When Our Inventions Invent Us

Of all inventions institutions are unique: they are the only inventions that, in time, invent us. Institutions like school, business, church, government and media define the individual’s life. A seven-year-old child has little choice about whether he is educated within an Afghani Wahabi school, where he is taught that America is evil, or in an Oklahoma City elementary school, where he is taught that America is good. Yet by the conclusion of either education, the individual will have learned to defend what he is taught. One of the first things that any institution does is teach its members how to defend that institution. 

There are no other inventions that program into their users this defense of the invention. Phonographs become CD players with little protest. Horse-drawn carriages become automobiles; telegraph gives way to telephone. Yet individual Jews, Christians or Muslims will die protecting their church. Austrians, Mexicans and Ethiopians will die protecting their country. Institutions do not just shape the life of the individual; they readily sacrifice those lives in order to survive.

The question is whether its possible to create a generation that is not institutionalized. Such a generation could treat institutions as tools rather than, be treated as tools by these institutions. It seems to me that such a remove will be necessary before we can engage in social invention in the same way that we now engage in technological invention. 

Dan Ariely on Predictably Irrational Humans

You may need to click through on this link as folks (sorry Sandi and Allen) seem to be having trouble with the video as it is embedded.

Bernard on Civilization as the Burden of Consciousness

Bernard didn’t waste anytime with small talk. Something had been keeping him up and the words spilled out even before I could read my menu.


“Civilization is the burden of consciousness. Our brains are big enough that it takes an enormous amount of complexity and work just to occupy them.”

“What?” I said, disoriented.

“We created all this society stuff to keep up with the development of our brains.”

I paused. I was irritated. Bernard knew that I rarely ordered the same thing twice and I needed to look at the menu each time. He wasn’t giving me time to do that. “So you’re saying that the Egyptian slaves built the pyramids because they were bored?”

“No. They had to create an outside world as complex as the one in their head.”

“Because?”

“Because otherwise they’d be bored.”

“Slaves?”

“Don’t be willfully obtuse,” Bernard sighed. “Communities do this. I has been a joint effort. Consciousness is like a vacuum that sucks civilization after it, inventing games, social constructs and technologies to occupy us.” He didn’t really need me to listen. He just kept on talking.

“But now the problem is that we Americans don’t really accept any rituals. It used to be that social complexity had to keep up with the complexity of consciousness, but now it’s reversed. We’ve made it too hard, made the construction of civilization and meaning a burden that we foist onto the individual.” Bernard did not even pause as the waitress came to take my order. I realized that he was again drinking espresso.

“We are a nation founded by Puritans who thought that rituals were a corruption of something pure. We threw away mass and art in church buildings. We reject rituals and social constructs and yet still there is a need for ceremonies, for some sacrament to mark milestones in life. But not many people have communion, or Bar Mitzvahs or whatever it is that ancient cultures have. We’ve been purified of rituals and still have a need for them so … we create them – rather poorly – on our own. What used to be a community tradition has become individual choice or responsibility.”

“So you are saying that it is not just that civilization is the burden of consciousness. You are saying that this burden is now personal?”

“Yes. And it’s an impossible task. By the time you realize what ritual is needed to become an adult or to leave home, you are a generation or two beyond that. The person immersed in the experience can’t be expected to also construct a way to commemorate, or symbolize it.”

“So I’m lost. You’re saying that we’ve purged our culture of rituals or that we just make them up ourselves? Civilization is the burden on consciousness or the burden created by consciousness?”

“I’m saying two things. One, civilization is a side effect of consciousness. Two, rituals are now left to the individual to choose or create. Now that everyone has to customize his own personal civilization – his own private culture – civilization has now become a burden to consciousness.”

“So we’ve gone full circle?”

“Everything living does.”

“So what is the prognosis?”

Bernard began to laugh. “Consciousness will become more complex. It has to, just to keep up.”

“Poof! Just like that? We’ll evolve more intelligence.”

“More social intelligence, yes. We already are.”

“We are?”

“Sure. What do you think the Internet is? Social sites like Facebook? We’re laying the foundation for new social inventions that can be shared. And we have huge networks to tap into.”

“Bernard,” I said laughing. ‘You’ve joined facebook?”

Bernard shifted uncomfortably. “Er. Yes. I have.”

I could not help but chuckle. “Bernard, I thought that was for college kids. No?”

“Not anymore,” Bernard said. “Everyone needs help constructing a life in a do-it-yourself culture. Not just kids.”

Your World - A Social Construct

My inspiration to begin blogging traces back to two things: my outrage at George Bush’s policies and wanting a forum in which I played with my 4th Economy ideas. It seems as though, of all the things that interest me, this 4th Economy idea – my one big idea – is the one that provokes the least interaction and interest when I write about it.

Going over ideas of Werner Erhard’s about how our own personal narratives are constructs, I wonder if one of the obstacles to my explaining the 4th Economy don’t trace back to this still elusive notion of social constructs. Foundational to the ideas is the notion that even terribly large constructs – like Renaissance thinking or the modern, dominant pragmatist way of thinking – are themselves social constructs.

If one were to doubt the claim that any culture’s dominant world view is a social construct, one would only have to look at the inordinate amount of time and attention we give to “civilizing” a baby to become a member of society. The gross effort it takes to recreate our society in each child should be testament to the fact that any culture is not a "natural" or spontaneous state; it is, instead a social construct that takes great effort - every time. Language and manners, what we question and what we accept, social roles … all of these end products represent the myriad tasks of parents and teachers and are essentially tasks that work to construct a world view and assert the place of the individual in it.

Instead of being seen that way, we more often see social constructs as “the way things are,” rather than a choice that is carefully and painstakingly chosen and supported. Mothers in particular have to be aware of how tenuous is this social construct. The curious child, the rebellious child, the stubborn child, the lazy child (and really, which of our children are not all of these things at various stages of the day / week / childhood / adulthood?) all question the social construct in ways that don’t readily suggest easy answers.

It might be too much to expect parents and schools to add to their list of admonitions and lessons the label: “Warning: contents of this society have been known to create feelings of anomie and alienation, provoke wars, homicides, and suicides, and pollute the habitat you need for survival. Most of what we tell you should be questioned and improved on. This is, really, just the best we’ve been able to do up until now and it could be that improvement will actually overturn much of what we now accept and advocate. Learn about your culture and your place in it, but don’t cling too tightly to it.”

It does seem like a stretch to expect communities to see their culture as a social construct when, as Werner Erhard and others have seemed to prove, even accepting the notion that our own life, our own life's story is a construct is elusive, a notion we tend to resist. As long as we continue to believe that even our own lives just represent "what is" rather than a construct that we might change, it'll be hard to build a consensus that it is time to break out of the consensus trance. And to give you some idea about my own level of optimism, I actually think that this is a task we can do.

To quote from the bumper sticker, just sign me, "another dopeless hope fiend."

Cool as a Construct: Transforming High School

One of my central insights to life came in high school. It is, oddly, a lesson whose import I still struggle to convey.

I attended three high schools and was, marginally, a part of a fourth. I attended high schools in Northern California, Southeastern Washington, and here in San Diego. People outside of California probably don’t realize how distinct is each region: the Bay Area is as liberal as Orange County is conservative; Palm Springs is as dry as Eureka is wet; Beverly Hills is as affluent as El Centro is poor. Living in different regions of California is like living in different states. I worked for uncles on farms in Montana; my Montana cousin was a day older than me and we spent time with his friends and classmates from this little farming community.

One thing was common to all these high school communities. Cool was essential to acceptance. If a person was not cool, they had trouble with all the rest. Athletic helped. So did good looking or smart or funny. But lacking an element of cool, all that was for naught. If your classmates thought you were cool, you were set. If they thought you were not cool, well, you may as well go kiss a rock.

By the time I got to San Diego, I had learned something about cool: cool was a construct. It was just made up. What made a person cool in San Diego – the affable easy-going “dude” of the surfers in flip flops – would have made that person alien and distinctly un-cool in Montana, where it was the ability to ride bulls, not waves, that commanded respect. My own sense of liberation probably went too far. I was a terrible student in high school. Atrocious. One semester, I remember my poor father wondering how I could have received 26 absences in one class. (Years later, I was consoled to learn that the amazing singer / songwriter Tom Waits did not just skip some of the same classes I did, but went so far as to drop out of the same high school from which I graduated. I felt somewhat vindicated.)

Knowing that cool is a construct is both liberating and, if one is not careful, alienating. I felt both. But it laid the foundation for a particular kind of worldview. When I was about 15 or 16, my English teacher couldn’t quite figure out a short story I wrote in which the protagonist, Butts Cigar, killed a parallel character from Russia named Buttiski and once he looked down at the corpse, he found a reel of tape that played the same instructions that Butts had received – a moment of existential revelation for Butts and a probably defeatist (or at least ambivalent) ending. The story included mention of parents and teachers as programmed programmers. The idea of programming was still nascent in 1975, but it seemed to me an apt description of the process of socialization.

Years later, I discovered the management philosophy of W. Edwards Deming. Deming stressed the importance of systems – in education or business or government. Deming pointed out that systems are just made up and that once they are, individuals too often focus their attention on performing well in them rather than on changing those systems. This insight seems to me both obvious and profound – as with any useful insight.

As a case in point, let’s go back to high school. (Please, says the reader. Let’s not.) Michael Kauffman used to sit on the board of the Deming User Group with me here in San Diego. I learned quite a bit from him about collaborative creation as an alternative to improvement. Michael continues to work with schools to transform the experience of education rather than improve it.

There might be no better example of the futility of improvement (rather than transformation) than the current mania for standardized testing. Three generations ago, my daughter might have been a teacher, nurse, or mother. A generation ago, her career options might have numbered in the dozens. Today, my daughter plans to be a professor of cognitive science – a field so new that the vast majority of her professors in the cog sci department do not even have degrees in the field. Never have we lived in a time of more options and variation. Never have we lived in a time of greater emphasis on standardized testing. Does no one else see this as foolishness on steroids? We don’t need to improve our ability to score on standardized tests: we need to transform how high schools prepare children for adulthood.

Michael recently posted about the drop out rate in high schools. As it turns out, the states report graduation rates with two sets of books: Mississippi, for instance, calculated their graduation rate as 87 percent in reports submitted to DC and in another exercise reported a rate of 63 percent.

His post shows how things are worse than reported. I think even this misses a bigger point: our education system has stable outcomes, regularly failing about 20% of the students it begins with. Given our emphasis on performance within systems, we have construed this to mean that students are failing. But a system that regularly “fails” such a percentage of students ought to be labeled as a type of failure. More emphasis on meeting the current criteria will not help this or result in transformation. Only starting anew at the state of the individual – each individual – offers hope to make the system work for students.

There are so many ways to succeed in life. We all know people who performed miserably in school but shame us in their business or romantic success. By no stretch of the imagination does school guard the single door to success.

One way to begin the transformation of schools is for communities to begin the conversation about what makes for a “successful” life. Generating a list of what determines success – determinants as varied as competence in relationships and adherence to exercise and diet plans to the ability to make money and influence people to a sense of meaning and engagement in the everyday – is to quickly point out all that is missing in a dozen plus years of education. Until schools do a better job of addressing the many dimensions of being human, they will continue to do a poor job of addressing the needs of more than 50 to 80% of their students. They “fail” the various kinds of students because they fail to address the various ways of being human. Changing this will require transformation.

After all, school is a social construct. Like cool, it is just made up. We don’t have to accept this. We can make up something new – something that better accords with the reality of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

80 Year Old Man Awakes From Consensus Trance: Bernard on Society

My work goes through waves of intensity. For now, I’m in a wave of 80+ hour weeks and days away from home in a time zone 3 hours away. I let this spill into my lunch date with Bernard, arriving late. He looked like he was on the verge of crying.

“Bernard,” I inquired. “You’re okay?”
He just looked at me and shook his head. “I just feel a little overcome,” he said.
“You seem to be getting more sentimental of late Bernard.”
“Senti-mental," he played with the word. "What good is mental activity without some sentiment?” He waved his hand, offended just enough by my insensitivity to feel his own a little less acutely.
“Point taken,” I replied.
“My life is nearly over, Ron. In all my thinking, there is only one conclusion I can safely make: I didn’t love enough. I didn’t love well.” At this he paused and, like a small kid who’d been sobbing, shamelessly wiped the back of his hand across his nose.
“The defining thing about life is that it ends. You have to keep that in mind. Most everything bad you do – from sloth to cruelty – seems to stem from forgetting this simple fact.
“Pay attention to the fact that life eventually ends and see if that doesn’t make you more sentimental.”
I had no response to this. I had been hoping for something more emotionally neutral, like philosophy. I felt a little awkward, wondering if conversations with Bernard were destined to be more emotional as he got older.

After we’d ordered, Bernard started in.
“We tend to forget that even reasoning gets moved along by emotion. What I’m about to say makes no sense to someone who thinks that sentiment has no place in logic.”
“Well, you are obviously in the right emotional place,” I say.
“You can be such a twit,” he chides. “Here’s a fact that those neuroscientist, cognitive science people like your daughter have yet to fully learn: emotional states are like the elevator that takes you to different floors of your mind, from which you can access certain thoughts or thought processes, reasons you can’t reach from any other floor. Existential angst gives your reasoning a different edge than contentment; anger makes a different route for reason than curiosity. It’s why so often drama changes minds more than arguments.”
“Bernard, I’m really fatigued. The wrong week to visit the east coast is the week of time change. You’re making me feel melancholy.”
“Good. Maybe then you’ll get what I have to say.”
“You didn’t already say it?”
“No, listen. This is what occurred to me at 3 AM this morning."
"Oh," I said. "So you're on east coast time as well?"
Bernard looked intently at me. "No, you dweeb. I'm an old man. Just listen.
"Society is a consensual trance, like a person hypnotizing himself in the mirror and then walking away from the mirror forgetting that he’s under hypnosis, thinking that everything he perceives is real.”
"What?" I was confused.
"We have programmed programmers, - parents and teachers - who tell children how to be. Where does their idea about how to be come from? Society. The society that they made up by adults telling children how to be. We're hypnotized, but it is us who have done the hypnotizing. Society isn't just made up. It's a spell."
“But societies are real,” I protested.
“Sure. But what is that reality based on? Think about the power of a hypnotist. He spends about 10 minutes with you and suddenly, you believe things that aren’t true. You’re a great singer, he might tell you, or carrying a heavy load, or walking a tightrope over the Grand Canyon. If you’re hypnotized, you believe this. It all seems incredibly real. And this is something you believe after just a few minutes of his spell.” Bernard’s eyes welled up again. I still could not make the connection with what he was saying.
“Now compare that with society,” he continued. “Compare that with the time society gets to color your conscious, the time it gets to tell you that you’re awful or wonderful, that you’re a saint or slut, a brute or a gentleman.”
“This is making you sad, Bernard?” I literally scratched my head. “It’s interesting. It’s provocative. But sad?”
Bernard laughed. “You don’t get it?”
“No. I don’t.”
“You know, emotional insensitivity is overlooked as a means to resist new ideas,” he shook his head. “I’m 80 and now I get this? I finally get that this,” he waved his arms expansively, “this is a consensus trance.”
“Your insight changed your emotional state. I thought you said it worked the other way around.”
“Don’t feel like you always have to be contentious,” Bernard advised me disgustedly. “Sometimes you change floors and sometimes the floors collapse on you. Sometimes you move to the floors and sometimes they move to you. I’m trying to save you some grief.”
“So what am I supposed to do with your latest insight?”
“Well, first of all, how are you doing on the love thing we talked about?”
“I …” I was at a loss. Of late I obviously haven’t been able to properly translate what my heart was saying. It was apparently getting lost in the mail, or lost in this male, in a manner of speaking.
“Here are two things you have to convey to those beautiful children of yours. One, this is all made up. Society is a game we’ve agreed to pretend is real. Make sure that they know this is all pretence.”
“And then what? I mean, that sounds like a state of mind that might lead them to drop acid and sit on the beach watching waves crash.”
“It might. Once you kick out the props out, lives stand precariously. If someone doesn’t feel safe with you and you tell them that their life is a game, you’ll just terrify them. Or sound like an idiot. You take away the social constructs and what you are left with is ingenuity and love. If you don’t have the love, you don't even have the ingenuity. Without safety or love, a person can’t even get into the region of the brain that can create its way out of a situation. Knock out the props for society without love and you reboot civilization into a time of chaos and force.”
“Sounds scary.”
“Well, it’s a form of enlightenment. If that doesn't scare you a little bit ..." He trailed off. "Enlightenment doesn’t mean that you are dismissive of what makes society tick. It just means that you are not consumed by it. You might even play the game some. It’s just that you remember it is just a game.”
"You don’t live your life tone deaf to the consensual trance, blind to it. You have to see it. You’ll feel profoundly alienated if you don’t. But you have to be distanced enough from it that, like any good hypnotist’s show, you can laugh, shake your head, and even question whether the folks under hypnosis are just faking it. Every society is a form of madness."
"Madness?"
"Well," Bernard paused. "Yeah, from the right angle. But it's not like it's a bad thing. Necessarily."
“So, I teach them it’s a game but one that matters?”
“Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.” He looked at me intently. “You know, if you can pull that off, you might just turn into a father yet.”
“It’s kind of sad, though, thinking that this is just a game.” When I’m fatigued like this, my emotions feel less robust, my natural optimism is muted.
“At first,” said Bernard. “But once you’ve told someone else, there is a certain joy in it.” He smiled like a kid. “Just a game! Think about the liberty in knowing that.” He laughed aloud. “You know, you cheered me up today.”
“I’m happy I could do that,” I lied. And before I could stop myself, I wiped the back of my hand across my nose like a kid who’d just finished a good cry.

Pass Me Six Slices of Bacon, Kevin

My buddy Bernard is a nervous wreck. He's afraid he could be implicated in the obesity epidemic of the last two decades. His concern has been triggered by a new study arguing that obesity is contagious. It seems as though the notion of acceptable weight is heavily influenced by our friends and relatives who, in turn, influence their friends and relatives' notion of normal, an odd variation on the game of six slices of bacon, Kevin.

This from the San Jose Mercury News

The study found a person's chances of becoming obese went up 57 percent if a friend did, 40 percent if a sibling did and 37 percent if a spouse did. In the closest friendships, the risk almost tripled. Researchers think it's more than just people with similar eating and exercise habits hanging out together. Instead, it may be that having relatives and friends who become obese changes one's idea of what is an acceptable weight.

In 1988, for no particularly good reason, Bernard's weight spiked. He gained 43 pounds. Shortly after that, his brother gained weight. And his friend. Then his brother's friends. His friend's friends. Now, as he walks through the mall, Bernard can see that the ripple effect outwards has seemed to have hit everyone, like a slow-motion, silent video of a fat kid executing the perfect cannon ball at the public pool. Fearful that sociologists will soon trace this epidemic back to him, Bernard is seeking solace in comfort food. Pass the bacon, Kevin.

Bjork and Social Deconstruction

Bjork is the most intriguing artist in pop music since John Lennon.

Art is important to the construction and deconstruction of social reality. The iconic art of medieval times gave way to the art of the human in the form of Michelangelo's David and DaVinci's Mona Lisa. This art helped to loosen the hold of form on the West, bringing the individual into focus. The classical music of the Enlightenment was pre-echo, if you will, of the symphony of factories and workers in the new world of capitalism - the importance of precision and coordination in art as prelude to commerce.

Bjork is one of those rare artists for whom the manipulation of notes is secondary to the manipulation of common clichés, symbols, and culture. She plays with the elements of pop culture. Anyone who thinks that pop culture can’t change society didn’t pay attention to the impact of the 60’s.

In this video, she deconstructs the odd symbiosis between media and culture, the muse and celebrity. It's a rare bit of genius in the midst of mindless videos. Enjoy.

Individuals & Heroes

"I asked myself 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. So ... I took it upon myself to get to know 'my' myth and I regarded this as the task of tasks ... I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me."

- C.J. Jung

Charles Tart makes the point that a hypnotist, in a matter of minutes, can program you to do things. How much more powerfully can society program you during the course of your life?

The purported purpose of life until now has been to be a good Christian, a good citizen, a good employee. That is, purpose has been given to the individual by social institutions.

The genuine individual distances himself from these institutions to do the hard work of defining herself with a degree of autonomy from them. The hero comes back from this shape-shifting exercise and transforms these institutions. It's hard work - and nobody's got to do it.