Changing Opinions

Sitting on the Fence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How often do you change your mind about something?

I don’t mean having difficulty deciding something and bouncing between a couple of options while doing so. I mean, once you’ve made you mind up, how often do you really change it?

If you’re like most people, the answer is, “not often”. Most people try to make big decisions in a moderately rational way. The bigger the decision, the more they try to apply logic to solve it. Small decisions like whether to order a latte or americano today, tend to be left to the more primitive parts of our brain. For the big issues, though, we like to go through a vaguely scientific process of asking a question, acquiring relevant information, balancing the information against preferred outcomes, and deciding what to do. Trouble is, most big issues are big because they’re difficult to solve logically, which means we end up having to make a final “gut instinct” judgement call in order to finally decide our opinion about the problem facing us. We end up using a heuristic rather than purely algorithmic approach; I’ve discussed such Wicked Problems before.

Heuristic problem-solving is inherently fraught with uncertainty; it’s based on a pattern-recognition approach, the validity of which varies according to the mind of the person applying the heuristic filter. Put simply, the wiser the person, the more likely they are to reach a correct result. But if the problem is truly wicked, then one can never test the result, and so we can never definitively prove who is wisest.

There are many proxy markers for wisdom, including reported or perceived happiness, wealth, position and/or influence in the eyes of others, and how well words stand the test of time. None of these is entirely satisfactory, for self-evident reasons, which means that definining wisdom itself ultimately becomes a matter of consensus and opinion. This is clearly troubling if one is concerned about creating an objective yardstick by which to measure human progress.

However, it is empowering if you are more concerned about making changes that chime in with your own personal opinion. Firstly, it allows you to define the frame of reference for success and failure. Secondly, it promotes uncertainty in other people’s decision-making, creating a space for you to influence their judgement. And lastly – if you are interested in making large-scale rather than personal changes – it provides you with a long-term tool by which to modify the broader cultural perception of what is ethically correct. As a culture, we have even given a name to this last process: Politics.

Politics is the art of persuading a sufficiently large number of people that your opinions are culturally correct. This actually applies as much to a tyranny as it does to the kinds of limited/representative democracies most readers will live in. It’s just that the violence and speed of the mechanisms of changing government that varies: revolution in the former; elections in the latter. But more than this, far-sighted politicians also understand that the optimal way of persuading people of their rightness is to modify the cultural mindset within which the choice is made. Alter the frame of reference, and you can ensure a specific answer will always emerge. This is also something tyrannies and democracies share, with only superficial differences between the two: tyrannies tend to use coercive force and single-party elections; democracies use advertising and other softer propaganda like manipulating the flow of information.

All the above is no more than I would expect an average teenager to grasp, and I actually think many do (at least on an unconscious level), even if the usual response is anomic cynicism rather than recognising the empowering potential. The more thoughtful will recognise another implication, however: even quite severe unpopularity in the short-term is irrelevant, provided you can sufficiently alter the mindset of a large enough group of people to influence their long-term cultural mindset in your favour to protect your long-term survival. This applies to individual lives as much as it does to organisations and to political parties.

Coming full circle to the start of this post, changing someone’s mind is very difficult in the short-term. Instead, you have to alter the way they make decisions. The more time you have to do this, the easier it becomes. This is partly what accounts for incumbency effect in politics: it’s harder to dislodge a known politician from a post than if two unknowns are fighting for the same position. It’s not usually that incumbents have really proven anything about whether they’re right or not; it’s just that they’ve become part of the mental furniture of voters. Even if they’re unpopular in some respects, the incumbent still usually retains a higher chance of retaining power than if they didn’t have that mindshare of reality. In a US Election year, it’s worth noting that this is a big part of the reason that most US Presidents tend to get re-elected for a second term, even if at mid-term it seems like they’re unpopular. UK politics frequently operates similarly: being in government allows you to craft the narrative in a much deeper way than being in opposition, and you can see it in many of the Budget 2012 changes being announced today (esp. personal tax statements, reducing reliefs & benefits and increasing personal allowances), despite the potential for some other changes to be unpopular in the short term. And even when the longer-term cycle of change occurs, political parties never reverse even a majority of changes imposed by their predecessors, no matter how vehemently they may have opposed them at time of their introduction.

Reality is like chewing gum: sticky but malleable.

The ultimate expression of this thesis of persuasion is that tactics should always be secondary to strategy, and that strategy should be guided by clear long-term insightful aims. Only that will allow you to gradually work on altering the perception of enough people for them to reach what you would consider correct decisions. Logic and argument is a poor convincer of anyone except a computer. Persuasion through modifying the frame of reference of the argument works much better on human beings. Next time you disagree with someone, or need to negotiate with them, remember these principles rather than attempting to argue with them. You won’t convince them today, but you might just change their mind tomorrow.

Archetypes, Stereotypes, and the Absence of Knowledge

Image via Wikipedia

All knowledge is ultimately self-referential, imbued with only such meaning as we choose to give it.

The archetype is a difficult idea to grasp within Jungian psychology. Archetypes are thought to exist within our psyche, being innately derived. Jung suggested that their existence is due to our connection with the collective unconscious, a broad sharing of the unconscious mind across humanity and across the aeons. While this can have spiritual overtones – and to Jung it likely did – it can also be interpreted using a less spiritual framework. Archetypes can be considered as a set of psychological memes passed down socioculturally through the generations, perhaps reinforced genetically by some basic similarities between all humans in terms of how our brains are neuroanatomically formed.

Archetypes include our Self – the person we both are and aim to be; the Shadow – those traits that lie hidden within ourselves, and often from ourselves; and the Anima/Animus – the part of our psyche that allows us to understand and communicate with the opposite sex. It’s also perhaps possible to consider our Persona – the person we project to others – as a form of archetype, although I consider it a simpler more superficial entity than the others mentioned.

When these archetypes come into contact with the world, a number of consistent mythic symbols are created to understand them. They have been referred to as symbols, motifs or archetypes-as-such. I like to think of them as Stereotypes. Stereotyping is often thought of as a bad thing these days, but in truth, the Stereotype has an important beneficial function. They are widely-held, over-simplified views but that also makes them very useful as a short-cut to understanding the world. Stereotypical forms of archetypes include the mythological motifs of the hero, the wise old man, the earth mother, and so on.

As we perceive the world around us, we do not process every situation as being fresh data. Consider: colours are not real; colour is a perception, or construct, based on the wavelength of photons hitting our retinas. Similarly, what we think of other people are also not actually real people; they are constructs based on the data we receive from those entities. We each possess a personalised understanding of who other people are, and what they mean. There is no objective reference yardstick by which to measure them. We interpret their existence both consciously through reason, and unconsciously through archetypes and stereotypes.

A careful reader might now suggest that if conscious thought and reason can allow interpretation, then this potentially provides a scientific approach to understanding. This is only true if reason itself is independent of archetypal influence. As our rules of reason are human constructs, we cannot be entirely certain that this is so. Munchhausen’s Trilemma (also known as Agrippa’s Trilemma) suggests that any line of reasoning can eventually be boiled down to one of three arguments: circular, regressive and axiomatic. Circular arguments depend on the theory and proof supporting each other, regressive arguments become a never-ending series of proofs, and axiomatic arguments are based on an assumption of correctness.

This is a difficult proposal to accept, but consider a child asking why the sky is blue. You could argue that the sky is blue because we have defined the colour we perceive it to be as blue: a circular argument that ends the debate but does not fundamentally answer the question. You could humour the child by discussing wavelengths of photons and the energy they carry, the effect that energy has on the retina, transduction mechanisms, post-processing of the transducted stimuli into perceptions, psychological constructs of perception, the concept of a construct, the meaning of a concept, and so on, without ever really getting to a final irrefutable proof. This regressive approach allows for a vast expansion of knowledge, but at some point you have to limit your field of study, or be trapped in a never-ending sequence of “but why?”s. Finally, the poor parent of our inquisitive child may simply snap, and say “it just is”: a mere axiomatic assertion of truth.

You can choose to accept any one of the three horns of trilemma and still carry out much productive work, but that does not answer the trilemma’s problem.

Jung’s archetypes and the stereotypes that result from them could be conceived of as humanity’s practical solution to the trilemma. They give us a framework for understanding ourselves, each other, and the ideas and concepts we create, without us ending up in a never-ending morass of “unknowability”. Of course, archetypal theory is in itself just as trapped by the dilemma as is any other idea (and indeed, is the trilemma itself, if you want to give yourself a headache). But it does allow us to think about who we are in a practical way, and consider who we might become.

Buddhists have the concept of sunyata or “emptiness”, which seems to my limited understanding of the term to be a similar concept. It suggests a middle way between the nihilism and anomie of nothing being provably real and the illogicallity of considering what we think of as real being necessarily true. It hints at a way of finding meaning in the emptiness by embracing it and finding oneself in that void. Jung might call that individuation, the ultimate manifestation of one’s potential self.

All knowledge is ultimately self-referential, imbued with only such meaning as we choose to give it. And what a wonderful opportunity and privilege of our humanity that is.

Personal Identity: Form and Content meet

Viktor & Rolf exploring extreme content in classic form, photo by Blommers & Schumms for GQ Style Italy

How do we define our personal identity?

A recent theme I’ve explored has been to understand personality through Jungian typology (and the later Myers-Brigg typology which is heavily based on Jung’s Psychological Types). Our personality governs how we perceive ourselves and how we interact with others. In that sense, it’s possible to conceive of personality as being the Form of our personal identity. It is the essential shape and outline of who we are, but lacks the detailed depth that comes with what we say and the actions we take. Those words and deeds are the Content. If Form and Content come together in harmony, a clear sense of personal identity – our personal brand – emerges. It is a brand that will make sense to others because it makes sense to ourselves.

This is a powerful and flexible way of viewing identity as it allows for active practical interventions to adjust the brand to our liking. The first step is to identify our natural Form; our core personality. Introspection and personality tests like MBTI can help with this. Secondly, we can determine whether we are living our lives (the Content) in harmony with that Form. For instance, are we in a job or relationship that naturally complements our personality, or are we trying to blend immiscible liquids together? Finally, we can adjust the Content to better fit in with the Form by making changes to our lifestyle that allow us to maximise our strengths and minimise our weaknesses. If need be, Form can also be nudged slightly in a different direction, but Content is almost always much simpler to change. It is easier to fill an amphora with wine instead of oil than it is to create a completely new vessel.

I often relate psychological principles to clothes on this blog but in this case, it was clothing that led me to this line of thinking. Consider a man wearing a tailored suit. The basic form is set by the core nature of these items; a jacket and trousers. However, the form comes with individual variation: number of buttons, vents, lapel size, degree of shoulder padding, gorge height and so on. The content is also highly variable: the fabric material, weight, pattern, colour and so forth.  A suit with conservative form will naturally take to conservative content while a suit with fashion-forward form may find its optimal expression with equally unusual content.

However, this is not always so. Sometimes a conservatively cut suit can be combined with an unusual colour to create a strikingly eccentric look that is made all the more interesting because of those conservative boundaries of form. And sometimes an aggressively-styled suit is rendered more pleasing to the eye by using a conservative cloth. Different designers play with these two continua to define their own brand identities. For example, Thom Browne often uses conservative classic cloth with an extreme shrunken form, whereas Ozwald Boateng has been known for vividly leery colours on a fairly classic suit. Tom Ford sometimes ventures to wild extremes on both axes with his heavily stylized suits in bold plaids, whereas Brooks Brothers is often conservative in cut and cloth.

Form and Content combine to define our personal identity. If yours seems unclear, identify your natural Form and then choose the Content that harmonises best with it to suit the identity you want to project.

The Importance of Tolerance

 

Passenger crying after the Moscow airport bombing, photo credit Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

There has been a preponderance of Jung in my blog recently, caused by re-reading Psychological Types over the past week. As I type, news reaches us of a fresh terrorist atrocity, this time in Russia’s largest airport, with a suicide bomber killing at least 35. I find Jung’s words relevant:

[speaking of the superficiality of most human relationships]

A rapport of this kind is by far the most frequent; it rests on mutual projection, which later becomes the source of many misunderstandings.

[later]

As a rule, partisans of either side attack each other purely externally, always seeking out the chinks of their opponent’s armour. Squabbles of this kind are usually fruitless. It would be of considerably greater value if the dispute were transferred to the psychological realm, from where it arose in the first place.

A real understanding can, in my view, be reached only when the diversity of psychological premises is accepted.

I think Jung is trying say that so much of what we commonly think of as disputes about facts, possessions, territories, economic systems and ideologies are fundamentally disputes about ways of thinking; about personalities. This is not so much a clash of worldviews as it is a clash of ways of identifying those worldviews. Because most daily human interaction – and therefore political interaction – is focused on the superficial, true engagement with the other person is very rare, and violent clashes about proxy issues result instead. Most of the time these violent clashes remain social or verbal, and so pass largely unnoticed apart from an abundance of hurt feelings or reaffirmed prejudices.

Sadly, for Russia’s air travellers today (as it was those present at Gabrielle Giffords’ meeting recently), the violence can become physical.

Jung is an advocate of tolerance through wisdom, encouraging attempts to see the world through the psychology of others, to prevent such catastrophic outcomes.

Hope, Happiness and the Potential of Man

Friedrich Schiller, Image via Wikipedia

It is commonly suggested that Man can be characterised as either an Introvert or an Extrovert. The validity of making such a distinction rests on the potential utility such taxonomy may bring; I am not interested in abstruse cataloguing without meaningful purpose. Does the attempt to divide Man into two broad groups help us understand him and the challenges he faces? Will it make him happy?

Carl Jung, drawing partly on Friedrich Schiller’s fertile correspondence with Goethe, suggested that the conscious mind of the introvert is driven largely by his ego (his internal sense of self)  while his sense of “relatedness” (affective/emotional responses) to objects in the external world is diminished. The extrovert, by contrast, is captivated by the world and his relationship to it, and the ego becomes secondary to this. Thus, “the extrovert discovers himself in the fluctuating and the changeable; the introvert in the constant”. Affectivity is “positively painful” to the introvert, while for the extrovert “it must on no account be missed”.

There is no better statement of this difference in approach to the world than that expressed when Schiller, the archetypal introvert, wrote to extroverted Goethe: “You have a kingdom to rule, and I only a somewhat numerous family of ideas which I would like to expand into a little universe”.

The introvert feels driven to externalise all the ideas he possesses within his mind, and make them manifest in the outside world. The extrovert yearns to internalise the world and consume it utterly. At their extremes, therefore, both the introvert and extrovert are autocrats, ruthlessly desiring absolute complete control, and unable to settle for nothing less.

A crucial point is that these drives and responses are functions of the conscious mind; they are how we overtly interpret in the world. But our opposite, inferior, nature can be found in the relatively submerged subconscious mind. So the extrovert finds harmony not just when emotionally exposed to a changing and vibrant external world ecology, but when he can come to intellectual terms with the impact and meaning of those emotions upon him. And the introvert waxes lyrical when he feels the emotional pleasure of appreciating an elegant rational system.

It is when the conscious drive moves in the same direction as the subconscious that this true pleasure results. Unfortunately, many of the systems in which we function do not encourage this dual approach to life. Schiller noted this, Jung remarked that it was worse by his time, and I may be bold enough to suggest that the situation has deteriorated further since. Jung said, “the differentiated function procures the possibility of a collective existence, but not that satisfaction and joie de vivre which the development of individual values alone can give”. Or, the need to earn money means that people gravitate to the roles and professions they are superficially productive at; the jobs that make the most use of their introverted or extraverted nature. They do these jobs to the practical satisfaction of their superiors, but not to the satisfaction of their inner self which demands more than this, and so they are unhappy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, being a crisper wordsmith than I, phrased it thus: “You must choose between making a Man or a Citizen; you cannot make both at once”.

If both conscious and subconscious drives exists, both must be satisfied for our minds to be at peace. The challenge is therefore to find ways of living that allow for the exploration of this dual, yet intertwined, nature of our psyche. Schiller proposed that “creative play” or “wise play” (such as that involved in appreciating or making Art, or Beauty) would enable this. Both the extrovert and the introvert can express their inferior, subsconscious, selves through this process. Indeed, Jung postulated that this process is a conduit to expressing an inner symbolic representation of our true (whole) self.

The trouble is that to be wise when playing suggests the requirement of insight into what the end-point of our play should be. And that is a very circular argument as it is the creative play itself that is supposed to align our conscious and subconscious minds in this fashion. It is suggestive of an iterative process of incrementally improving wisdom and insight, whereby the act of play opens new avenues of thought, which in turn suggest new types of play, and so on.

It is worth pausing here to note that most people are not yet ready to even begin to play wisely. So Jung warns: “for them seriousness must occupy the middle place instead of play”; they must first think about their rational and emotional natures and the tension between them, before they are ready to use creativity to begin to meld the different parts together. This again reinforces the value of insight, and encourages self-reflection.

But if one is ready, the potential reward is individuation and self-actualisation. True individuality results from the ability to both be, and be separate from, the two opposing functions of our conscious and unconscious minds. Interaction between individuals would only occur when creative play was the aim of the meeting.

Is this achievable?

I suggest not in this lifetime! To be so fully cognisant and accepting of ourselves may theoretically be possible, but suggests to me such a differentiation from humanity as to be divinity.

But think of this: Man is the only beast to even contemplate such heights. We have the gall to wish to strive beyond ourselves, to fulfil our ultimate potential, to become god-like. The only collective community that would satisfy us would be the liberty of Mount Olympus. That is the truly remarkable thing about our species, and why typology and psychology are not mere taxonomy, but tools we can use to understand our potential.

It is this hope within us that fires our creativity. Eternal happiness may be the ultimate reward for all that effort, but for now, it is enough to know that splendid things will result from just the creative potential.

Wandering the Desert

At least three world religions were born in the Desert.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all owe their origins to the baking heat and sparse environs of the desert landscape. Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, Mohammed; they all had their greatest revelations when alone in desert (or at least very barren) landscapes. Depending on their leaning, the religously-minded would suggest that this is because communion with God is only possible either when Man divests himself of physical distractions and so can focus on spiritual matters, or when he undergoes sufficient physical and emotional turmoil to turn to God for salvation.

A secularist reading of the pattern would suggest that these individuals – already unusual or eccentric, and possibly predisposed to odd beliefs and experiences – sought out solitude because that predisposition led them to be dissatisfied with a mundane life. And then in that harsh environment, they became sufficiently physically distressed to become delirious, an experience they interpreted as spiritual in nature.

Whichever reading is true (and in the end, the answer that satisfies you most boils down to which interpretative model you have most faith in), wandering the desert has acquired symbolic significance as a rite of passage. Whether literal or metaphorical, the idea that Man has to separate himself from the rest of the world to achieve higher purpose is a theme common to both religion and mythology, as well as being present in several schools of philosophy.

My previous entry elicited an intriguing comment from Touch2Touch which tessellated elegantly with some of my own pre-existing thoughts, and inspired me to write a post on the theme of separation from others as a result of finding contentment, security and tranquillity in one’s own internal assessment of any given situation.

Social networks (using the term in its broadest sense, not the e-variety) can certainly help those who feel lost. They provide a means of temporarily laying off responsibility for one’s own actions, decision-making and emotional stability to others. Support systems can be vital in this context, but I always find myself cringing when people talk of supportive social networks in a longer-term sense. To me, this attitude belies the essential meaning of the word “support”. Before wanting support, the key question must surely be: “support to do what?”

I would suggest that the end goal is not to be permanently supported by others, constantly having to use friendships and acquaintances to buttress your own emotional and intellectual needs, but to feel strong and comfortable enough in one’s own skin to be independent of that need.

This requires uncommon clarity of thought and purpose, as well as an unusual degree of insight. It is also unlikely to result without a intense amount of self-confidence in the method by which these individuals assess the world. This will seem to border on arrogance, except that observers will notice the world bending around these individuals, moulding itself to their will, rather than hitting them head-on in a violent crash as inevitably happens to the genuinely arrogant.

Wandering the desert is not so painful for these individuals as it would be for others. They have an internal moral compass that generally points them in a direction they’re happy with, and seem to carry around a portable oasis that nourishes and refreshes them when need arises. They enjoy meeting fellow travellers; companionship and hospitality are good traditions and can bring fresh news. And sometimes they even travel together for a while with the more pleasant and wise of their fellow nomads. But eventually the call of the empty dune summons them back to a solitary journey.

The great unanswered question should be: “what lapse of thought called the prophets of world religion back from the desert to commune once more with an unwise and ungrateful population?”

Risk and Reward

Human beings cope best with causal black-and-white relationships: “if I eat that bright-red berry, I get sick”; “if I see a sabre-toothed tiger chasing me, I must run”; “if I have a job and a family; I will be happy”. They are much worse at understanding probabilities and weighing up opportunity cost: “red berries (and families) can either be tasty or poisonous; if I take the risk of having one at random, I need to know how debilitating the poison might be, before judging whether the potential benefit of being lucky enough to get a tasty one is worth it”.

This more nuanced view of the world requires a high level of both insight and cognitive processing, and an acceptance of uncertainty and risk. Most people can intellectually grasp the necessity of such an approach but recoil from implementing it in their daily lives. It is much simpler to operate under certainties, and most people’s daily lives are so busy that they lack the opportunity for reflection.

Modern society reinforces this intellectual laziness. We cram a vast quantity of multi-tasked activity into a day, and still feel the need for more. Adults have become infantilised, desperate for the reassurance of an umbilical connection to an omniscient and omnipresent mother, except this parental figure is now the disembodied social network of the internet, mediated via our phones and laptops, by Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and other media.

I note in passing that Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, has just been named Time’s Person of the Year, which reflects how pervasive his worldview of “connectivity = benefit” has become.

The similarity of our relationship to the internet to that of the child to the parent under Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and Mary Ainsworth‘s Strange Situation experiments is striking. When separated from the connection to maternal, even womb-like, presence of the internet, even adults show all the signs of a child bereft of a maternal presence: feeling somewhat lost, alone, unsettled, uncertain and ultimately glad of reconnection. Anyone who has lost their mobile phone will be familiar with this phenomenon.

This child-like regression shows that we have ceded more and more active processing of the world to intemediaries, and now expect those systems to solve our problems for us. Our willingness to take personal responsibility and balance risk against reward has diminished. Nowhere is this more striking in our collective response to the risk of terrorist atrocity. Since 9/11, there has been an implicit assumption that preventing another terrorist attack has overriding importance.

This is absurd. Terrorism is a fact of life, and its probability of occurence cannot be reduced to zero. Reducing its risk comes at a cost, both financial and societal. We recently saw this in the furore about airport security measures such as body-scanning and pat-downs. Defenders of the policy always fell back on a variant of “we must do everything we can to protect our skies” without acknowledging that this simply isn’t true. A more accurate statement would be “we must do everything we can to protect our skies, providing that doing so doesn’t damage our ability to live our lives freely any more than we as a society are willing to accept”.

In other words, when judging how much security is required, one needs to quantity the extent of the damage caused by 9/11, and compare that to the small but cumulative damage caused by irritating large numbers of passengers. Quantifying these matters is complex, and touches upon the difficulty of assigning worth to non-tangibles, something I discussed yesterday. The refrain of “if it saves one life, it’s worth it” is plainly false, as if that were true, the way to achieve it would be to ban all air travel completely.

IATA is now planning the introduction of a much more sensible, risk/reward based approach to passenger screening. It sounds a far better way to deal with the issue than existing systems, but when it goes wrong – and no system can be perfect, as the risk is always higher than zero – it will face criticism that “we didn’t do enough” and the temptation will again be to add more layers, rather than deciding what level of risk is acceptable.

Leaving air travel aside, the more fundamental point is that the best way to progress as an intelligent society would be to encourage the understanding of probability, risk and opportunity cost. Not to mention encouraging independence of thought and a willingness to take personal responsibility for one’s actions. I have my doubts as to whether a critical mass of the population will do so. As rewarding as it is, such liberty is also frightening and that may be a step too far for most.

What are you worth?

Image via Wikipedia

How do we define value? What makes one thing more valuable than another? And does that logic apply to human beings?

These questions hinge on a deeper question about reality. If reality is just a sum of human constructs – an agreed consensus framework – then value itself must also be subjective and ultimately a question of mutual consent. If reality is objectively true – if it exists independent of human perception – then it should be possible to use the framework of that higher reality to determine what is valuable and what is not.

Fundamentally, this is an unanswerable question, so I prefer to short-circuit it. There may or may not be a higher reality, but because I am human all I can know about reality is limited by my own perceptions, and the same is true for each living being on this planet. Therefore, even if there is a higher truth, humans have no objective way of assessing whether they recognise it correctly, so it is better and more practical for all concerned to be operate within the lower, subjective, consensus model of reality.

In this model, each of us brings to the table a unique perspective on the world. Reality is the net sum of all those perspective, weighted by our relative abilities to influence other people’s perspectives. The value of something is determined by the sum total of the world’s opinion on its value. This is a very circular proposition, as if something has traditionally been highly valued, it will tend to remain so. If it has traditionally been valued lowly, it would take a paradigm shift (e.g. a revolution) for its higher value to be recognised by a critical mass of humanity.

Thus, gold is valuable because it has been traditionally used as a valuable material. Proxy reasons include its relative durability, its scarcity, and its difficulty of extraction, but the same is true of any number of different commodities, metal or otherwise. Gold is pre-eminent in the human psyche as a marker of value because it has culturally cemented its position over millenia of use.

Over more recent centuries, certain currencies like the US Dollar, the Japanese Yen, and the British Pound Sterling have also been highly valued as so-called “reserve currencies“, held in relative esteem over others not because of the intrinsic worth of the paper – or electrons – underlying their value, but because of faith in those countries’ ability to repay their debts consistently. Whether they all hold their positions into the future remains to be seen, given Moody’s downbeat assessment of the USA’s credit-worthiness and the general concerns over sovereign debt levels.

But ultimately, whether these currencies retain their value or not will be down to the same reason why gold retains its value or not: faith in the mutually agreed consensus on reality and the worth of objects within it. It sometimes scares people to think of our entire financial system being built upon pure faith, but it should not be a frightening proposition once you consider that our entire reality is also built upon pure faith in much the same way. Of course, some have gone insane pondering that latter issue…

If the mutual consent of a large enough group of people can determine value, that means that ideas, and not just commodities and currencies, can be differentially valued. One aspect of this is politics. Over the long-term, countries get the governments the majority of their populations want. That applies just as much to tyrannies as to democracies; it’s merely the way that governments change that varies. Democracies are more sensitive to changes in large-scale public opinion, but it really is only a matter of degree.

If commodities, currencies and ideas can be valued in this way, it is not a significant stretch to realise that humans can also be compared, both as individuals and as groups. Some readers will be appalled by this, and point out that this line of thinking led to atrocities like the Holocaust and similar episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They are right, of course. But the process of considering one person as more valuable than another still happens. For instance, on a small scale, family members and mutual friends generally value each others’ happiness higher than they do a stranger’s. If all humans were equally worthy in their eyes, this would not happen.

What then is the counterweight to prevent genocide?

Merely that a large mass of humanity also consensually agrees that despite our implicit measuring of value of one person versus another, we also choose as a population to limit the impact of that value judgement on smaller groups in society. This is a paper-thin protection against abuse, but all our societies can ultimately do.

On a less dramatic, but perhaps even more meaningful, scale, these relative valuations of one human’s life against another underpin the field of cost-utility analysis, which is increasingly used by governments, agencies and companies worldwide, to determine how best to spend money in order to maximise value. It’s all about getting the biggest bang for your buck for the most people for the greatest amount of time… and if you think about that carefully, you’ll realise that will always persistently work to the advantage of some groups relative to others. For instance, in healthcare, such QALY assessments will consistently benefit younger people relative to the elderly.

So, value is both mutable and dependent on mutual consent. Reality is as thin and fragile as a pane of glass, and it is only because we add our panes together that a viable edifice can be constructed. Our societies implictly use this model of value to determine the relative worth of ideas, objects, people and even money itself. And they will only value us as individuals or groups if we can convince a sufficient mass of others that we are indeed worthwhile.

If that sounds too tiring a task, the only alternative is limiting contact with society to necessity and protecting one’s isolated position by accumulating sufficient quantities of things that society already finds valuable.

The themes of this post are explored further in the next two entries:

• Risk and Reward
• Wandering the Desert

Ironic by name…

… anti-knife campaigner DJ Ironik has been stabbed by muggers…

Source

OK, so technically it may not be irony, but does fit the common usage of the term. Or, as I prefer to call it, The Morissette Definition.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether situational irony like this is indeed irony or whether you prefer to stick to the original Greek definition of the term. You can do that while suppressing the evil chuckle that crossed your mind while reading the article and noting his name and the situation.

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A Guided Tour of Dreams

I have been busy the past two days, which both explains the lack of posts here and provides the foundation for my entry today. Last night I had a pleasant dinner with friends I first met while working my last job before leaving full-time employment in favour of my current lifestyle. It was fun to catch up with them and I indulged in rather more food and wine than usual which led to some intriguing dreams overnight.

I am not a complete believer in dream analysis but the unique nature of dreams can be a good jumping-off point to spark discussion about one’s current psychological state. It is two months since I left that job and I have noticed occasional unexpected thoughts regarding this recently. Thoughts such as “I really don’t have to go back” and “I wonder what I’ll do tomorrow”. These are not wistful or regretful thoughts but have the feel of a genuine and deeper sense of freedom than the initial exuberance of the first flush of liberty.

Last night’s dreams fed into this deeper quandary of choice.

The first dream I can recall put me back in that last job on a normal working day. I was doing the work well, but just as I was getting close to completing one task, another was given to me, and I became increasingly irritated by the incessant workload. So far, so simple to interpret. I then experienced a brief interlude as a mediaeval knight in armour riding through a forest (which was in fact a more thicketed version of the land near my last workplace) and I knew that I was searching for something but I knew not what.

The Questing Knight is a classic Jungian archetype of the collective unconscious and is also found in some form within every world mythology. It represents travel towards a lofty goal and the classic flaw of the Knight is that he fears nothing but that he will fall prey to personal weakness at the height of crisis. What is also interesting is that the Knight usually achieves his goal by confrontation or violence, and this symbolic conflict led directly into the next dream element.

From hunting knight, I then found myself hunted prey. I was a forensic psychiatric patient, detained under the Mental Health Act, and fleeing the authorities as they tried to recapture me. The police were after me, but so too was a paramilitary organisation. This part of the dream did not last long; just as I was about to be captured, I became the paramilitary sniper tracking me. I was looking down a rifle’s sights, flitting from one potential target to another before finally hitting the fugitive with a tranquillising dart. My squad members congratulated me on the successful hit as we drove back to our base.

In the foyer, there was a poster advertising for applicants for a space mission to a red planet, possibly Venus or Mars. I then flash-forwarded to successfully landing on the planet – effectively conquering it – and returning home. From that successful return home, I segued into returning back to my parents’ home of 10 or 15 years ago and was congratulated and welcomed back by my late mother. I woke up shortly afterwards, with a vaguely perplexed sense of both happiness and curiosity.

A simple interpretation would be to suggest that my unconscious mind still seeks a task to complete to validate my existence. This is something I consciously reject, believing such tasks to be self-imposed constructs. So it is not surprising that these thoughts instead found voice in my dreams.

They represent my Jungian Shadow, that part of the unconscious mind that is a conglomerate of repressed weaknesses and instincts. It is the part of us that defies everything we believe true about ourselves. My conscious self – my Persona – is calm, controlled, even-tempered and often dispassionate. The Shadow (whether as Knight, Sniper, Fugitive or Conqueror) is the more violent and passionate undercurrent of my unconscious mind.

The presence of my mother at the end of the dream could be interpreted as part of my Anima – the feminine side of my nature – congratulating me on the acceptance of emotionality (the thrill of the chase, the triumph of the planetary landing, the completion of the quest) into my life.

The turbulent and emotional natures of Shadow and Anima have the capacity to drive creativity, in a way the conscious Persona cannot. But the Shadow cannot be allowed to overwhelm the Persona. As Jung himself said in Archetypes, to do so would result in “a man… always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps… living below his own level”. If the Shadow is not recognised it leads to over-identification with the Anima in order to satisfy the Shadow’s desires: “Possession caused by the anima [results in] the anima surround[ing] herself with inferior people”.

The task facing me – as it is to all of us – is acknowledging the creative power of the Shadow and the Anima, integrating them into the Persona without letting them overwhelm it. Writing about the dreams I experienced last night is thus one step in the ultimate life-task of individuation and perhaps the dream also expresses a residual creative hope that others will attempt their own similar journeys.