bums?
Have We Created Societies of Social Welfare Bums?
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
What do love and jealousy have to do with welfare? A great deal, as you will learn. First let me note that the two paragraphs that comprise the quote come from different sources by Heinlein.
Let's lead off with a big idea, though one you should find comfort with. We have people for whom someone or some people other than themselves takes priority over their own best interests. And we have people who, when all distractions are stripped away, have their own best interests of primary importance.
Doesn't everyone give importance to their own best interests? Of course, it's how we survive. Doesn't everyone have to put the interests of others ahead of their own sometimes? Yes, but in the case of our self-first group, putting the interests of others ahead of their own may indeed be in their own bests interests. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take the example of a highly paid executive who makes a sizable donation to charity right before the end of income tax season. By no small coincidence the amount of the donation happens to lower his income below a threshold, putting him into a lower tax bracket. In the end he is money in pocket and he receives acclaim for his donations. Is that bad? No, most of us would do it if we could. But that person can't claim to have the best interests of others ahead of his own if he will benefit financially from the donation. His own wallet counts first.
Now let's take the example of a parent who loads his adolescent son with electronic toys and gadgetry, so much so that the boy spends much of his time at home alone playing with the games. Admirable, huh? Except when you realize that the parent has thereby relieved himself of the parental obligation of interacting with the child, of teaching life lessons to the child while conveying the benefits of a close relationship between parent and child. That's what parents are supposed to do, what they have done throughout human history. The parent avoids that. That puts his own interests ahead of those of his son, no matter how he appeases his conscience by telling himself how good a father he was to give his son so much, more than he had as a child.
Another example, this time from the other group, might be the businessman who takes time out of his work week to mentor school kids--or even one child--so that the children have examples of good role models other than their own parent(s). Many other adults belong to service organizations in their communities where they volunteer many hours each year to benefit certain groups or individuals with needs they can't otherwise meet. They help, others benefit.
We have one group who loves themselves first, another who loves others more. You likely know many of each type. You may even have friends of both types. "Love" may be a strong word for people for whom love is, essentially, a business arrangement.
To put this into clearer perspective, let's take an extreme example of a life crisis. Let's say a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or tornado destroys one or more distribution centres for electricity in your area. It will take weeks, maybe months, before power is restored to your home and every other home, business, factory, recreation hall and other gathering place within 500 kilometres of where you live.
At crisis times, we all need allies. It's the time when everyone should pull together. In this scenario, which group of people would you rather have as your allies, the self-interested ones or the ones who willingly share and think of others before themselves?
That's easy to answer, you may say. Choose the group who will help you most. That extreme example was only to give perspective. Life is filled with all kinds of situations of a less critical nature in which we could use help from others. You might have a flat tire on the freeway and your cell phone battery is dead. If someone were to stop to help you, which group would you expect the helper to come from?
Some people can't make it in life. For many reasons, they have fallen into a pit of problems from which they can't extract themselves. They lose their job, can't pay their mortgage, get hassled by credit card companies, and so on. No matter what they do, they can't manage to put their ducks in line.
We have welfare (also known as social assistance) to help them. But for how long? If they do not have the necessary work skills, attitude and work ethic to get and hold a job, it could be years before they can pay their way in life again, if ever. Somehow they didn't get what they needed while they were in school, including life skills that could help them to survive in times of crisis.
They often live in the poorest quality of housing, maybe it reeks of the urine of past occupants or harbours cockroaches or has plumbing that works only sporadically. Or all of the aforementioned. It's not pleasant to be inside, especially in summer, so they sit outside with their beverage of choice, often beer.
That's where they are when some people see them and complain that "we pay our taxes so these people can sit around home all day and drink beer." Have you ever heard one of those complainers express a desire to change places with those welfare "whores" they despise? If life is so easy for welfare recipients, why would more people not want to change places with them?
We have many people in our society who, for a variety of reasons (none of them pleasant), must spend many years in prison. The prisons allow the inmates to work, for which they receive a little money (a dollar a day, for example) they can use to buy small treats for themselves. They often have access to libraries and classes to upgrade their education. And they can watch television.
Setting aside the discussion of the mood we might expect prisoners to be in (remember, they must associate with staff members who are outsiders to them) if we kept them confined full time in mind-numbing violence-inducing cells, we have people who condemn prisons for being places of luxury. "It's a great life and we pay for it!" Have you ever heard one person who seriously would trade places with a prisoner for any given period of time? Of course not. They know life is not luxurious or comfy in prison, no matter what they say.
Some people want to help those confined to prisons. Some want to help those who are stuck on welfare because they can't figure out how to dig themselves out of it. Some want to throw a lifeline to people who have lost their jobs or whose homes have been lost to fire. Or people whose life mates have walked out, leaving them alone enough to want to end their lives. Or people of an age they should retire because their health is not so good, but they can't because they have lost their life savings to some scam or stock market downturn.
They are the helpers. They are the "liberals" who want to "help out every freeloader who can't be bothered to work enough to earn a proper living." Even though not one of the self-first complainers would ever offer to change places with a person with a problem, they condemn those who would help. Because helping others does not help themselves and they are always more important than any others.
Those helpers are the ones you want as allies in a crisis. Ironically, the helpers will, in a crisis, help even the most self-interested lamers.
Returning now to our opening quote from Heinlein about love and jealousy, does it become obvious to you which group of people are likely to become jealous and which more apt to love others?
If you have a mate who is jealous, now you know why. That mate is not someone who would lay down their life for you in an emergency, no matter if you would for them or not.
Study your friends, workmates and neighbours and you will see which are the selfish ones and which the generous helpers. Some love themselves first and foremost, some love others more.
Remember, you will eventually have a crisis in your own life. Cultivate the helpers now so that they will support you when you need them. That's what friends do, though they serve much different functions most of the time.
The old saying goes: to make a friend you need first to be a friend. If you want to have a helping kind of person as a friend, you will need to make friendly gestures to that person first if they are not already your friend.
In other words, help someone else now who needs your help. That person needs a friend now and will be your friend later when you need him or her. Maybe. The ones who become friends will far outweigh in benefits to you those who take what you give and forget about you.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to raise their children to be helpers, to be able to make friends, to be self sufficient yet comfortable with interdependence.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
What do love and jealousy have to do with welfare? A great deal, as you will learn. First let me note that the two paragraphs that comprise the quote come from different sources by Heinlein.
Let's lead off with a big idea, though one you should find comfort with. We have people for whom someone or some people other than themselves takes priority over their own best interests. And we have people who, when all distractions are stripped away, have their own best interests of primary importance.
Doesn't everyone give importance to their own best interests? Of course, it's how we survive. Doesn't everyone have to put the interests of others ahead of their own sometimes? Yes, but in the case of our self-first group, putting the interests of others ahead of their own may indeed be in their own bests interests. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take the example of a highly paid executive who makes a sizable donation to charity right before the end of income tax season. By no small coincidence the amount of the donation happens to lower his income below a threshold, putting him into a lower tax bracket. In the end he is money in pocket and he receives acclaim for his donations. Is that bad? No, most of us would do it if we could. But that person can't claim to have the best interests of others ahead of his own if he will benefit financially from the donation. His own wallet counts first.
Now let's take the example of a parent who loads his adolescent son with electronic toys and gadgetry, so much so that the boy spends much of his time at home alone playing with the games. Admirable, huh? Except when you realize that the parent has thereby relieved himself of the parental obligation of interacting with the child, of teaching life lessons to the child while conveying the benefits of a close relationship between parent and child. That's what parents are supposed to do, what they have done throughout human history. The parent avoids that. That puts his own interests ahead of those of his son, no matter how he appeases his conscience by telling himself how good a father he was to give his son so much, more than he had as a child.
Another example, this time from the other group, might be the businessman who takes time out of his work week to mentor school kids--or even one child--so that the children have examples of good role models other than their own parent(s). Many other adults belong to service organizations in their communities where they volunteer many hours each year to benefit certain groups or individuals with needs they can't otherwise meet. They help, others benefit.
We have one group who loves themselves first, another who loves others more. You likely know many of each type. You may even have friends of both types. "Love" may be a strong word for people for whom love is, essentially, a business arrangement.
To put this into clearer perspective, let's take an extreme example of a life crisis. Let's say a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or tornado destroys one or more distribution centres for electricity in your area. It will take weeks, maybe months, before power is restored to your home and every other home, business, factory, recreation hall and other gathering place within 500 kilometres of where you live.
At crisis times, we all need allies. It's the time when everyone should pull together. In this scenario, which group of people would you rather have as your allies, the self-interested ones or the ones who willingly share and think of others before themselves?
That's easy to answer, you may say. Choose the group who will help you most. That extreme example was only to give perspective. Life is filled with all kinds of situations of a less critical nature in which we could use help from others. You might have a flat tire on the freeway and your cell phone battery is dead. If someone were to stop to help you, which group would you expect the helper to come from?
Some people can't make it in life. For many reasons, they have fallen into a pit of problems from which they can't extract themselves. They lose their job, can't pay their mortgage, get hassled by credit card companies, and so on. No matter what they do, they can't manage to put their ducks in line.
We have welfare (also known as social assistance) to help them. But for how long? If they do not have the necessary work skills, attitude and work ethic to get and hold a job, it could be years before they can pay their way in life again, if ever. Somehow they didn't get what they needed while they were in school, including life skills that could help them to survive in times of crisis.
They often live in the poorest quality of housing, maybe it reeks of the urine of past occupants or harbours cockroaches or has plumbing that works only sporadically. Or all of the aforementioned. It's not pleasant to be inside, especially in summer, so they sit outside with their beverage of choice, often beer.
That's where they are when some people see them and complain that "we pay our taxes so these people can sit around home all day and drink beer." Have you ever heard one of those complainers express a desire to change places with those welfare "whores" they despise? If life is so easy for welfare recipients, why would more people not want to change places with them?
We have many people in our society who, for a variety of reasons (none of them pleasant), must spend many years in prison. The prisons allow the inmates to work, for which they receive a little money (a dollar a day, for example) they can use to buy small treats for themselves. They often have access to libraries and classes to upgrade their education. And they can watch television.
Setting aside the discussion of the mood we might expect prisoners to be in (remember, they must associate with staff members who are outsiders to them) if we kept them confined full time in mind-numbing violence-inducing cells, we have people who condemn prisons for being places of luxury. "It's a great life and we pay for it!" Have you ever heard one person who seriously would trade places with a prisoner for any given period of time? Of course not. They know life is not luxurious or comfy in prison, no matter what they say.
Some people want to help those confined to prisons. Some want to help those who are stuck on welfare because they can't figure out how to dig themselves out of it. Some want to throw a lifeline to people who have lost their jobs or whose homes have been lost to fire. Or people whose life mates have walked out, leaving them alone enough to want to end their lives. Or people of an age they should retire because their health is not so good, but they can't because they have lost their life savings to some scam or stock market downturn.
They are the helpers. They are the "liberals" who want to "help out every freeloader who can't be bothered to work enough to earn a proper living." Even though not one of the self-first complainers would ever offer to change places with a person with a problem, they condemn those who would help. Because helping others does not help themselves and they are always more important than any others.
Those helpers are the ones you want as allies in a crisis. Ironically, the helpers will, in a crisis, help even the most self-interested lamers.
Returning now to our opening quote from Heinlein about love and jealousy, does it become obvious to you which group of people are likely to become jealous and which more apt to love others?
If you have a mate who is jealous, now you know why. That mate is not someone who would lay down their life for you in an emergency, no matter if you would for them or not.
Study your friends, workmates and neighbours and you will see which are the selfish ones and which the generous helpers. Some love themselves first and foremost, some love others more.
Remember, you will eventually have a crisis in your own life. Cultivate the helpers now so that they will support you when you need them. That's what friends do, though they serve much different functions most of the time.
The old saying goes: to make a friend you need first to be a friend. If you want to have a helping kind of person as a friend, you will need to make friendly gestures to that person first if they are not already your friend.
In other words, help someone else now who needs your help. That person needs a friend now and will be your friend later when you need him or her. Maybe. The ones who become friends will far outweigh in benefits to you those who take what you give and forget about you.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to raise their children to be helpers, to be able to make friends, to be self sufficient yet comfortable with interdependence.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Robert Heinlein: un-American Rebel With A Cause
Robert Heinlein: un-American Rebel With A Cause
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein, American science-fiction author (1907-1988)
That's outrageous! Why, look at what our experts have done for us.
Our expert chemists have created chemical fertilizers and pesticides to put on our agricultural crops so megafarming agribusinesses can produce lots more food than our ancestors ever dreamed of. And diseases and weaknesses such as diabetes, allergies and heart disease at rates never previously imagined because our bodies can't cope with the chemical attacks over long periods of time. (Tests are usually over three years, seldom longer, as if nothing could affect our health over a long period of time.)
Other expert chemists, medical specialists, have developed drugs to rescue us from the ravages of those chemicals, which have also made their way into our air (over half a million kinds) and our drinking water (over 300,000 kinds).
Our expert medical doctors happily prescribe those drugs for the rest of our lives so we can stay on our feet and work harder than our ancestors ever dreamed. And, so they won't forget what to prescribe, many of them accept reminder gifts from the pharmaceutical companies. A comfortable arrangement for the experts.
Our business specialists, MBAs tucked neatly in safe locations, figure out how to manufacture things to make our lives easier. Our communications specialists devise ways to sell those products to us through advertising, making us believe we need stuff we seldom use. The facts that our lives are not easier, that we have more stress than any previous generation, take more drugs than any previous generation and buy so much we don't need that we have to have yard sales and to give other stuff to "needy" people in neighbouring countries is never mentioned, so we forget. (Donations by Americans are often sold in Canada, and vice versa, a fact seldom noted publicly.)
Our expert architects design skyscrapers so well that most people who have to work in them have their health compromised. Sick building syndrome--no one knows how it will affect our length of life--stands as a hallmark of modern architectural progress.
Our legal specialists are so good at defending bad guys with cash to spread around that few go to prison and the ones who do have short stays. Our lawyers have reputations worse than used car salesmen of the old days. Their accounting specialists advise them how to Hoover every available dollar from ordinary folks who know so little of the skills of relationships they don't know how to stay married, so little about money management that more cash goes out than comes in for too many people and so little about getting along with neighbours that whole television courtroom series have cropped up to document the conflicts and allow the rest of us to be voyeurs.
Our specialists have made us the great Western World are persuaded those who are not part of it envy to such extremes that some of them want to murder us because of it.
We are, in short, the epitome of progress. We have our specialists to thank.
Let's take a moment to consider the parts of their lives that our experts and specialists don't want us to think about. Would you expect to see one of them changing a flat tire? No, because they have roadside assistance insurance. Or is it because they have no idea how to change a tire? Or because they fear getting their hands dirty. Ask one.
Most pay little attention to their diet until they are diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, have a stroke or are told point blank by their doctors that they are obese or dangerously overweight such that their lives are at risk. They know little about nutrition, what their bodies need to stay healthy.
Most have no idea how to fix their own computers, even how to keep dust out of them, and many don't even keep their security programs up to date. They don't change the oil in their own cars because they don't know how. They can't change a washer in a leaky tap/faucet. They have to call a plumber when their toilet plugs up because they have no idea how to use a plunger (or how to avoid plugging the toilet in the first place).
They don't plant their own gardens where they can grow pesticide-free and chemical-free veggies and fruit because they "don't have time." In fact, most don't have any idea how to tend a garden.
On the other hand, a high school dropout may know how to do all of these things and hundreds more. Does this make the dropout more fit for life in the 21st century than the highly educated person? Not necessarily. But maybe.
Consider this possibility. Something happens that causes the power to go out in your part of the world and you learn that it will be out for a whole year or more. Would you rather have the high school dropout who has had to survive by the seat of his pants for many years as an ally or one of the experts or specialists mentioned earlier in this article?
Of course you assume that such a thing will never happen, even though a terrorist bomb could accomplish it. The 30 million people of the US state of California believe their state will never sink into the Pacific either, even though scientists have been warning it would happen for years from a split of earth's tectonic plates along the San Andreas fault. Many Americans are unaware that what is known as a super volcano is brewing under Yellowstone Park, even though a blow that would darken the skies of the world possibly for years is overdue. These things can happen. Eventually one will. Some call it Armageddon, but it's really just nature in action.
Am I suggesting that high school and post secondary education is worthless or counter productive? Not at all. What is needed is a change of focus in our elementary and high schools. We need to teach children life skills, not stuff they know they will never need or use. How much do you remember or use of what you learned in high school? Would you have willing traded much of it for some of the life skills you have learned by experience since then?
Adolescents and young adults have trouble in high school often because they see how useless what they are forced to learn is and will be to them in the future. They know they need to learn life lessons--that desire to learn is instinctive--but they don't know what those lessons are or how to get them. They rebel. They drop out. They take drugs or alcohol, get tattoos, listen to music that could destroy their hearing, and so on. Eventually, most of them learn the lessons they need, get back on track and become upstanding citizens. But not quickly enough. Those lessons often come the hard way, by making mistake after mistake and learning from them. A few don't make it.
As radical as Robert Heinlein's suggestion in our opening quote seemed when you first read it, it makes more sense now. We have time to teach these life lessons and more. We simply need to eliminate what was better suited for 18th century schools than it is for today's world. In the 18th century kids learned life lessons at home. Today's kids can't learn them at home because many of their parents don't know the life lessons themselves to teach. With both parents working to earn enough to buy the fun things of life as well as what we believe are necessities, we need someone to teach the life lessons that used to be taught at home.
They aren't being taught at school today because the curriculum is too crowded with other (often unnecessary) stuff. They aren't being taught at home. And our young people experience more problems at school and outside of it than any previous generation.
This is a simple connect-the-dots problem and solution. By the way, I still don't know how to set a bone, but I can do most of the rest of what Heinlein suggested. It took me six decades of life to learn these lessons. I should have been able to learn them in school, before I needed them. You too.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to understand guidebook (with a threatening sounding title) for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to manage their lives. It includes specific lessons.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein, American science-fiction author (1907-1988)
That's outrageous! Why, look at what our experts have done for us.
Our expert chemists have created chemical fertilizers and pesticides to put on our agricultural crops so megafarming agribusinesses can produce lots more food than our ancestors ever dreamed of. And diseases and weaknesses such as diabetes, allergies and heart disease at rates never previously imagined because our bodies can't cope with the chemical attacks over long periods of time. (Tests are usually over three years, seldom longer, as if nothing could affect our health over a long period of time.)
Other expert chemists, medical specialists, have developed drugs to rescue us from the ravages of those chemicals, which have also made their way into our air (over half a million kinds) and our drinking water (over 300,000 kinds).
Our expert medical doctors happily prescribe those drugs for the rest of our lives so we can stay on our feet and work harder than our ancestors ever dreamed. And, so they won't forget what to prescribe, many of them accept reminder gifts from the pharmaceutical companies. A comfortable arrangement for the experts.
Our business specialists, MBAs tucked neatly in safe locations, figure out how to manufacture things to make our lives easier. Our communications specialists devise ways to sell those products to us through advertising, making us believe we need stuff we seldom use. The facts that our lives are not easier, that we have more stress than any previous generation, take more drugs than any previous generation and buy so much we don't need that we have to have yard sales and to give other stuff to "needy" people in neighbouring countries is never mentioned, so we forget. (Donations by Americans are often sold in Canada, and vice versa, a fact seldom noted publicly.)
Our expert architects design skyscrapers so well that most people who have to work in them have their health compromised. Sick building syndrome--no one knows how it will affect our length of life--stands as a hallmark of modern architectural progress.
Our legal specialists are so good at defending bad guys with cash to spread around that few go to prison and the ones who do have short stays. Our lawyers have reputations worse than used car salesmen of the old days. Their accounting specialists advise them how to Hoover every available dollar from ordinary folks who know so little of the skills of relationships they don't know how to stay married, so little about money management that more cash goes out than comes in for too many people and so little about getting along with neighbours that whole television courtroom series have cropped up to document the conflicts and allow the rest of us to be voyeurs.
Our specialists have made us the great Western World are persuaded those who are not part of it envy to such extremes that some of them want to murder us because of it.
We are, in short, the epitome of progress. We have our specialists to thank.
Let's take a moment to consider the parts of their lives that our experts and specialists don't want us to think about. Would you expect to see one of them changing a flat tire? No, because they have roadside assistance insurance. Or is it because they have no idea how to change a tire? Or because they fear getting their hands dirty. Ask one.
Most pay little attention to their diet until they are diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, have a stroke or are told point blank by their doctors that they are obese or dangerously overweight such that their lives are at risk. They know little about nutrition, what their bodies need to stay healthy.
Most have no idea how to fix their own computers, even how to keep dust out of them, and many don't even keep their security programs up to date. They don't change the oil in their own cars because they don't know how. They can't change a washer in a leaky tap/faucet. They have to call a plumber when their toilet plugs up because they have no idea how to use a plunger (or how to avoid plugging the toilet in the first place).
They don't plant their own gardens where they can grow pesticide-free and chemical-free veggies and fruit because they "don't have time." In fact, most don't have any idea how to tend a garden.
On the other hand, a high school dropout may know how to do all of these things and hundreds more. Does this make the dropout more fit for life in the 21st century than the highly educated person? Not necessarily. But maybe.
Consider this possibility. Something happens that causes the power to go out in your part of the world and you learn that it will be out for a whole year or more. Would you rather have the high school dropout who has had to survive by the seat of his pants for many years as an ally or one of the experts or specialists mentioned earlier in this article?
Of course you assume that such a thing will never happen, even though a terrorist bomb could accomplish it. The 30 million people of the US state of California believe their state will never sink into the Pacific either, even though scientists have been warning it would happen for years from a split of earth's tectonic plates along the San Andreas fault. Many Americans are unaware that what is known as a super volcano is brewing under Yellowstone Park, even though a blow that would darken the skies of the world possibly for years is overdue. These things can happen. Eventually one will. Some call it Armageddon, but it's really just nature in action.
Am I suggesting that high school and post secondary education is worthless or counter productive? Not at all. What is needed is a change of focus in our elementary and high schools. We need to teach children life skills, not stuff they know they will never need or use. How much do you remember or use of what you learned in high school? Would you have willing traded much of it for some of the life skills you have learned by experience since then?
Adolescents and young adults have trouble in high school often because they see how useless what they are forced to learn is and will be to them in the future. They know they need to learn life lessons--that desire to learn is instinctive--but they don't know what those lessons are or how to get them. They rebel. They drop out. They take drugs or alcohol, get tattoos, listen to music that could destroy their hearing, and so on. Eventually, most of them learn the lessons they need, get back on track and become upstanding citizens. But not quickly enough. Those lessons often come the hard way, by making mistake after mistake and learning from them. A few don't make it.
As radical as Robert Heinlein's suggestion in our opening quote seemed when you first read it, it makes more sense now. We have time to teach these life lessons and more. We simply need to eliminate what was better suited for 18th century schools than it is for today's world. In the 18th century kids learned life lessons at home. Today's kids can't learn them at home because many of their parents don't know the life lessons themselves to teach. With both parents working to earn enough to buy the fun things of life as well as what we believe are necessities, we need someone to teach the life lessons that used to be taught at home.
They aren't being taught at school today because the curriculum is too crowded with other (often unnecessary) stuff. They aren't being taught at home. And our young people experience more problems at school and outside of it than any previous generation.
This is a simple connect-the-dots problem and solution. By the way, I still don't know how to set a bone, but I can do most of the rest of what Heinlein suggested. It took me six decades of life to learn these lessons. I should have been able to learn them in school, before I needed them. You too.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to understand guidebook (with a threatening sounding title) for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to manage their lives. It includes specific lessons.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
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