Fear and Complexity

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got perspective? 

on a life of quiet desperation?

Let’s start with a metaphor: Everyone knows the usual way to cross the overpass and then enter a freeway is with a small simple semi circle into a merge lane. 

But nevertheless, I travel a long, winding oblong merge road, winding around with the skyscrapers of downtown first on the right, then ahead, later on the left, and still later, now hidden by grassy canyons, astern at six o’clock, as at last, I attempt an all too short merge. I know two drivers who time their trips to avoid that dreaded merge during rush hour. And—get this—at some point, long before the freeway merge, the road narrows into one lane. 

You might think our road engineers would be as practical as old Roman town planners, putting our roads on a classical grid, but no—I think our engineers flunked out of art school. That long spaghetti road to merge is fun for me only because I am used to it, and only because, as I drive with narrowed eyes, seldom does anyone pass me before the road narrows. In fact, unlike nearly everyone else, you are unlikely to see my brake lights before any of the precipitous blind turns—although I will ride with my foot nudging the brake pedal, in case I see a deer: So if I have to panic I won’t STOMP on the wrong pedal, as people have been known to do. It’s been years since I owned a sports car: These days, taking that road so fast, leaving cars behind in my mirrors, is my sole bit of silly male showing off. Hurray for me!

It was writer Larry Niven who pointed out that a driver will take a stretch of road faster and faster until he is at the very limit of his capability, a capability that he finds out the hard way. Perhaps through a harmless flash of fear. To me, Niven’s drivers are a metaphor for our society: We are going ever faster paced, ever more complex, roaring around corners right up to the sidewall of failure… and inevitably, by this model, some people get left behind. Or squashed on the sidewall.

In the merry old days no one was left behind. I am imagining a quaint English village, back in Europe in the time of long bows when only members of the aristocracy would ride a horse. Who would I have been, among the villagers, back then? With my same gender as today, would I have been a broad shouldered fellow, perhaps too nervous for battle, but very good at steering a straight plow? Would I have been a skinny troubadour, good for rousing songs of battle and good cheer, but only average at working the farm? Would I have been the village idiot, happy to contribute to the harvest by copying what others were doing? One thing is sure: The complexity and pace of society would have been slow enough that even as an idiot I felt included as a valued villager. Not left out.

For some people their first “village,” as children, is their school. You might think a school would be scientifically designed so every one would be valued, safe within a section of folks of their own sort of ability. Not so. Of the musically inclined, in band class, some play only “third chair.” For learning arithmetic, according to a teacher on the radio, some kids “feel punished” when others get awards: He was against awards. And many children in school, too many, feel dumb. For a few, without the power from feeling accomplishment, their only way to feel power is to bully others. (On an episode of The Simpsons some bullies smash Bart’s trophy saying, “We hate kids who do things.”)

As new adults, some of those kids, the ones who took algebra, will go on to university, there to quietly crash at midterms, fail at finals, and “graduate at Christmas.” The campus will have resources in place, of course, such as academic helpers and trained psycho-therapists. The problem, though, is partly psychological: Too many students, unaware of how swift and complex society is, think they are unique in their struggles. The counsellors report that they never even see a lot of the students who drop out.

Meanwhile, in the real world, many grown adults don’t have a perspective on how much they should try to “keep up with the Joneses.” The slick magazines are full of articles on what is sexy-normal, what is serene-normal ( ha-ha) and “How I learned to stop worrying and enjoy our frazzled modern style.” OK, I haven’t written that last one yet, but back in the 1950’s someone wrote a business nonfiction, The Organization Man. This was back when the usual thing for an ambitious man of business was to get hired by some “big corporation,” the bigger the better. Other tell-tale books of that time, of the fiction sort, were The Big Company Look and the classic The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson, a book that labeled a generation. In the days of black-and-white TV people knew, but didn’t know what to do.

If our society is overly complicated, then maybe modern life is not a problem to be solved, but a plight to be endured… and to be endured as sanely as possible. To me, sanity is realizing that society’s common sense “knowledge” has not yet caught up to our common “experience.” How many young students, up to their hips in alligators, truly realize that people are more alike than different, and that others, too, are just as sunk in the swamp?

In the Organization Man a businessman is quoted as being frustrated: He is not getting results with the exciting new idea of splitting a big meeting into smaller groups, groups that then report back to the main group. Merely “reporting back” is the usual remnant, today, of that old technique—with one person as recorder, and one as spokesman for, say, a group of six. The problem with this usual method, as practised today, is that it ignores fear. The good news is at least small groups are a chance to interact, in a left brain “just the facts and observations, Ma’am” fashion. And yes, at least there’s a little bit of group bonding. To be sure, the group won’t share honest emotions unless there is work for a clear problem, but… best results come when the chairman can secretly face the concept of “fear” and sneak it into his or her plans.

Hollywood is instructive. Not after the first world war, but only after the second, and then only after a decade had passed, would the war movies finally have a scene where a veteran tells new recruit, fresh into combat,: “Everybody’s scared…” This intelligence, besides being “nice,” is reality based, and results in the new guy feeling more normal, less paralyzed by a sense of personal inadequacy, and then better able to function. Which helps everyone, veterans and newbies alike.

In our modern peacetime culture, despite people commiserating with each other, we still don’t know, not truly, how much fear, anxiety and “everybody is scared” is normally out there. Said Henry Thoreau back in the 19th century (from memory) “The average man lives a life of quiet desperation”—words that still need to be said. 

Today in our business world, or our community halls, as regards those small groups that report back to the larger meeting, the underlying intention, if the chairpersons know their stuff, is to share emotions, discovering that others are anxious too, thereby reducing the flow of energy required for fear and protecting one’s ego, and therefore releasing energy to tackle the problem. Group problems are only solved when energy is available. (Other small groups using this principle of “emotional management through perception-checks” would be hallway conversations during meeting breaks) 

An extreme example may illustrate this principle: Teenagers. On student council. Remember? Jostling and fidgeting, maybe laughing a bit too loud, having nearly all their energy flowing to their self protection, 

(the underlying reason for much “impulsive” behaviour at their meetings) 

a flow hard to redirect… which is why, for example, anything complex, such as organizing to Save the Black Footed Ferret, is better left to college age people. 

We adults are older than we once were, but we still have our inner teenager…

Fear. Inadequacy. How ‘bout those roads? There’s a reason for the cliche of men going on road trips with their wives and then not admitting to problems with going too fast for the map, and with not wanting to ask strangers for directions. Yesterday morning I saw the cliche acted out, yet again, by Daddy Pig on the British children’s show Peppa Pig. 

In a society revved to the max, let’s give ourselves permission to see fear. Let us help each other. Let’s help the new recruit, help the village idiot, and help Albert Einstein too when he faces something new in his everyday life. Gone are the green pastoral villages of yesteryear. Today all of us, in this grey and complex world, can truly say, “I’m a stranger here myself.”

Sean Crawford

Somewhere in society

March

2019

Footnotes: 

~Reducing individual group member’s anxiety is part of the “bag of tricks” a chairman can use to break a group’s gridlock, a trick I learned from the mentor I wrote about in January of 2019. (See archive)

~One antidote to fear is self confidence. But confidence is like shyness: situational, not dispositional. 

At a job site where I was feeling unsafe and unsupported, my I.Q. would plummet as I walked over the threshold.