Brave New Generation

I remember where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I remember his idealism, and then our eager long haired years when we said “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” We, and those coming after us, intended to keep our idealism for good citizenship as we all aged… striving, seeking and never yielding. The world was going to be “new and improved.”

Mark Manson, successful blogger, is 36. This morning, (Monday June 1) I received my usual Monday morning e-mail from him. (footnote) At the risk of thereby misquoting or misrepresenting him, please let me present one great paragraph out of what he sent. I have broken it up into smaller paragraphs, for cosmetic reasons, all the better fit computer screens. His swear words are idealistically chosen for effect. 

QUOTE

I am thirty-six years old. Despite crippling problems with health care, education, gun violence, immigration, climate change, stagnant wages, income inequality, and racial inequality persisting for my entire adult life, I have never once seen my government help with or resolve any of these issues. 

For as long as I can remember, it has been: tax cuts, war, tax cuts, bailouts, tax cuts, bailouts. 

I have never seen things get better in this country. Only worse. I have never seen anything substantive from my leaders, Democrat or Republican, that makes me proud of voting for them. I wasn’t alive for the moon landing. I am too young to remember the Berlin Wall falling. I don’t give a flying fuck about Saddam Hussein. 

My introduction to my nation was 9/11, followed by hearing about friends and classmates being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by graduating into the worst economic collapse in 86 years, followed by thirteen more years of absolutely fucking nothing changing. 

Forty-five years of no real wage growth for the middle and lower classes? Nothing. Kindergarteners being shot at school with assault rifles? Nothing. Eleven million bankruptcies due to a corrupt and dysfunctional health care system? Nothing. Black people being repeatedly murdered by police, live, on camera? An entire generation of young people saddled with over a trillion dollars of debt just to go to school and then told to stay home and not work as soon as they get out? 

UNQUOTE

As Manson credibly related the ongoing frustration of his peers to the current protests and riots... something occurred to me: At age 36, Manson has never known a world without Reaganomics. 

It is instructive to compare the 40 years between the war and President Reagan’s changes, with the 40 years until today. In this comparison, reagonomics loses out.

While Mark and his friends take it for granted that a federal government should be mainly concerned with stockholders, and a business solely concerned with stockholders, that was not the case when I was young. In my day, every successful businessman knew there were other valid concerns beyond stockholders.

Some wise guy: “Ya, but the money will trickle down!”

Me: “Really? How’s that working out for you?”

For you Canadians, I suppose this doesn’t apply, except, after the international border reopens, if, say, a U.S. citizen is sincerely asking you why all the other developed nations believe in socialized medicine, and why they nearly all, including Canada, declined to participate in the invasion of Iraq, and then declined to join the occupation “to instil democracy”… 

After you heave a sigh and say, “It’s not coincidence,” you could suggest your American friends might just possibly, maybe, perhaps, debrief on how reaganomics has worked out. I tell you, the previous economic model was good enough for my grandfather, my father and I.

And for my final angry word (And Lord, how I want to swear!) 

In war time? A tax cut in war time? Only under something as ugly as reagonomics, back when America was supposedly needing all available money and troops for the war—desperate for troops— “all of us in this together,” when all of us were supporting some of us to fight overseas, could there ever be a tax cut… which the servicemen and their families would never see.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

June 2

2020

Footnotes:

For Mark Manson’s June 1st letter: 

View in browser

Promoting Mark’s regular Monday letter:

(Note: If you like these emails and know someone who would enjoy them, please consider forwarding this to them. If you are receiving this for the first time, you can sign up here to receive this newsletter every Monday.)

Trust and Ugly Americans

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got Trust Issues? …

Got Ugly Americans?

Got an idea how the two are connected?

The previous blog post , URLs Again, had some interesting links (web addresses) 

Ugly American

One of the links was to a post by a famous blogger, Mark Manson, called Ten Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America. (footnote) As I was putting that link into context for my dear readers, I realized something. The “penny dropped” as I wrote:

“…written by an American, but not by an “Ugly American,” Mark Manson, living abroad, has truly mingled as an equal, and has a Brazilian wife.”

As you may know, the book The Ugly American, later a Marlon Brando movie, was a best seller that introduced that phrase into our culture. (and inspired the creation of the Peace Corps) The book came about because two well-traveled men thought America was “shooting itself in the foot” (my phrase) during the Cold War, that time of desperate competition with the Second World for the hearts and minds of the Third World. They first typed out an entire book of nonfiction, ripped it up, and then resorted to a series of short stories. In their book, the writers said the best advertisement for democracy was the Americans themselves, back home, where they are plain spoken, humble and gracious to guests, but… as soon as they put even one foot across their border—Whammo!—they turn ugly. Turn into snobs.

In Vietnam, just as in the book, this meant Americans staying with the snob elite in Saigon, while totally avoiding the villages that were… one, by one, by one… voting to go communist and support the guerrillas. (Viet Cong) In Iraq, as is well documented, this meant segregating themselves inside the elite “green zone.” Americans, as you know, were waging America’s War on Terror through their great task of striving for their noble goal of instilling democracy in Iraq. And equality. This while somehow avoiding all the common cab drivers, barbers and interpreters who, if any, any Americans had cared to humbly ask, would have unanimously advised, “Are you crazy? You can’t just…”

Snobs, eh? Would Canadians agree? Well, not about all Yankees, let’s not stereotype, but put it this way: I am still chuckling over folks in a charter flight to England, while still on the tarmac in Toronto, being addressed by their Canadian tour guide, who reminded them, “When we get to England, don’t act like American tourists.” People groaned. Did I say it was a charter? Of veterans and their spouses? Half the passengers were U.S. citizens. Who, by the way, got along well with their fellow North Americans, members of the Royal Canadian Legion.

Would Americans agree? Some are so ashamed of their ugly countrymen that when they backpack in England they put a Canadian flag on their pack. I’m still chuckling at a Canadian saying to a pair of young men in Paris, “Hi guys! What part of Canada are you from?” “New Jersey.”

Would I agree? I don’t know any more than the two writers do about the mystery of why Americans turn ugly, but I can humbly offer two small pieces to the puzzle: I think one reason is that Yankees don’t mingle as an equal. As we know from everyday life back home, snobs just don’t mingle well. They isolate. A second reason would require a whole page to explain: Trust Issues.

Trust Issues

Snobs don’t trust the natives.

My past is relevant to a recent slowness to act. “I was not always the man you see before you.” Many years ago I lived in a dark place. Compared to later years, my everyday self esteem was very much lower, my ever-present shame very much greater. Happily, I did personal growth, to the point that my chaplain noted my very voice had changed. (Not from aging) An old army roommate, honourably discharged and now a social worker, said to me, “You’re a success story.” His words I would gladly set up on the same shelf as my awards and medal. (Significantly, perhaps, we both stayed in the city of our last posting)

Part of my growth was from being in one or more self-help groups. At our meetings I would not talk of abstract things, however good, nor of what I was “gonna do” but rather, I told of specific events during my past week, of what I had just done and what it meant. I was admitting my mistakes, and sharing my strength and hope. In our sharing we were leading by examples of the good, the bad and the ugly. 

I suppose our meetings worked like evolution where, from our sharing about behaviours with consequences, over time the fittest behaviours would prevail. We found it useful to talk in simple non-medical terms, such as “isolating” and “boundaries.” I don’t think we ever said the term “trust issues” but I am saying it now. Until recently, I had known only two such unfortunates. (Now my ex-boss is a third)

One was a lady in my shared house. She was an angry communist who distrusted the capitalist world, meaning: just about everybody. The masses, including you and I, were too stupid to rise up for a revolution. An illustrative example of her trust issues: We found someone’s cat. Of course we only kept it temporarily. The thing was this: She hid the cat, when the owner came by, for fear that “owner,” a respectable ordinary looking woman, was not the real owner.

The other such person I knew was my girlfriend, angry and impatient with society. It seemed to me back then that our relationship meant trusting that we were safe to be emotionally intimate, use silly pet names and be naked. We managed to do the naked part but… it took me a while to grasp that no amount of me being honourable and trustworthy, again and again over time, would ever get her to feel trusting of me… She wasn’t a communist, but she did have a comparable superiority, believe that 90% of the population had an addiction, that everybody lives in daily grave danger of falling into an addiction to something.

Some might say: Too bad most people don’t know the joys of abstaining and only drinking plain water. Some might say: Too bad most people are too unenlightened to realize the joys of socialism. I would say: Such views are a form of snobbery. Great Superiority is a counterfeit coin: the obverse side is Greatly Distrusting. I would add that superiority is a crutch most unworthy.

From both my childhood and our popular culture (think schoolteacher getting mad or an angry sargeant) comes a “social contract”: You are allowed to be angry from having your higher standards, and in return you have to know what you are doing. But of course the contract is a sham. My best sergeants only raised their voices for emphasis, not anger. Same with each of the most accomplished ladies and gentlemen I have ever met. Even folks dealing with medical life and death, such as nurses and folks in my own profession, disabilities, will not be angry but instead firm and fair.

One of my imperfections as a young person was that I was too stubborn to name drop, place drop, or do other things to look cool. It worked out alright for me, as the friendly folks and the most secure cool folks would still want to get to know me. I thought: Never mind the rest. 

Another imperfection, partly as wimp-proofing, and partly as distrust, was my philosophy of “never complain, never explain.” My distrust: What if I tried to state something as a mitigating factor, and was then accused of making an excuse? Or worse: what if my side of the story wasn’t believed? What if I was called a crazy liar? My self esteem was low enough already without accusations. Better to be tough. It would all work out, I thought, because if someone worked or socialized with me over time, then they would surely get to know the real me far beyond my poor power to add or detract.

(Note: In healthy everyday life, with common sense trust, I do try to respect you and me when we complain or explain) 

I confess: Recently, at a certain part-time (fortnightly) workplace, my own unease around a boss with “trust issues” might have meant I gave up on him too easily. Then again, I try to be humbly conscious, as a “creative artist-type,” that I might be wrong about things, and that I might be wrong as to how much he and others should believe in inclusiveness and respect. 
(Two topics I’ve used for essays in the summer of 2018) 

Now, after making allowances, I have surely done all I can. In fact, I have at last taken action: I have resigned. This essay helps to put my “time-to-resign” insights into perspective.

Where my imperfect philosophy breaks down, of course, is when I encounter an angry superior isolating Ugly American. Because if such a person has trust issues… then despite rubbing shoulders over time I never can build any credibility. The “penny dropped” when I realized that if my boss is superior and disrespectful of everyone else too—and he surely is, grotesquely so, as much as my housemate and girlfriend—then almost no one he knows ever earns any credibility. Everyone in his world is forever at square one. Not just me. 

So I can say to myself, “Self, don’t take it personally, and give up any hope for change over time.” An illustrative example, which I won’t give any details for, was when my boss and I had a slight altercation last week, including his unethical breaking of the “social contract.” We simply weren’t dialoguing properly, certainly not as equals, but rather, with me as the native and him as the Ugly American. I did not offer a certain useful opinion, or a certain useful fact, because I knew from his anger he wasn’t interested. Was the issue “too angry?” Nope—Too disrespectful! Too bad, as it was a useful-to-him fact, too.

Of course I won’t divulge any historical workplace details: Too private for him, too distasteful for me, and—(cough)—too revealing of my formerly low self esteem. I am sad to say: A normal person would have resigned much earlier. But besides other reasons, I wanted to work on my own issues, on “my own side of the street” first… Snobs don’t ask for my help, and no I won’t, even now, give that boss any constructive feedback. No figurative exit interview.

(…Partly I won’t because there have been other folks quitting: If I have no value with that boss, then fine, let them give the feedback… except, as I only now realize, they wouldn’t feel valued either, not enough to offer vulnerable thoughts from their hearts and minds…)

Why not give feedback? Because it wouldn’t have worked for my old housemate: Character flaws are impervious to advice or logic. Besides, I don’t like to take chances with people who bizarrely don’t trust me; better to practise being strong and silent.

As for Americans in Iraq, I can sympathize with their initial culture shock at others having different opinions and beliefs, along with the almost inevitable “blame the natives” for one’s own discomfort, that’s merely human nature, but… After time has passed? Still? I wonder: How many Americans departed Iraq with their trust-level and respect-level for Iraqis no different than when they had first arrived and hadn’t even interacted with any natives yet? 

Snobs don’t change.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

2019

Footnotes:

~Here’s the (link) to the above post of Mark Manson.

~Don’t worry, my ex-boss won’t have his feelings hurt by reading this. I’m sure he doesn’t even read mass newspapers and flyers, let alone obscure web essays.

~The functional way to trust is to start in the middle trust level, and then raise or lower trust over time based on experiences such as from socializing together, or from seeing the person flinch at “too much information.” One might avoid the latter mistake with “share, check, share, check.”

~Among the least of reasons for not writing about any work details is my old self-help group’s concept of “don’t take (scrutinize) someone else’s (flaws) inventory.” Among the least of the reasons for this advice is wimp-proofing: Every minute spent thinking about another person is a minute of escaping any work on one’s own issues. 

To illustrate: That fellow that bitterly stalked his ex-girlfriend for ten years? I think he spent his ten years without getting any new girlfriend. 

By the way, as reported on CBC radio, the stalking didn’t stop until he died in a car accident. The police, for ten years, beginning with their saying, “He’ll soon get over it,” had been useless. Ten years of terror.

~For any young survivors reading this: 

Please don’t lose hope from reading my recent story. I know, I was wrong to stay too long at a gig unworthy of me, one where I was not valued, but that gig is only a very small blip on my big radar screen of life: I can assure you that right now at my functional full time job I am greatly valued for doing great work.

(As for documenting growth, last Monday night a poet at a coffee house microphone singled me out to people, last Friday night at a formal kickoff party I was singled out: In both cases I had to raise my hand to show myself to the crowd. Tonight I will be at a microphone myself, with enough self esteem to speak clearly and feel warmly valued from a monthly open mic community) 

Personal growth is real and possible. I can say this because I have done so.

Once you have experienced stage fright, you are always aware that it could be just around the corner waiting for you, just waiting for you to get cocky and overconfident. So you treat the body and the brain with much more respect, and you remain conscious always of the shadow in the corner.

Lawrence Olivier

For me, the capacity for shadowy self doubt always remains. 

I got that line from a fellow with a Ph.D, a successful writer, in his book The Content of Our Character. He, Shelby Steele, was (unknown to his family) verbally abused during class by a white racist during just a single year of elementary school. Other parents got the man fired, and the boy was told it wasn’t his fault, and this was logically true, but for the rest of his successful life the capacity for self doubt was always there. He thought the tension between everyday self esteem and this capacity was a distinctive part of each person’s makeup. I think the abusive year made him a better human, better able to dialogue with young black undergraduates and with white “fellow middle class” folk.

As Tiny Tim said, “God bless us, everyone.”

Learning from 2006

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got a queer view of the world?

Sometimes I am reminded this world is queerer than the painted-over flattened version I normally imagine…

I try not to get too offended at that May 2006 copy of The Atlantic magazine I wrote about back in October. It’s like how I get offended when I see photographs from our old western frontier days: complicated, messy, not like the simplified Hollywood narrative I am accustomed to. 

I even wince at modern Europe being complicated: Did you know there are six “micro states” that don’t show on political maps of Europe, or that the city of Vienna has three languages?

Here in Calgary I surprised a friend by teaching him that, contrary to popular belief, you can be Jewish and still be an atheist. (And he taught me things) Back west here, Jews are like homosexuals used to be: present in theory, but normally assumed to be off stage and out of mind. Out east, in contrast, from my reading of columnist Dear Abby, I think folks rattle off “church-or-temple” as easily as we say “parent-or-guardian.” Jewish holidays out there are public holidays, as documented in their University calendars, available at my local campus. A college teacher told me the traffic noises even change on those days—she said her friend had missed their long distance phone call because the friend had been using morning traffic as her alarm clock, and slept in. 

Yeah, sometimes we make our lives too complicated—Better to just set two clocks for getting up. Why two? Because for mine you have to set the time and set the alarm, pull out the pin, wind the main clock and wind the alarm bell: that’s five separate variables—at least I don’t need any snooze button, not if I put the time-delayed second clock over by the door.

From May of 2006 I see the U.S. is not, despite the American’s wishful gloss, a melting pot from sea to shining sea.

QUOTE (page 130, by Marc Cooper)

…The historic migration we are witnessing is radically remaking American culture, producing what some call, in a new twist on on old term, a “Los Angelization” of the country. More and more neighborhoods, even some entire towns, are now predominantly Spanish-speaking. Other areas are officially bilingual.

UNQUOTE

I am so offended from feeling, once again, “always the last to know.” To think I could have known back in May, years ago.

Getting heavy: What truly offends me? That all the shocked amputations and blasted guts of the Vietnam conflict did not inspire anyone to turn over a new leaf. You may recall the conspiracy by several U.S. government agencies to meet together to agree on a number, to tell the public and politicians, for Viet Cong troop strength. This after a lone C.I.A. operative, Samuel Adams, (yes, a descendant of the patriot, but not a brewery owner) “blew the whistle” internally to say that, scientifically, based on desertions alone, the Viet Cong should have already ceased to exist. I tell you, “conspiracy” is not too strong a word.

As writer Michael Crichton once said, “Science is not done by consensus.”

In Iraq, for the war on terror, the U.S. government was again trying to trick the public, this time by steadily refusing to count enemy dead. Call it War Without Windows. (book title) So two good citizens, O’Hanlon and Cordesman, had to glean their own count, and then they published enemy casualties covering a two year period.

Page 36 has a graph: O’Hanlon’s red line of the "cumulatively killed and imprisoned" goes up at a 45 degree angle, over a bar graph for the insurgent membership, month by month.

QUOTE

Despite steady progress in the killing or detention of Iraqi insurgents, the size of the insurgency seems not to have diminished, as new recruits have joined. 

UNQUOTE

QUOTE

(There were think-tank meetings at the Pentagon)

At one such meeting, a participant noted the large number of insurgents being killed or detained ( on O’Hanlon’s Iraq Index) and asked Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whether this showed that the insurgency faced clear annihilation. “I asked him, ‘Don’t the numbers look pretty good?’” the participant says, “But he declined to make that claim. He was acknowledging that things weren’t quite as they appeared.”

UNQUOTE (Page 36-37, by Joshua Green)

He declined? Perhaps the lessons of Nam didn’t teach “the establishment” to stop hiding the truth, but merely to stop actively lying, from fear the truth might somehow come out. In Nam, as you know, the government got “in trouble,” getting not a tiny bit pregnant, but a tiny bit dishonored, a little bit exposed, by a great big thing called The (expletive deleted) Tet Offensive.

Some philosophy: While secret negotiations in Washington on declaring communist troop strength may take only a day or two, international negotiations can be like watching paint dry—one gets mighty impatient. A comic once offered these words of comfort… when world negotiations seem unbelievably long, let’s remember that back in the day, when a cold war chess tournament between a Russian and an American had all the front page drama of a Canada-Russia hockey series, how it took so very, very long merely to arrange that innocent chess game. The two masters played on neutral ground, Iceland, and we patriots still remember the match: Because Bobby Fischer beat Boris. (Yes, and “Canada” beat Russia)

I try not to forget, or gloss over, the competitiveness of those cold years.

I was acquainted with a boy—he would be in the background when I visited his parents—who was killed in action with the Canadians in Afghanistan.

I see on page 17, back in the day, that Britain was taking over from the U.S. in Afghanistan, and the Afghan president “…Hamid Karzai, confronted his Pakistani counterpart, Perves Musharraf, in February with evidence that insurgents are being trained, equipped and deployed from Pakistan…Karzai said his hope is that Musharraf will crack down and mitigate the attacks.” This in 2006. 

As you know, Pakistan steadily, year by year… as fresh paint aged, faded, peeled and had to be repainted… has refused to admit they are helping the Taliban by using Pakistan’s intelligence service. I guess these discussions take time. 

Last month, President Trump responded by cutting aid—300 million dollars worth. Change is up to the Pakistanis themselves—I refuse to help by flying over there to teach them what every American Muslim schoolchild would already know: “Islam means peace.”

On a comical note: Back in America, on the domestic front, women were “negotiating” in 2006. Someone soberly edited a serious essay collection called Mommy Wars: Stay-at-home and Career Moms Face Off On Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. (Random House) 

The response in The Atlantic was an article (Page 110)by Sandra Tsing Loh called Rhymes With Rich subtitled one women’s conscientious objection to the “mommy wars”

QUOTE

Lying in bed the other night, cradling some seltzer water, my stomach gurgling, the word for my malaise suddenly came to me: “afflufemza,” wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism, and you find yourself in a dreamlike state of reading first-person essays about it, over and over again.

UNQUOTE

What? Hey, I’m a feminist! And I’m an essayist! Oh man, I’m always the last to know if I’m being insulted. But I think I’m safe, in this case. Besides, I don’t mind being offended if someone is funny about it.

…Well, that’s all, dear reader, for 2006 when an issue of The Atlantic cost U.S. $5.95 …$6.95 in Newfoundland. Maybe I should go try a 2018 edition, but it would probably have a bigger price tag: I’m scared to go look. 

Sean Crawford

October

2018 Anno Domini

In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains

Footnotes… held back… maybe for another time 

Lastly, on a funny, happy note: From the city of the first Fringe Festival, here (link) are some fun artist-hacked street signs, reported by the BBC. Scroll on down.

Listening as An Inside Job

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got inner listening?

Every few years, I come across a slick paged popular magazine article, with a description on “listening,” advising such skills such as nodding your head, or not crossing your arms. I say: “Never mind!” 

And (figuratively) so says Richard Farson, the man who first observed and described all those visible skills, skills now taught to social workers. At the time, he was working with psycho-therapist Carl Rogers. 

What Farson says, specifically, is he wishes he had never published all those “skills.” Because, and I agree with him, it is better just to listen sincerely. (He says this in his great little book Management of the Absurd, with forward by Michael Crichton) I am sure if you are listening hard then your physical actions, if any, will take care of themselves—Better than using your skills to to fake that you are listening! 

Instead of skills, why not follow the advice of Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurly Brown who said, in her famous Mad Men era self help book, Sex and the Single Girl, (in my own words) “when you go on a date, listen really hard.” Isn’t that common sense? I guess not.

Listening “hard and sincerely” leads us into the realm of “focus.” A good word. Unfortunately, the closest the magazine articles ever get to “focus” is this advice: to paraphrase back what the other person just said. But I think “saying back” is mostly meant to make sure you interpreted right, not for helping you to stay focused on hearing what the other person is saying.

Focus means getting beyond your ego. I try. People have long said I am a good listener, which would always surprise me: Doesn’t everyone try hard? But I realize now I’ve been doing more than just trying hard: Having recently read Zen in the Art of Archery, I am aware of things beyond our everyday understanding.

Now, before I delve into the “zen” of an ego-disciplined mind, let me hasten to observe that some well-meaning people dial down their listening. Why? Because they assume they are “supposed to” be trying to “think as they hear,” meaning: thinking of what they will reply. My response? Don’t do that! Don’t try to do two things at once. Only listen. 

I am convinced it is worthwhile to wait until the other person’s sentence has come to a full stop. Only then boot up your CPU (Central Processing Unit) to think it over, and then, only after that, think of what to say. What seems to take too many seconds? Worth it! For then the person feels heard… 

In this sad world, for too many people, being heard is all too rare: No wonder I get told I am a good listener. I will always show even an impatient “type A personality” that I respect them enough to take time to listen and think. Even an impatient person will respect that. 

And hey, let’s remember, time telescopes when you are being looked at. What seems like a few long seconds? Microseconds! It’s barely a few microseconds.

I am sure there is an inner level of listening many people never achieve. From Book Three of David Gerrold’s War against the Chtorr, told in the first person, is a scene in a children’s refugee orphan camp. Even though the hero wants something from the young camp director, he isn’t truly listening. 

QUOTE 

I made an impatient waving gesture with one hand. “I know all that, Birdie. Let’s just cut to the chase, all right?”

She turned her chair to face me, pulled it close and leaned in close. She said, “What I’m getting at is this: for someone who seen as much and done as much in the past two years as you have, you are one of the most pompous, arrogant, and unlikable bigots it has ever been my misfortune to deal with. I like you, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have the very bad habit of not really listening to people. You’re not really listening now. You’re more concerned with boogey men up in the hills than in dealing with the children you’ve supposedly accepted responsibility for. At the first…

UNQUOTE (page 289)

Key phrase: “You aren’t really listening.”

Ego. Such a strange filter. It is a listener’s weak ego, I am sure, including his “I know more than you do” that makes him assume his own concerns, during a conversation, including his thoughts about the future, are more important than the person “here and now.” Ego can filter out the big world, if we are not willing to humbly release our own little world while we listen.

But there’s another sort of filter used by the weak: Here’s a scenario from an essay by computer millionaire Paul Graham. He runs a company to advise groups of “founders” of “startup” (computer software) companies. Again the place is an office. Graham converses, but do they listen? He describes unsuccessful founders in terms of their listening.

QUOTE Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. The best word to describe the failure to do so is probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow. A better way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. UNQUOTE

At the office location, Graham’s partner wrote:

QUOTE
My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so. They may not even be conscious of this process but that's what I think is happening when you say something to bad groups and they have that glazed over look. I don't think it's confusion or lack of understanding per se, it's this internal process at work.

With the good groups, you can tell that everything you say is being looked at with fresh eyes and even if it's dismissed, it's because of some logical reason e.g. "we already tried that" or "from speaking to our users that isn't what they'd like," etc. Those groups never have that glazed over look. UNQUOTE

(from the essay A Word to the Resourceful, (link)

Maybe if folks say I’m a good listener then it’s because my eyes don’t glaze over: You might say I keep a zen “beginner’s mind.”

Back to those popular magazines with slick pages for people to carelessly flip through: I think it logically follows that pop writers won’t put in dense paragraphs that require effort: Nothing about such hard-to-describe things as “zen,” or “filters,” or even “focus.”  

I think if the average person won’t set their ego aside, then the average person won’t be a good listener. A wise man said: The average person can’t run a mile; it’s normal to be able to run four miles. 

Dear reader, let us listen normally, from the inside.

Sean Crawford

In a cabin in the foothills

Calgary

October

2018

Sad Sidebar: 

I wonder: Was Paul Bremer, America’s man in Iraq, in charge of America’s war effort “to instil democracy,” any good at listening? Or—? Question: Did President Bush send a closed-eared ‘control freak’ to Iraq? Given Bremer’s gargantuan, egregious mistakes, mistakes that every single Iraqi taxi driver, barber, translator or Iraqi leader would have advised against, crying “Nooo…!” I guess I don’t have to ask.

In the nonfiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City (with a foreword by the director of the Matt Damon movie Green Zone) is the chapter The Plan Unravels.

How sad: 

An Arab council to create a government is listening and sharing and consensus building, and has al-l-l-most enough mutual confidence to announce agreement with Bremer’s plan. Rushing to a vote would only result in a glorified opinion poll. Bremer? Not listening. He uses his power, as leader of the American Occupation, to order them to rush.

Across Iraq, disaster ensues.

The chapter ends quoting Adel Abtel-Mahdi, later the finance minister, saying ruefully, “If Bremer had only given us an extra day, none of this would have happened. We would have had the democratic government that the Americans promised us when they went to war.”  

Our grandparents had a folk ballad:

For the want of a nail, a (horse) shoe is lost,

For the want of a shoe, a rider is lost,

For the want of a rider, a battle is lost,

For the want of a battle, a kingdom is lost,

And all for the want of a nail.

Sing it, sister:

“For the want of an ear, 

a country is lost,

For the want of a country,

A war (on terror) is lost, 

and all for the want of an ear.”

That book, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, is published by Vintage Books, and has won several awards.

Three Footnotes:

~In the second paragraph I mentioned Carl Rogers. I really liked Roger’s brand of therapy, of listening with positive regard and acceptance—just reading Roger’s work was healing for me, back in my youth.

~Women's Liberation (feminism) arose as women met for circles of "consciousness raising" where they would defy society (and what they were "supposed to" think) by listening to each other.

~For Making Conversation, here’s a nice link, where I found that being in a conversation is like being in the world, like looking for a blog topic: Get off, (the couch) Go out, and “Prepare to be amazed.”