Book Review-Suicide Among Gifted Children and Adolescents: Understanding the Suicidal Mind

Robert Bogue February 12, 2024 No Comments

It’s a concerning question for parents of children who are considered “gifted” intellectually. Suicide Among Gifted Children and Adolescents: Understanding the Suicidal Mind doesn’t answer the question about whether these children are more or less likely to die by suicide. Citing conflicting research, no conclusion is drawn. However, there is work to surface the factors that lead to these conflicting results.

Theory of Suicide – Suicide Trajectory Model

One serious limitation to the book is the choice of primary model. They chose the suicide trajectory model put forth by Stillion and McDowell. This isn’t a popular model, rarely appearing even in the child development context under which it’s borne. It has some similarities to Rudd et al.’s fluid vulnerability model (see Brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention), and it seems to map out Pathways to Suicide, like Ron Maris’ book. However, while predisposing, contributing, precipitating, and protective factors are reviewed, they don’t form a pathway as much as they represent a set of factors at the individual, family, peer, school, community, and sociopolitical levels.

The problem is that these aren’t discriminating factors. While citing articles of M. David Rudd and his colleagues, it seems as if Cross misses the central point that we don’t have discriminating factors, and we need to find them. More recently, Craig Bryan explains why our capacity to predict suicide is unlikely to get specific. (See Rethinking Suicide.) This is consistent with research showing that many attempters (who survived) didn’t think about suicide for more than an hour. Commonly, around 70% of attempters hadn’t considered it more than an hour or two before the act. It’s hard to build a prediction framework with these kinds of timeframes.

The Myths

Like many others, Cross falls into the trap of describing “myths” about suicide. The first “myth” is that “Suicide occurs without warning.” Clearly, that’s true for some people (≥70%). “Myth” four is, “If a gifted young person wants to commit [sic] suicide, very little can stop him or her.” Here, nuance is important. Certainly, if they are determined to die, they will. They’ll lie, or they’ll find lethal means that you wouldn’t think to protect them from. (See Suicide: Inside and Out for more.) However, the nuance is whether or not they’ll have an honest conversation about their suicidal ideation with you. Techniques like Motivational Interviewing can help open people up to the idea – as long as the coercive forces aren’t too strong.

The “myths” reflect historical thinking about suicide. While many continue to believe the myths as stated, we’re beginning to realize that the old ideas aren’t necessarily true.

Perfectionism

The most consistent finding for impact in suicidality is perfectionism. This occurs among the gifted and the normal. However, perfectionism flows through the sense of agency or growth mindset that Carol Dweck explains in Mindset. It’s consistent with Harris’ work in No Two Alike. In short, a small amount of dispositional difference – even among twins – will result in tendencies towards and away from things, like academic excellence. (See Perfectionism for more on the topic.)

The Meaning of Gifted

Cross’ work is challenged by the lack of a consistent definition of what “gifted” means. Is it high IQ or mental aptitude in a certain way? (See Howard Gardner’s Extraordinary Minds for more.) Is it performing above the required standard?

One relatively common understanding is the experience of being gifted. The experience is often described as “feeling different.” I certainly felt – and feel – that. To be clear, for most, it’s not necessarily better – it’s different. It’s a curiosity about what is wrong with me, or why am I different?

Psychache

Cross ends with a call back to Shneidman’s work on psychache and the need to eliminate it if we want to take care of others. (See The Suicidal Mind for more on psychache.) The need to increase feelings of a life worth living in the person and eliminate their pain is, however, universal to all humans. It’s not specific to either gifted or youth. It can be that if we want to prevent Suicide Among Gifted Children and Adolescents, we’ll need to just prevent it among all children and adolescents.

Book Review-Compassion and Self-Hate: An Alternative to Despair

Robert Bogue February 5, 2024 1 Comment

While compassion is the subject of many books, self-hate is not frequently discussed. Compassion and Self-Hate: An Alternative to Despair seeks to map the relationship between the two and how compassion can heal self-hate. I came to the book because of self-hate’s role in suicide. I came to understand how someone could hate themselves so much that they thought they and the world would be better off without them in it. (This interest was focused while reading Managing Suicidal Risk, 2e.)

Self-Hate Machinations

Sometimes, the mental machinery of our mind gets stuck. (See Capture for more.) It can get stuck replaying a time when we were frightened and vulnerable or when we did something that wasn’t nice. Stuck in this state, it is easy to see how self-hate can develop. The problem with this is that self-hate is problematic from both a physical and mental health perspective.

Self-hate can also be borne by external or internal perfectionism. (See Perfectionism.) With impossible standards, you’re always falling short, and that falling short leads to condemnation from others or yourself.

Self-Punishment

If you know you did wrong – or didn’t measure up – you can take matters into your own hands and punish yourself by denying yourself grace, compassion, or, more tangibly, the hobbies and activities that you enjoy. This self-punishment makes you your own enemy and sets up a further fracturing of identity that places parts of yourself into the dangerous category.

The logic of self-punishment is either the desire to motivate ourselves to better behavior or to “balance the scales.” In other words, if there is enough self-punishment, then I should deserve to succeed. The scales should be slanted towards good things for us – even if that’s not realistic.

Rejection of Praise

When one’s internal image doesn’t match the image that others are sharing with you, you may reject it. Because what they’re saying is inconsistent with your internal perspective, the discrepancy must be resolved, and it’s easier to resolve it in a way that points to your negative, internal view being right. It’s easier, but it’s probably not correct.

Sometimes, we outright dismiss the comment. “That’s not me.” Other times, we discount it. “I only did a good job because it was easy.” Another way that we discount it is by removing the uniqueness. “Anyone could have done it.” These approaches prevent us from letting in the light that other people are trying to shine to us.

If someone else is the arbitrator of good or bad, and they say good, believe them. (If they say something negative, you should evaluate it more carefully to understand their motivations.)

Secretly Suspicious of Good

Whether it’s someone saying good things or simply feeling good, some people are suspicious. They don’t believe they deserve to feel good or to have happiness. When it happens, they feel ashamed, as if they have stolen something that doesn’t belong to them.

Value as an Economic Engine

From a chemical composition perspective, the human body is worth less than $100 in chemicals. Of course, that’s not the standard by which we measure a life, much less a human life. The value of human body parts has a much higher value – and a much higher moral rejection factor. (See Moral Disengagement and How Good People Make Tough Choices.) More commonly, people see themselves as economic engines that generate value through their work. It’s not surprising, then, that the stock market crash and the Great Depression, with so many out of work, led to a surge in suicides. Without money or a job, they saw themselves as without value and were willing to throw away their lives.

Most people believe, intuitively, that human life is intrinsically valuable, but too frequently, that value is dismissed.

Early Warning Signals

One of the keys to ongoing maintenance of an attitude of self-esteem rather than self-hate is identifying the earliest signs that our internal talk track is moving towards self-hate. Learning to identify these early warning signs may prevent the downward spiral before it begins. The problem isn’t in the idea that we should be looking for early warning signs. The problem is identifying them.

Early warning signs aren’t universal. There’s not a cookbook or checklist. Everyone will have to learn their own unique, personal early warning signs – and choose to react to them. However, this can be one of the most powerful ways to bring more joy to life.

Learning to Live with Rejection

One of the hardest things for our ego to accept is the reality that we will be rejected. There will be times when the other person isn’t capable of the thing that we’re asking for. It may have something to do with us or what we’re offering them – but it may not. In either case, we will still experience the rejection, and it will still sting.

People who have the most robust mental health have developed a resilience in the face of rejection. They know that one rejection isn’t the only path between success and failure and that the rejection will not be the last. They’ve divorced the rejection from their worth and value. However, those that struggle with self-hate can’t do that.

Instead, each rejection is seen as a fatal failure. They think that every rejection is a statement about their value and worth. They become convinced that they’re fundamentally flawed and unworthy of acceptance when this is not the case.

Compassion is the Antidote

In the broadest view, compassion – and particularly self-compassion – is the antidote to self-hate. Another way of stating compassion is loving-kindness. If we can learn to be kind to ourselves, we can realize that self-hate isn’t right. Compassion itself is built upon empathy – “I understand this about you.” Compassion directly is about understanding the suffering of another and desiring to do something to make it better. (See Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion, and Altruism for more on empathy and compassion.) Self-compassion, then, is understanding ourselves and our suffering and making a decision to make it better.

When we start to treat ourselves with compassion, we can see both the help and the helper in ourselves, and self-hate is incompatible with that. We know that we’re fundamentally wired for cooperation and compassion. Being compassionate is built-in, we just need to accept it. (See SuperCooperators and Does Altruism Exist? for more.)

Moods Are Not Permanent

One of the challenges of self-hate is the moods that we arrive in that fuel it. We find ourselves in depressed moods that seem as if they’ll last forever. While emotions may be brief, it feels that a mood will be permanent. Logically, we know that to not be truth, but that doesn’t help our emotions. Our emotions drive our thinking – and are frequently in control. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis for more.)

Constant self-reassurance is required to overcome the powerful force of emotions and the perception that negative moods are permanent. Recalling when you had negative moods before that have passed and good moods that have persisted for a while is a good way to break free of the perception of permanence.

The Surrendering Skill

There are two kinds of surrender – surrender accept and surrender defeat. (See Conflict: Surrender Accept vs. Surrender Defeat.) Too frequently, we confuse the two. We get stuck in the belief that things should be different – that we should never feel bad (or good) – and we find that reality lets us down when it doesn’t conform to our expectations. If we are willing to let go of our preconceived notions and insistence on our perfect or ideal, we can find more compassion and less frustration. In fact, if we’re willing to openly surrender and accept reality, we may find that we can see the difference between Compassion and Self-Hate.

Book Review-Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

Robert Bogue January 29, 2024 No Comments

It’s spooky stuff. Rewind the clock to a time before you have conscious memories and watch your interactions with your mom and dad. Mary Ainsworth did this and refined the work of John Bowlby on attachment. They collectively discovered that the way we form relationships as an infant is relatively stable over time and can shape how we’ll behave in intimate relationships decades later. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love is the exposition of their work and the work of others that seeks to help us understand why we act the way we do – and how we can change it.

Evolution

To understand the genius of Bowlby’s work – and Mary Ainsworth’s extension – we must recognize the evolutionary advantage of attachments. If we take a step back, we can acknowledge that humans aren’t the fastest or the fiercest animals on the planet. However, our capacity to be social and select strategies of cooperation are an essential part of our ability to be the dominant biomass on the planet. (See SuperCooperators, Does Altruism Exist?, The Evolution of Cooperation, and The Righteous Mind.)

From there, we can see there can be special relationships we make – primary bonds – with those who are the most important to us and the most likely to support us. In childhood, these are often our parents; in adulthood, our spouse. Bowlby theorized, based on Harlow’s work on rhesus monkeys, that social comforting and perceived protection can be more important than food. In Harlow’s experiments, he fashioned two mother monkey replicas in wireframe. In one, he fashioned a place to hold a bottle for food, and the other he covered with terrycloth (to simulate the mother’s fur). The monkeys would get food when they were hungry but would routinely spend time with the terrycloth replica, who offered nothing else tangible.

Mary Ainsworth, who worked with Bowlby, would go on to develop a protocol for the “strange situation” that could clarify Bowlby’s hypothesis. She discovered, first in Uganda and then back in the US, that there were three basic ways that most babies would become attached. They are secure, avoidant, and anxious. She recorded several other variants that can be lumped together as “anxious-avoidant,” which is a mixture of the two non-safe attachment styles. Today, it is more commonly called “disordered attachment” because of the unpredictability.

Robin Dunbar later postulated the number of stable social relationships as a function of the size of the primate brain. Most frequently, this is quoted as 150 people for humans, but Dunbar’s work is much more nuanced. First, the overall number is a range that might be up to 250 people; more importantly, Dunbar proposed that there are rings of intensity of relationships that allow for the primary relationships Bowlby earlier believed in.

The Styles

What Ainsworth saw in her test exposed a paradox. Those babies who were attached in a way that Ainsworth would call “stable” were more likely to explore and experience the “strange situation.” Like the rat pups who received more licking and grooming who explored their environment, children explored more when they believed that they had a safe person to return to. (See How Children Succeed for more on rat licking and grooming.)

A summary of the styles is:

Secure – They are aware that they have a safe person to return to and thus are less fearful and more open to experiences.
Anxious – When their safe person isn’t available, they experience anxiety with the apparent concern they’ll never return. This is believed to be associated with neglect (intentional or unintentional).
Avoidant – When their safe person is available, they often push the safe person away or ignore them. This is believed to be associated with perceived (but not necessarily real) abuse.
Disordered – Alternating styles of avoidance and anxiety believed to be related to unpredictable experiences. Children of alcoholics can fall into this category or the anxious category depending on the predictability of their needs failing to be met.

Attachment in Plastic

The continued research into attachment has led to the awareness that, while attachment styles are generally stable over a lifetime, they can be changed. It’s described as the styles being plastic. They can be flexed and changed, but not without some degree of effort.

Cults sometimes intentionally try to pull people to a disordered attachment style, so they are more easily controlled and manipulated. (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing for more.) Without intentionality, trauma can move people from more secure attachment styles to less secure attachment styles. This is often disorienting for both the person and those around them.

However, with work, the opposite is true. Even those who grew up in chaotic environments can develop secure attachments and approach close relationships in healthier ways.

Unmet Needs Continue

Sometimes the dynamics of the situation have one person calling the other “needy” or “clingy.” This pejorative assessment unfairly characterizes the gap between one person’s capacity to give and the other person’s need. The person with the need is characterized as excessively needy rather than the giver being seen as insufficiently capable of giving. No matter what you call it, the gap exists – and it may grow over time.

Consider a family that earns $50,000 per year but for whom their expenses are $55,000 per year. Are they needy? Certainly, their needs exceed their earnings, but needy may – or may not – be a fair characterization. In financial terms, we increase our debts to cover the difference, which further increases the gap between income and expenses. In emotional terms, we may choose to defer our needs temporarily with the expectation that the deficit will be addressed later.

The issue is the fundamental gap between need and capacity, and it stays the same even if our tolerance of the issue doesn’t stay the same.

Intimacy Anorexia

Over a decade ago, in a previous marriage, I encountered the work of Douglas Weiss and Intimacy Anorexia. While I’d seen the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth when I encountered Weiss’ work, I hadn’t quite put the pieces together. “Intimacy anorexia,” as Weiss defines it, is a caricature of the avoidant attachment style. They use a variety of strategies to avoid the person whom they’re married to or in a committed relationship with. With every pursuit of intimacy that the secure or anxiously attached person makes, the anorexic is putting up walls. John Gottman in The Science of Trust explains how important these bids for attention (and intimacy) are.

The net result is that the person bidding for intimacy questions whether they’re normal or needy, as their partner claims.

The Anxious-Avoidant Pairing

The unfortunate outcome of attachment styles and the dating process is that people with anxious attachment styles quite frequently end up with people who have an avoidant attachment style. This set of attachment styles is often dysfunctional, with one partner constantly pursuing and the other partner constantly fleeing the threat of intimacy. The best bet for these parings is for both partners to work towards changing their attachment styles to be more stable – which is substantially harder than it sounds when your partner is human and fallible.

The Stable Connection

One might assume, rightly, that a couple consisting of two adults with stable attachment would offer the best chances for intimacy. Both partners would allow for the appropriate space for the other. They’d accept their partner as an independent person with their own needs – and recognize that they’ll be there to support their needs. An unexpected finding in the research is that having one stable person in the relationship is nearly as effective as having two. It seems that someone with a stable attachment style can calm the fears of the other partner.

It’s as if they’re able to provide the degree of closeness that the other person needs – even if that degree of intimacy needs changes. From a personal perspective, I can remember counseling sessions where I shared that I didn’t have the right to a bad day, because if I did have a bad day, my now ex-wife couldn’t rise to the occasion to meet me in the middle. In a plane, there’s a flight attitude you can get that requires the engine to run at 100% capacity. It’s called “hanging on the prop,” and it’s risky when close to the ground. When you’re operating with one securely attached person in a relationship, there may or may not be much room for weakness.

Protest Behaviors

In fact, some “protest” behaviors can drive even the securely attached partner beyond their coping capacity. Levine and Heller’s list includes:

Withdrawing
Keeping score
Acting hostile
Threating to leave
Manipulations
Making them feel jealous

I take issue with the last one, since you can’t make anyone else feel something – but you can encourage it. That being said, the list shows similarities to the ones from Intimacy Anorexia.

Elevated Attachment Isn’t Love

One of the traps people sometimes stumble into is that they mistake an activated attachment system for love. In How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how she might have mistaken illness for interest in a date. Luckily, she sorted it out. Others aren’t so lucky. They err on the side of interest when there’s something triggered in their attachment system trying to warn them, inadvertently bringing them like a moth to a flame.

The opposite is also true, where people fail to feel a “spark” with someone else and they assume that it’s because they’re not interested. Romance novels lead some to believe that there has to be this spark instead of creating space for a relationship first.

Conflict Resolution Leads to Intimacy

Even relationships between secure attachment types include fighting. Sure, they fight differently, but they still fight. When one of the partners is avoidant, they may seek to keep the conflict operating, because resolving the conflict creates too much intimacy. I can remember this experience. I’d try to eliminate the disagreement only to find a new one or a new dimension emerges. If you’re using your best conflict resolution skills, and the conflict seems to constantly rekindle, you may be working with someone who needs to keep the fight alive.

Responding to Effective Communication

Another clue to a person’s attachment style is how they respond to effective communication. The securely attached respond very positively; other attachment styles reveal their nature by changing the subject or creating a distraction. Securely attached people don’t have any interest in or any time for games. They expect effective communication – and they give it.

Growing Up

At some level, we grow up, but we don’t always learn How to Be an Adult in Relationships. We carry around the attachment styles we learned as a child, and we don’t even know that we should adjust it for a happier life. In the end, to find the best happiness in life, we need to learn how to be securely Attached.

Book Review-New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning

Robert Bogue January 22, 2024 No Comments

People are funny about death, grief, and bereavement. We continue to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that death doesn’t exist – or at least that it won’t happen to us. New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning seeks to share what we’ve learned – and how what we’ve learned doesn’t match what we’re doing. Grief, mourning, and bereavement aren’t new topics. I’ve read the classic On Death and Dying as well as The Grief Recovery Handbook, which provide perspectives into death, dying, and grief. I’ve also read Top Five Regrets of the Dying to understand what people regret most before they die and The Denial of Death to learn how we avoid the thought of death in general. However, New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment does offer a perspective that the other resources do not: a new way of thinking about the process.

Definitions

Before getting into the meat of the work, it’s important to frame the perspective with some definitions. We start that all death is loss. That loss means something we had – like our relationship with the deceased – is gone. The internal response to loss is grief. It’s the way that we feel the loss. The outward expression of that grief is mourning. Suffering is the process of grief. This is particularly true when the grief is unnecessarily extended, as in cases where people aren’t given the proper support.

These aren’t necessarily the definitions used by the book. I use these definitions here, because they are most likely aligned to the definitions that others have and are more consistent with other literature.

It’s also important to recognize that the grieving process will differ by person and by situation. We cannot force the process towards a natural end; however, we can support people in the process and reduce the suffering.

Detachment and Reattachment

Traditional models of grief are focused around Freud’s work and the need for the individual to detach from the loved one they’ve lost. While this is a part of the process, it neglects an often critical aspect of grieving, which is preserving the other person as well. Instead of completely severing connections with the deceased, the goal is to redefine the relationship with them. In grief, we’re disconnecting the old relationship and replacing it with a new relationship.

This new relationship acknowledges that the person is no longer with us in a physical sense, but rather they remain with us in our memories and in our imaginations. We can maintain a relationship with them by recalling previous memories and by simulating conversations with them.

It’s the critical process of redefining the relationship and creating a new attachment based on that new relationship that seems to have a healing and protective effect for people.

Radically Reorienting World Views

A common, but not universal, experience with people who experience a loss is the radical reorientation of world views. We all use world views to define how we see the world. We consider the world a generally helpful or generally harmful place. We have a belief that the Sun will rise in the East and set in the West. It would be incredibly disorienting if the opposite were suddenly true. This is, in essence, what happens when someone whom you expected to be with for the rest of your life – or at least longer than the time you’ve had with them – dies. This is particularly true when the loss is that of a child.

Children are supposed to bury their parents – not the other way around. When a parent is forced to confront the loss of a child, they must also realize that the grand clockwork of the universe isn’t exactly the way they saw it. When a parent buries a child, there is something profoundly wrong with the order of things.

It’s these world views – the things that are so woven into the fabric of life that we cannot directly see them – that must change when confronting the reality of death and that can be its own pain.

Frozen Feelings

One of the traps that people can fall into is the complete lack of feelings. Because of conditioning while growing up, societal expectations, or our own sense of perfectionism, we can find that we don’t allow ourselves the inward expression of grief or the outward expression of mourning. Instead, we bottle up the feelings. We contain them so they don’t get expressed, and we don’t have to fear what others will think of us – or fear that we’ll never stop crying.

Unfortunately, this approach leads to two problems. The first is that you can’t block out the bad feelings – the sorrow, the grief, and the fear – without also blocking out the good feelings like joy, love, and happiness. While freezing our feelings off into their own space may be appropriate for a time, eventually the ice must thaw, and we must experience our emotions – bad and good.

The other challenge is worse. If these feelings do remain bottled up for too long, the pressure will build, and eventually they’ll come out. It may be as anger or resentment. It might be an explosive outburst. More tragically, it may be a psychotic break that leaves someone disconnected from reality and the love of the world.

The Story

In Trauma and Memory, Peter Levine explains how our implicit memories of an event – including being notified of the death of a loved one – exists outside of time. It’s the process of converting these memories into explicit memories that places them into a time context. Without that, we’re subject to flashbacks and other intrusive thoughts. More broadly, we need to make sense of the trauma.

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains how prediction is a core part of consciousness. Inside Jokes explains that we’ve got mechanisms in our brain that detect errors in our predictions, and the reward cycle for detecting them is what kicks off laughter. For the prediction engine of our consciousness to continue to run, it needs a new model of prediction, and that means integrating the events into a cohesive story that can make sense. Without this, we’ll be stuck, unable to trust our ability to predict the future, and the world will necessarily become a much scarier, unstable place.

It was James Pennebaker’s work in Opening Up that made me aware of the healing power of writing down a trauma. Writing down the narrative of trauma allows us to weave it into a story that makes sense as well as an opportunity to take a step back and see the potential benefits that can come from a tragedy.

Expectations

We’ve got these expectations about death and loss that aren’t grounded in reality. Ideas like we’re going to completely resolve any bereavement that we have and move on aren’t real. Certainly, it gets better, different, and less painful at times, but anyone who says that it will end isn’t being truthful.

Similarly, we can’t prescribe a flow that all bereavement must go through. There’s no amount of gnashing of teeth or wailing that is mandated for a given type of loss. Instead, we must recognize that everyone will grieve in their own way. A failure to express outward morning or acknowledge inward grief doesn’t mean that the person isn’t going through the bereavement process “correctly.”

It’s similarly not necessary that someone experience a great deal of pain in the loss. It’s quite possible that the loss represents the other person being freed of their burdens in a way that brings them peace. That isn’t to minimize the loss or indicate a lack of attachment but rather is an acceptance of things and how the world really is.

Who Cares for Whom?

Option B shares a model of circles of proximity to the deceased. You provide support for those closer and seek support from those further out. As a general model, it’s fine. However, it breaks down inside of the nuclear family, like Newtonian physics breaks down at a subatomic level. When a parent is lost, both the spouse and the children occupy the closest circle, and both need support from the outside. However, inside the circle, things are not even.

Parents are expected to provide support to their children and not vice versa. The hierarchy of the family unit suggests that this should be the order of things. However, often, the spouse is unable to function at a level that allows them to support the children. Instead of having reserves that allow them to get support for their needs and invest in the children, more frequently, the children must fend for themselves – and sometimes take care of the parent. This causes long-term harm to the children as they’re forced into a parental, caregiving role before they’re supposed to.

Secrets and Security

You’re only as sick as your secrets. Yet, in some families, it seems that secrets are all that there are. Siblings who die at an early age are never spoken of. Grandparents are just “away” with no expectation of return. Even tragic illnesses that everyone knows about are just not discussed.

The problem is that, from a stability and predictability standpoint, children and adults learn that there’s always another shoe that can drop at any time. We can’t feel safe and secure enough to share our feelings, because we can’t see what tragedy is coming around the next bend. We can’t trust that the people we love and those that we depend on to care for us will tell us the truth so that we can predict some sense of stability in our lives.

The New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment accepts our need for safety, sense-making, and reconnection.

Book Review-The Road to Character

Robert Bogue January 15, 2024 No Comments

It’s a sort of challenge to the values of today. The Road to Character proposes that, historically, we were more concerned about our character than our appearance. We were more concerned with community than individual wealth and happiness. We knew, the book supposes, that serving others was the path to joy and happiness. It also proposes that we’ve lost our way.

Others agree. Tom Brokaw wrote The Greatest Generation to acknowledge the work, sacrifices, and character of the generation that fought great wars and tamed nature. While Chuck Underwood was looking at the differences in America’s Generations, he couldn’t help but acknowledge that things are different now. They’re somehow more “me” focused.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt express a similar sentiment in The Coddling of the American Mind. What happened, they wonder, that we must have trigger warnings on everything, that people can be cancelled from university appearances because we disagree, and everything has been turned into a microaggression? Instead of intelligent, thoughtful, and passioned debates about the issue, we’ve fallen into isolation and attacks.

Delayed Gratification

It seems like we lost our willingness to delay gratification. If we were all preschoolers in Michel’s Marshmallow Test, we might eat the one in front of us before the researcher had left the room. While there’s some question about the replicability of Michel’s tests, the concept of delayed gratification is important. Albert Einstein called compound interest the 8^th Wonder of the World. The more you can save and delay gratification, the more interest works in your favor instead of against you.

What Other People Think About Me Is None of My Business

We’ve also become obsessed with our image – what other people think about us. Image consultants work on everything. Hairstyles and clothing are set to match the image to project. Public relations firms shape what we say so as not to offend, and when we do, “fixers” help us to clean up the mess. This process has been happening for some time now. As I mentioned in The Deep Water of Affinity Groups, we’ve started putting on brands so that we could feel differently.

The Hidden Persuaders and Unsafe at Any Speed both explain that marketing stopped being about features and utility and started being about selling emotions and a life that you didn’t have. Instead of working to be happy, serve others, or whatever it took to really get what you wanted, the suggestion was made that you could just buy a product and have it immediately.

Large Organizations Are Dinosaurs

There was a very old commercial where a man is at a party, and someone asks him what he does. He explains that he’s a filmmaker, and the girl he is talking to swoons. He adds that it’s for cable and she visibly deflates. Finally, he explains that he makes films for HBO, and she regains her amorous attention.

It used to be that working for a large organization was an honor that not everyone could have. However, since Enron, MCI/WorldCom, and countless other disasters of ethics or environments, we’ve come to believe that large organizations aren’t as good as they once were.

Instead, the darling place to work is the venture capital-based startup. If you can work for a small company that makes it, then you can cash out and retire early. Not only do we question the ethics of a large organization, but we’re not interested in working hard for decades for someone else.

Neither, by the way, are most up for the entrepreneurial struggle that many of our great-grandparents faced in working for themselves.

Forging Morals from Weaknesses

It used to be that your teachers, mentors, and friends would encourage you to work on your weakness. You’d be encouraged to build your weaknesses until they were no longer weaknesses. Today, we encourage people to focus exclusively on their strengths. The problem with this approach is that the weaknesses – sometimes critical weaknesses – remain.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the kind of weaknesses that are easily solved, like getting glasses or contacts to improve vision,. I’m talking about the kind of weaknesses that can’t be worked around and will continue to negatively impact you year after year.

It used to be that folks like Josh Waitzkin would learn chess and then go work in martial arts – and he’d celebrate the work it takes to push through the losses. (See The Art of Learning.) Positive psychology, for all its benefits, can create challenges. It’s fundamental to positive psychology to focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. (See Positive Psychotherapy: Clinician Manual.) The challenge is that once people have recovered from their challenges and have achieved a baseline normal, they rarely go back and work on their weaknesses.

Focusing on strengths, so that people recognize they have value and that things can get better, has its place. It’s important to redevelop a sense of self-efficacy, but at some point, it’s necessary to return to the things that are holding you back. Raise Your Line makes the point that hard work is necessary. If we want to change our outcomes, we’ve got to work on the weaknesses that are holding us back.

Performance (Merit-Based) Love

Too many children are told that they’re a good child and that they’re loved with the implication that they’re loved because they’re good. Too many children begin to associate love with their performance. Instead of recognizing their intrinsic value, they believe that they’re only valuable when they’re doing something good for others. This sets children up to become adults that don’t recognize their own worth and seek ways to find their worth externally.

It works from a deficit model instead of a model that builds on a foundation of strength.

Emotional Morals

Without a solid foundation, it’s hard to be a moral person. Knowing what you believe and accepting the consequences for what you believe is hard. It’s even harder when your perspective is warped with the belief that your only value is what you can do for others.

Distortion becomes accepted. Instead of making hard decisions, people begin to make decisions that feel right. In fact, they endorse utilitarian ethics with the sense that the only real value is how it makes them feel. Feelings, while necessary for our survival, are also not reliable.

Inner Cohesion

I describe it as stable core. I last wrote about it in my review of Resilient. It’s this sense that you know who you are and what you stand for. It’s a foundation for the development of character, and it’s too often overlooked.

What Am I Being Called to Do

May people believe that you don’t choose what you are to do in life. Life, God, or the universe decided what you are called to do, and it’s up to you to answer the call – or not. For most of my life, I’ve not known exactly what it is that I’m supposed to do, what my calling is. I’m not entirely certain I understand it today.

However, I can say that the path including work on trauma and suicide wasn’t on my list. The events surrounding me pushed me in that direction, and I moved along with them. Even writing these posts was a set of circumstances that led me to believe that, if I wanted to continue to grow, I’d need to read voraciously and work to integrate the learning into my life. For me, that meant writing a book review every single week.

Late Bloomers: A Life of Preparation

An important point to remember if you’re on the long path to character is that many of the greatest leaders of all time experienced their success very late in life. We venerate Abraham Lincoln but fail to see the losses in his career. Walt Disney’s bankruptcy is washed away by history. (See The Wisdom of Walt.) Nothing much was expected from the great military leaders that we revere.

In the end, what we realize is that the end may be some sense of success and perhaps fame, but the path to get there is The Road to Character.

Book Review-Wonder Drug: 7 Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself

Robert Bogue January 8, 2024 No Comments

It’s a fair question to ask why I’d read Wonder Drug: 7 Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself given the mixed review of the authors’ prior work, Compassionomics. The short answer is that someone in a position to be helpful suggested it. The longer answer is that, despite Compassionomics’ limitations, there were still good points being made. Unsurprisingly, the “Wonder Drug” title is hyperbole. It’s also no surprise that this work is an extension of Compassionomics in that they’re proposing you actually do something about the compassion you’re feeling.

Live to Give

Though I’d argue that altruism is a level of compassion that involves personal cost or risk, many don’t draw that distinction. The concept of living to give – or live to give – is that you’ll be the happiest if you worry about other people more and yourself less. It’s no surprise that the Dalai Lama would agree. (See The Dalai Lama’s Big Book of Happiness.) Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson concur in Altered Traits, basing their perspective on neurologically verifiable details about firing patterns. Neurological and psychological research is practically paved with studies verifying that the more concerned we are with others, the happier we’ll be.

The authors cite Adam Grant’s Give and Take. On Grant’s suggestion, I read SuperCooperators and Does Altruism Exist?, which further the argument for concern for others. Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation even provides computer models for how cooperation might have evolved – and what strategies are best.

Clearly, there’s no question about what the best approach is. However, the important question is how to make the transition. Even the Dalai Lama and Paul Eckman pondered whether we’re fundamentally compassionate or selfish people. (See Destructive Emotions.) They wrestled with the challenge of flipping the switch from selfish to serving. They didn’t reach an answer. Of course, the Dalai Lama could point to Buddhist monks, who meditate on compassion (loving kindness), but then one could argue that they were already on the side of compassion.

While the authors leave the question largely unanswered, I believe that before we can have compassion for others, our needs need to be satiated. We need to believe that we have enough and that we are enough. (See Brene Brown’s work in I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) and Daring Greatly for more about enough.)

Passion, Purpose, and Wisdom

Sometimes, we confuse the idea that we’re passionate about something for our purpose. Consider a professional athlete. They’re clearly passionate about their sport. However, eventually, they’ll have to give it up. Many athletes identify passion projects during their career or after their careers are over. Scholarships, sports equipment, and programming for underserved youth are just the tip of the iceberg. The difference between their passion for the game and their purpose is in how it serves others. Purpose is why we’re here. (See Start with Why for more.)

The problem is, whether you’re talking to college graduates at a commencement or whether you’re in your second decade of working, the purpose may not have revealed itself yet. Finding the thing that is your purpose isn’t easy or straightforward. As Extreme Productivity points out, life has twists and turns that are not predictable. Many people find that their purpose isn’t discovered until late in life. While they’re waiting, they’re trying out lots of causes to see one might be the one that moves them.

The Overreaches

There are places where Wonder Drug overreaches. That is, the book makes bold claims that aren’t supported by research. For instance, “Seventy percent of your ability to give (emotion, time, money) is the result of nurturance.” The research doesn’t come close to supporting this assertion. In fact, the more consistent research supports that it’s a combination of disposition and resources. Those who believe they can spare some resources are substantially more likely to do so. Of course, we all know people who have plenty who are disinterested in helping others and giving back. However, that self-centered attitude is much rarer than it may first appear.

Another instance where there’s an overreach is in pain management. “Just to be clear: if you are compassionate, your brain is more resilient. It can block out the empathetic pain of witnessing the suffering of others to allow you to give meaningful help to people in need.” There are two overreaches placed side by side. First, a resilient brain isn’t necessarily more compassionate. Though there may be some correlation, that doesn’t mean causation. You’re resilient if you can weather the storms of life.

Second, there is nothing that says you can block out the pain of witnessing the suffering of others. “Blocking out” implies hiding it from your consciousness, which would be the opposite of empathy and – because empathy is required before compassion – compassion as well. Those people who are the most able to give are able to accept and process the emotions and pains of others and convert that into action – they are by no means blocking them out.

Get Started

Wonder Drug weighs that purpose is in being something larger than yourself – I disagreed above. However, there is a barrier, a discouragement that can happen if you focus on the magnitude of the problem that your purpose puts in front of you. You can see the scope and scale of the literacy problem for grade school children and do nothing. However, that accomplishes nothing. Instead, you can, like Dolly Pardon, set up library and book programs that make the maximum impact possible with the resources that you can spare. No doubt that Dolly Pardon has more resources than the average person, but her example shows that no matter what you can do, you should do it.

No doubt that if your purpose is of large scale and importance, you’ll not be able to do it alone or in your lifetime. That’s why it’s important to find others who can share your purpose – and become passionate about ways to address it. Some projects may not be completed in your lifetime. It may be that what you start won’t see fruit in your life. The truth is that the results are nice but the real reason for doing it is the process – knowing that you’ll be making the world just a little bit better.

While compassion and living a life of philanthropy and service may be good for you, it’s not as easy as it may seem. If we abandon the “me” culture for the culture of “we,” we become interdependent upon one another, and that’s far harder in today’s world than being independent.

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t be givers. We should. We have to recognize that the path isn’t easy. It is saying that, in the end, there may be no Wonder Drug.

Book Review-The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

Robert Bogue January 1, 2024 No Comments

I’m concerned. A lot of people are concerned, really. It seems like our political system in the United States is spiraling out of control, and it’s not clear what can be done to stop it. The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels is not completely reassuring, but it does help to put our current state into a broader historical context.

The War of Northern Aggression

As I write this, I’m sitting in a state that seceded from the United States as a part of the Confederacy. In this border state, one can still find Confederate flags and other reminders of a time long since past. Here, they wouldn’t speak of the Civil War. They’d speak of the “War of Northern Aggression.” If you’ve not heard that term before, you’ve not engaged in enough conversations while in the South. Like the conversations that we have today, where facts are warped to support feelings, the Southerners convicted by the conflict will insist that the war was one of Northern aggression.

The issue surrounds Fort Sumter, which sits in Charleston, SC’s harbor. South Carolina seceded from the United States, but the fort wasn’t relinquished from federal control, so the Confederacy attacked it. While the Confederacy may not have felt the United States was within its rights to hold the fort, the simple fact of the matter is that the first shot was fired by the Confederacy on the United States Fort Sumter.

I start with this story not because it’s contained within the pages of the book but rather because I see it as a real and practical example about how we don’t always listen to facts when we’re choosing our positions.

Discrimination

Certainly, any historian would point to the Civil War and the resulting disruption to slavery as a contentious time in our nation’s history. Lincoln was clear that freeing the slaves wasn’t his point. His goal was to maintain the integrity of the Union, and if slaves were freed as a part of that process, that would be fine. History paints Lincoln in brighter colors, but his motives weren’t as altruistic as we’d like to believe.

It would be decades of Jim Crow laws and discrimination before Harry Truman would push forward a civil rights program that included anti-lynching legislation. It’s frightening to me that we had to enact such laws. It was Eisenhower who Invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, deployed the 101^st Airborne division, and federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard to ensure that nine Black students could go to school.

It would be another six years before Martin Luther King Jr. would stand at the Lincoln Memorial and share his “I Have a Dream” speech. Kennedy’s assassination spurred Johnson toward completing the civil rights work that Kennedy had started. Johnson stated that he was willing to lose a chance at reelection if he could get the civil rights bill passed. Of course, this didn’t eliminate discrimination, but it codified that it was illegal and allowed for legal pressure to resolve the issues that were once an accepted part of life for Black Americans.

This is a window into the constant turmoil that we have faced as a nation for over 100 years – if we start at the Emancipation Proclamation. While we think of the 1960s as an era of civil rights, few realize that the work began with Truman and Eisenhower.

It’s important to state that slavery in general and the length of time it took to get to our current state is a black spot in the history of the United States. Too few people are aware of just how long the struggle took.

McCarthyism

It starts with fear. Communism came to be widely feared throughout the United States. We didn’t fear an invasion or attack from the communists. We feared that they’d infiltrate us from within and destroy the American ideal. We feared that our friends and neighbors might silently be sympathetic to communism. We particularly feared that people in our own government were moles for communism.

Senator McCarthy played on these fears with endless theatrics that claimed to find evidence of people’s involvement only to have these baseless claims evaporate in the light of the day. Still, few were willing to lock horns with him, because they feared the fallout if he turned his gaze towards them. While some stood up against McCarthy, it wasn’t as many as those who should have. While his reign of terror has since ended, it was allowed to continue for far too long.

Trumpism

What’s striking about McCarthyism is that we’re seeing it play out again. Trump knowingly promulgated false information to the public about COVID-19. He played on the fears of people losing their jobs to illegal immigrants “pouring” over the United States-Mexican border. His hyperbole regarding the wall and the misinformation regarding COVID-19 cannot help but be seen in the context of McCarthy and the adeptness that he shifted from one issue to the next to prevent the American public from catching on to his shell game.

No one – including Trump – are all good or all bad. Both McCarthy and Trump have been adept at reading the politics of a situation and adapting. However, that’s not the thing that we need most.

Slow, Stumbling Steps

We make and have made many mistakes. We fail to act quickly enough. We fall prey to fear and divisiveness, and we always have. The fact that even today there are divisions around the Civil War (over 150 years ago) is evidence that we don’t always make progress quickly. Enlightenment exists within our boundaries, but it’s too narrowly dispersed.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” While we cannot expect that today or even tomorrow we’ll be the country we desire to be, the expectation is that, in time, we’ll be better than we are today. Maybe we’ll even find The Soul of America.

Book Review-The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging

Robert Bogue December 25, 2023 No Comments

The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging is more like a sketch of where to go than the kinds of GPS-enabled maps that we’re used to today, but that’s not a criticism. Community and belonging are necessarily context dependent, and as a result, there’s no one map that can lead us to the places of belonging that we long for. Robert Putnam’s work in Bowling Alone more than 20 years ago made it clear that the foundations of our social capital are eroding. He revisits these dynamics in Our Kids, explaining how we’ve become more insular in the way that we raise our kids – and less community-based.

Putnam is not alone. Sherry Turkle in Alone Together shares her perspectives on how technology is exaggerating the problem. The Great Evangelical Recession explains the loss of connection from a church perspective. In short, the problem is everywhere. The Art of Community is designed to give people a map they can use to navigate back to places of community even if that means having to take a greater responsibility in creating them.

Loneliness

Loneliness can be a powerful if not overwhelming experience that far too many people encounter during their lives. Persistent loneliness can have substantial negative health effects more than smoking or alcohol consumption. (See the book Loneliness for more.) The move away from relationships, social capital, and community means more loneliness and that the loneliness will last longer.

Communities and Tribes

Seth Godin’s book, Tribes, suggests that we need to find our group – and lead them. While tribes are sometimes used synonymously with communities, there’s an essential difference. In communities, members care about other members because they’re a member of the community. We’ve always had mechanisms where we cared about others and would make sacrifices for them. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explains a kinship mechanism that makes this work, despite the fact no one is making a statistical analysis of the probability of matching genes when deciding to rush into a burning building to save a person – family or not. While many question the kinship hypothesis put forth by Dawkins, there is no question that we’ve evolved with a degree of concern and even self-sacrifice.

The primary problem with communities is the concern for those who would take advantage of the community by not doing their share. Adam Grant in Give and Take speaks of the takers who take more than they give. SuperCooperators and Does Altruism Exist? express a similar sentiment but back it up with mechanisms that keep it in balance. Collaboration and The Evolution of Cooperation call it “social loafing,” but it is the same thing. Cooperation leverages the best outcome for everyone over the best output for one person – the Nash equilibrium instead of the von Neumann-Morgenstern equilibrium. (See The Outward Mindset for more.)

We can see the influences today by playing the ultimatum game as explained in Drive. The short version is that we’ll punish another party if they’re not being fair – even if it has a cost to us.

Four Features, Three Questions, and Seven Principles

The core of the book is understanding how there are four features that you must be able to understand and articulate to drive the community. There are three questions that the community must help the members answer. And there are seven principles to creating community.

The four features are:

Shared values
Membership identity
Moral proscriptions
Insider understanding

The three questions that the community must help the members answer are:

Who am I?
How should I act?
What do I believe?

Finally, the seven principles are:

Boundary: The line between members and outsiders.
Initiation: The activities that mark a new member.
Rituals: The things we do that have meaning.
Temple: A place set aside to find our community.
Stories: What we share that allows others and ourselves to know our values.
Symbols: The things that represent ideas that are important to us.
Inner Rings: A path to growth as we participate.

Boundaries

Boundaries aren’t about keeping others out. They’re about creating safe spaces for the members. In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch lays out a pattern for how to structure cities with six components: maps and signs (directions), landmarks (ever-present reference points), paths (channels of movement), edges (barriers), districts (major areas), and nodes (intersections). Boundaries align with the edges that keep people in their lanes.

In Collaborative Intelligence, Richard Hackman explains the importance of boundaries – and the ease of crossing into and out of the group. He describes over- and under-bounded groups and their problems. In the case of community, we often have gatekeepers. These people are designed to help people move into and out of the group. Gatekeepers are those who welcome people in – and sometimes move people outside the group.

Initiation

An aspect from Influence that didn’t make my review is that the more we put into becoming a part of a group, the more we’ll defend that group. In the rationale of justifying our decision to subject ourselves to a difficult initiation process, we necessarily increase the value of membership. The greater the cost of the initiation that we’ve gone through, the greater the value of the group. (See The Deep Water of Affinity Groups for more about association with groups.)

The balance to be struck is to make it easy enough that people will want to become a part of the community while simultaneously making it hard enough to drive further commitment to the group.

Rituals

Rituals have been burned into our culture since the very beginning. As van Gennep notes in The Rites of Passage, rituals are an important part of signaling transitions between different phases of life and of community. Robert Lewis in Raising a Modern-Day Knight encourages parents to develop their own ritual for the transition to manhood for boys.

Rituals are particularly powerful when they involve rhythm and synchronization across the group of people. The combination of synchronicity and rhythm seem to have been a part of our evolution and hold a strong primal power over us. (See Pre-Suasion, Team Genius, and Split-Second Persuasion.)

Temple

Sometimes the place that members come together are easy. If you’re a member of any of the dozens of Disney-focused groups, there are two temples in the form of Disney Land in Anaheim, CA and Disney World in Orlando, FL. Walt Disney (and his brother Roy) made sure that the experience inside the gates was a consistent story that people could walk into and ignore the outside world. (See The Wisdom of Walt and Beyond the Wisdom of Walt.)

For most of us, the place that our community meets will be less specific. Whether it’s online or it’s a gathering at a local community space, we need to consider how we create that sense of space. (See Digital Habitats for creating online spaces.)

If you’re in physical spaces, The Art of Community suggests that special places can be created by:

Boundary: Something indicates the space boundary.
Invitation: People important to the ritual are specifically invited into the space.
Clothing: Participants wear special clothes to the space when it’s sacred.
Lighting: The lighting is shaped for the ritual.
Sound: The sound is different when the space is sacred.
Height: Objects important for the ceremony are raised up, including people.

Stories

Since the time before written language, we’ve been telling stories. Cave paintings and oral tradition predate our writing of stories. These stories truly define us. The stories that we share and the stories that we believe bind us together and define our values. (See The Power of Myth, Story Genius, and Wired for Story for more.) The question for every community is what are the stories that every member should know? What stories should we tell to new members? Is the formation story necessary and relevant today? Is there a reawakening story that shares the new vision and values for the organization?

Symbols

There’s a tradition in the military of challenge coins. These coins are given to signify that you were a part of something – or that you were respected by someone of rank. The original story goes that if you were in a bar and said you were a part of something, someone could challenge you. If you couldn’t produce the coin as proof, you’d buy them a drink. If you did produce the coin, they’d buy you one. Since those beginnings, they’ve become a thing of pride for many military members and other groups.

Many communities have symbols. Some, like Alcoholics Anonymous, use coins as well, but your symbol can be anything that the members find value in. In Green Bay, WI, it might even be a foam, cheese-shaped wedge to wear on your head.

Inner Rings

Once a group grows to a larger size, there must be a division that separates the “inner rings” from the outer rings. That is, those who are the most committed to the community and those who are less committed. It can be an official designation. It can be an invitation to participate in a group that is helping to shape or design some aspects of the community. It’s an invitation to participate more deeply that signifies that people have made it.

Convening

Throughout my reading of The Art of Community, I was struck about how this was the temporal and relational extension of the work in The Art of Gathering. Beyond simply the similarity in names, the art of gathering – or convening – precedes the creation of community. We bring people together to allow them to form relationships and then to develop concern for one another. If you’re building community, the art of bringing people together is a prerequisite.

Binding the Group Together

Binding people together can have negative connotations. The idea that people would be prevented from leaving is quite obviously not appropriate. As we move to more restrictive forms of binding to the group, we move closer and closer to being a cult. (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing.) However, we also need to create a sense of belonging, togetherness, and concern that binds folks so that they’ll be committed to one another to work through tough problems.

Disagreements occur in every community. Building the commitment to one another to work through hard problems and disagreements is a important part of building The Art of Community.

Article: Communicating Effectively Through Repetition and Channels

Robert Bogue December 19, 2023 No Comments

Two simple changes can help reduce the complaints about poor communication—from you and the rest of the organization. By identifying the breakdowns of communications and better choosing channels, communications can be received more frequently—and without painful misunderstandings.

From the ATD blog. Read the full article here: https://www.td.org/atd-blog/communicating-effectively-through-repetition-and-channels

Book Review-Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, and Restoring Sanity

Robert Bogue December 18, 2023 No Comments

Margaret Wheatley’s work was a recommendation from a friend. In a chance part of our conversations, he shared his reverence for her and her work. That’s why I picked up Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, and Restoring Sanity. There’s the slightest hint of fatalism in how the world will disintegrate and our societies will crumble. However, through it all, there’s a sense that we have the capacity to grow and learn as a living system.

The Fate of Empires

Wheatley explains that her work builds on the works of Joseph Tainter from The Collapse of Complex Societies and Sir John Glubb in The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. She directly shares Glubb’s ages:

Pioneers – In the age of pioneers, fearless, courageous people form the new empire.
Conquest – In the age of conquest, they take control of others, organizing their might for the good of the empire.
Commerce – In the age of commerce, with borders secured, they turn towards material wealth and comfort.
Affluence – In the age of affluence, service ethics begin to wane and are replaced with a new degree of selfishness.
Intellect – In the age of intellect, intelligence increases and spends endless time debating rather than acting while the empire declines around them.
Decadence – The end age of decadence worships the idols of celebrity and descends into behaviors including narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fanaticism, and high levels of frivolity.

Living Systems

Wheatley calls it the “arrow of time.” It’s the tendency towards entropy. It’s chaos ultimately unwinding the clock of creation. However, she explains that this is only one view of things. Another view is of living systems that continue to move in the direction of order and of converting information through an energy process.

Living systems is a way of viewing the universe. Images of Organization invited us to view organizations as organisms – living organisms. Wheatley suggests that we apply this thinking to everything. There’s reason to believe that this is a reasonable approach. When we went to revisit Darwin’s survival of the fittest through Dawkin’s Selfish Gene, we discovered Robert Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation and stumbled upon SuperCooperators putting an end to the question of Does Altruism Exist?. We discovered that the only way for cooperation and altruism to have evolved is for higher-and-higher levels of organization to generate them.

Even inside living systems, there are higher levels of systems that evolve to create structures where there were none. While there is this natural tendency to greater organization, we cannot ignore the challenges that we’re creating in the world. We can’t blindly believe that we’ll find a new technology or approach that will undo all the damage that has been done. Ronald Wright labeled this “The Progress Trap,” and Wheatley asserts that this is a major factor in accelerating decline.

Change to Preserve

People, organizations, and societies resist change. In fact, organizations and societies are designed to resist change. Given this, how is it that changes ever happen? The answer seems to be that the motivators line up such that the organism or society – or person – perceives they have no choice. Thomas Gilovich explains in How We Know What Isn’t So how we’ll deny what we don’t have to accept. However, at some point, we must accept that what we believe or what we’re doing is no longer working. It’s at that point that the system will accept changes – begrudgingly.

When Facts are Fiction

Perhaps the most concerning observation that Wheatley shares is the one that there comes a time when we’re no longer concerned with facts but are instead more focused on personal beliefs. Going to Extremes begins exposing the process by which this can start to happen; however, there aren’t complete answers.

There’s a group of people who believe the Earth is flat. The Flat Earth Society is a real association with members around the globe. (I couldn’t help it.) They’ve steadfastly refused to believe other scientists, pictures, and any other evidence that the world was not, in fact, flat. In the documentary, Behind the Curve, they decided to set up their own experiment. The short version was to fire a beam of light parallel to the Earth along water, so they knew there wasn’t a change in elevation. The documentary ends with them proving the Earth is not flat. And yet, the Flat Earth Society still exists. They have, themselves, disproven their premise, and they continue. How and why? It’s one thing to distrust others and to believe that they’ve got ulterior motives, but what’s it like to discount your own members?

The problem isn’t one group of fringe people at one point in time. The problem is this same pattern repeats over and over again. We see it in cults and their failures. Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, Heaven’s Gate in California, and Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple are all examples of cult followers who died because of their beliefs in the leaders of these cults.

How would I know for sure that this is true? What’s true-ish? We see distortion in the media and the messaging from politicians, and we don’t know what to believe. (See Why We’re Polarized for more.) We have a greater capacity now than at any time in history to verify facts – and we’re less likely to try. The internet brings us unimaginable opportunities for verification of information – and an overwhelming amount of false information. (See The Information Diet and The Organized Mind for more about the overwhelming amount of information we face.)

The simple fact of the matter is that we have no capacity left to verify the amount of information confronting us. We’re constantly taking shortcuts – we must if we want to pretend to keep up. This is a frequent concern of psychology, neurology, and marketing – The Hidden Brain, The Signal and the Noise, How We Know What Isn’t So, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), and many other books speak of rules of thumb. Rules of thumb are the positive spin on these shortcuts. The negative path uses stereotypes, which is also a popular topic: White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, The Mind Club, No Two Alike, On Dialogue, and particularly A Class Divided speak of stereotypes. It’s not that we occasionally take a cognitive processing shortcut, it’s the way we think.

More problematic is that we’re too exhausted to test to see when the rules of thumb and stereotypes that we’ve created are wrong. The Wason selection task was designed to see how much people would seek to disprove their theories instead of confirm them. The problem is that we’re generally bad when we must disprove our own theories. (See The Righteous Mind and The Black Swan for more.)

No Longer Hate Crimes

“Don’t feed the trolls.” It was a warning sign shared with people in the early days of the internet. In the archaic equivalent of social media channels in the form of Internet Relay Chat and America Online (AOL), people intentionally tried to get a rise out of someone by making outrageous comments. Moderators were taught that if the “trolls,” as they were called, were not responded to, they’d stop talking. They would be deprived of what they’re looking for. The trickiest trolls would post anonymously. They’d be too ashamed to make their comments with their name attached. However, by 2015, it was no longer socially unacceptable to say hateful things with your name attached.

No longer were people concerned about whether people knew who they were – even someone’s real name versus a username. We’d lost our concern for how people would react to us if we connected ourselves to hateful speech. The trolls are easier to find – but they’re also harder to remove.

Weaponized Information

We live in the information age, where information can make the difference between success and failure. The old cliché that the “pen is mightier than the sword” is truer now than at any time in history. Of course, it’s the phone or the computer not the pen – but the point is the same. Virtually anyone can create information – true or not – that is seen across the globe by millions (and billions) of people.

Information can bring down regimes, like we saw in Arab Spring. Information can shape perception, including misperception. False claims about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin caused countless people to use these drugs incorrectly – and resulted in untold deaths.

Information can now be clipped out of context and applied to situations which it was never intended to be used for. Clipping out the part of the fight where the defender is hitting back can – and does – create the wrong impression.

Clear Theory of Action

Public health professionals are well intended. They want to make the world a better place through better public health. If they didn’t believe this, they wouldn’t have chosen public health as their profession. It’s not glamorous, nor does it come with huge salaries. It is a profession that you have to want to love – or you won’t even get started. That being said, too many public health professionals are in the copycat business. They look for a pattern that has claimed to work in another locale and they apply it to their population. The problem is they don’t look for or evaluate the theory of action that led to its success.

A theory of action is a narrative about why the activity gets the results. It starts with “We think…” and it ends with a causal chain from the action to the result. The chain doesn’t have to be intuitively obvious. It needs only to be a reasonably plausible pathway.

Too many public health professionals don’t stop to question how an intervention leads to results – or to verify the previous efficacy claims. Take the Gun Shop Project. It introduces the task of assessing mental health – and relative degree of suicide risk – to gun shop employees. Given that even mental health professionals fail to identify people who are suicidal at rates much better than chance, it’s hard to believe that an employee of a gun shop with minimal training could possibly accurately predict the suicidal intent of a patron. (See Assessment and Prediction of Suicide for more on our ability to predict suicide.)

The argument from public health professionals is “At least it’s something.” The problem is while this makes us feel better – it doesn’t necessarily result in better outcomes. (See Change for the problems with bias towards action.) The real problem with this thinking is that it can block other, more effective strategies. Even if it doesn’t directly block a different approach, the lack of efficacy leads to greater change resistance. Effective programs make it easier to do more programs; ineffective programs block progress.

One Good Conversation

Relationships are at the heart of being human. We are social creatures. (See Loneliness for more.) How does one build a relationship? It all starts with one good conversation. One good conversation is all it takes to reintroduce us to what it feels like to be in a satisfying human relationship. One good conversation allows us to be known – and to know someone else. Sometimes, it can feel like the people we want to be are in some far off and elusive state. We forget, however, that we can take steps to be the people we want to be in small and immediate ways.

Knowing Ourselves to Help Others

Brene Brown explains that some of the most wholehearted people she knows are good at boundaries. Behind this is a great deal of work on themselves. They know who they are – and who they are not. People who are in helping professions frequently focus on others and solving their needs – after all, they’re so much larger than theirs. However, the problem is that you cannot give what you do not have. You can’t give peace if you don’t feel it yourself. You can’t help people feel safe if you don’t feel safe yourself.

It’s hard work to choose to work on yourself. Facing other demons isn’t the same as facing your own. It’s easier to tell others to be strong than to stand in the face of the oppressive weight. When we learn more about who we are, what we believe, and how we will behave, we’re preparing to be able to give gifts to others.

Making Meaning

“Humans cannot live without meaning. The greater the uncertainty, the more our desperate grasp for a handhold, a shred of meaning.” As we struggle to predict the future to protect ourselves, we seek to find meaning in everything that we do. However, it’s more than that. Many of us have to find a way to positively impact humanity. We need to find that way that we’ll leave our small mark in the sands of time.

Being a leader who bends the arc of humanity in a positive direction is a good meaning. It’s this thirst for meaning that has us asking and hopefully answering the question, Who Do We Choose to Be?

Public Speaking