All the demagoguery of the presidential election season
coming at us 24-7, plus the recent hoopla over Olympic athletes and their
“reaching of goals,” has set me thinking about the rampant individualism that
rules, or purports to rule, our world. Pols like Romney and his new running
mate, Paul Ryan, are desperate to demonstrate a) their record of success either
in business or politics or both, and b) their possession of “plans” to solve
the crises du jour instantly, and for
the foreseeable future. In a similar way, the gold medalists, prompted by
fawning interviewers, love to point out how they’ve been planning and willing
and training for their moment of triumph for years, and thus fully deserve to
luxuriate in their success. The background for all this, for all the shouting
of USA! USA! at the Olympics, is the confirmation of our most cherished idea:
that determined individuals are the engines of success, and that all any person
needs is drive and will and a refusal to bow to any handicaps or obstacles to
reach the summit of human or national achievement. I did it, I made it, I alone
am the author and agent of my own glory (sometimes with a sign of the cross or
a pointing to the sky to acknowledge that my personal god has, of course, helped me because he is
the most powerful of all gods, and hence, though busy, able to specifically
concern himself with my welfare as an individual.)
Included
in all this is an implied dismissal of the part played by any other factor, be
it luck, or the bounty of nature, or my genetic or financial or social
inheritance, or any outside contribution whatever. The idea is that we in the
modern world succeed on our own. We succeed as individuals by being
individualists, even up to and including being consciously selfish and
competitive where other individuals, species, or nations are concerned. We get
to be number one by not being squeamish about fighting for our place at the
head of the line, at the top of the heap, by standing up for ourselves and
making clear that we will crush all competition if that is what it takes to be
number one--indeed, that we enjoy the competition, that we shine brightest when
the prize is on the line, when victory can be seized by a sheer effort of will that
pushes us to beat the hell out of whoever is behind us or beside us or outside
us. Life is a brutal competition after all, and not for the faint of heart.
This,
of course, is at the heart of the battle between Republicans and Democrats in
the current election; with Romney and Ryan as the prime exhibits in this paean
to individualism. Romney touts himself as the “self-made” billionaire, the
clear-eyed wizard of finance who made billions by buying up faltering companies
and “turning them around” to be sold at a nice, fat profit. To do this, he had
to be quick, and ruthlessly efficient at not wasting time or mental energy
worrying about silly things like unions or people getting fired or communities getting devastated, or
any of the other soft-headed concerns so dear to liberals. Efficiency and
profit had to be all; followed, when the money poured in, with more cleverly efficient
ways to avoid taxes and hide his gains in offshore Swiss or Cayman Island accounts.
All of which was perfectly “legal” and perfectly understandable to most
Americans. He did it alone, he did it his way, and he has, so the song goes,
the perfect right to keep his hard-won earnings. All of it. Paul Ryan sings a
similar song. His grandfather (comparable to Romney’s father, who made his
fortune in automobiles) earned millions building roads paid for by the
government, and so left for little Paulie the right and leisure to go to
Washington and become, all on his own, the courageous spear-carrier for the
Republican right, unafraid to make “hard choices.” (Ryan’s wife Janna, from a similarly
prominent Oklahoma farm/political family, spent a decade in Washington herself,
first as a congressional aide and then as a corporate lobbyist for such business
stalwarts as cigar makers, logging giants, pharmaceutical bandits, health maintenance
organizations and nuclear power plants.) And so we get Paulie’s mantra: freedom
comes from god (and/or wealthy families), not from government. With that freedom, we individuals should be able to
do what we want with our money (primarily keep it), send our kids to whatever private
or charter schools we choose—using government vouchers to pay for them—and even
turn health care into a voucher system so we, as individuals, can get whatever
health coverage we can afford without having to come in contact with all those unsavory
types who can’t pay to cover themselves and thus want ever more of our taxes to
pay for them. Because it’s our money,
earned (or inherited or stolen) by our individual effort fair and square; so we
shouldn’t have to give it to a wasteful, money-hungry government determined to
share it with lazy losers and odorous freeloaders.
We
all recognize and respond to this, of course, because we’re all subject to the
same selfish, self-aggrandizing impulse. When we succeed at something, we want
to take full credit for it. It was due to our hard work, our
intelligence, our persistence, our
rare insight or foresight. When things go
wrong, on the other hand, we tend to attribute the failure to others, or bad
luck, or our parents’ incapacity, or the animosity or perversity of the outside
world. More specifically, we tend to view ourselves, our conscious selves
located somewhere in our heads, as generally in control, as the decision makers,
the agents of our perception and action who size up a situation and then make a
rational, informed decision about what or who or how to choose. We comparison
shop for a car or a house, we consult the experts and our friends, we calculate
our budget, and we make the right decision. When deciding about a new friend or
a new job, we imagine ourselves taking everything into account, mulling over
our options, and deciding based on our best reasoned judgment (being careful to
choose friends who will ratify our judgment).
The
truth, though, is that our decision-making process is far less rational and
considered than we think. Danel Kahneman has written a whole book—Thinking Fast
and Slow—about this, and it is sobering
indeed. The basic idea is that our thinking and decision-making process depends
on two systems which Kahneman calls System 1 (our intuitive process that
operates very rapidly, and below the level of consciousness) and System 2 (the slower,
conscious, logical system with which we identify.) What Kahneman shows us, with
countless examples and variations, is the extent to which an alarmingly high
percentage of our decisions are in fact made by System 1—that is, quickly, based
on rapid impressions and ancient responses that take place below our
level of consciousness. As Kahneman notes, “cognition
is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.” This means
that thinking in this way is subject to visceral responses (one experiment
showed how people presented with odd pairings of words like bananas and vomit
tend to immediately associate a tasty fruit with nausea, and hence display a
rapid tensing and avoidance tendency to bananas) that happen below the level of
awareness. What is happening is that “System 1 makes as much sense as possible
of the..oddly juxtaposed words…by linking the words in a causal story” so as to
prepare for a possible threat. That is what System 1 is needed for, designed
for: real world threats that often do not afford an organism the luxury of time
and slow, rational consideration of all the evidence. When an instant response—to
loud sound, or an unknown shape or smell—can be the difference between life and
death, it is far better to be quick, and safe, than sorry. Hence our System 1
responds rapidly, even when the “threat” is a silly juxtaposition of words like
“banana” and “vomit.” The well-known response of “priming” works via this same
system: in an experiment at NYU, students were asked to assemble four-word
sentences from a group of five words. One group had neutral words, while another
had these: Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. The
students thought this was a test of verbal skill, but it was not, for when
finished, participants were asked to walk down the hall to another experiment.
The walk was the real subject of the experiment, for it was timed. And the
experimenters found that those students who had made sentences from the words
suggesting “old age” actually walked down this hallway far more
slowly than the others! Mere words and associations
of those words primed a physical behavior, walking; thinking of old age made
people walk older. Of course, many people who take part in, or hear of priming can’t
believe that they could be so affected. That is because their System 2—the rational,
conscious part that they consider to be themselves—believes that it is in charge. When confronted with evidence that it
is not, people bridle with disbelief.
More
important, when System 1 jumps to unwarranted conclusions, based on its rapid
response to limited information, System 2, always seeking coherence, will often
endorse those intuitive responses, in order to have the world make sense (“we
are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world,” notes Kahneman). Such an
endorsement of intuitive beliefs can operate in a political system too, as when
people allow their likes and dislikes (immediate impressions based in System 1)
to determine their beliefs about the world. If a person likes the Affordable Care Act, for example, he would tend
to believe in its great health benefits and the reasonableness of the costs. If
a person dislikes Obamacare, however,
then the benefits seem negative and the costs outrageous and Obama a damned socialist.
More
than that, people tend to be overly confident in their beliefs, including the belief
that those beliefs are the product of rational thought (System 2) rather than
rapid impressions (System 1). What this means is that, despite the evidence,
people who have had their beliefs confirmed—as for instance, those, like CEOs, who
have been successful in business, or the stock market—tend to be overly-optimistic.
Like political and military leaders, they feel both smart and lucky and
therefore try to convince others to follow them. As Kahneman puts it:
Their experiences of success have confirmed their
faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their
self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads
to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of
others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks
than they realize.
Anyone who has looked at the world carefully, of course,
knows that luck does not last, that what goes up must come down, and that the
complexity of any life situation can rarely be reduced to the rapid intuitions of
System 1 that are often responsible for
decisions (think only of George W. Bush and his great faith in his “gut
feelings” when he took the entire nation and half the world into the disaster
that was, and still is, Iraq.)
But
the inadequacy of individualism only begins with personal psychology. The more
we learn from science and life itself, the more we realize that only a fool
could imagine that he or she is in full control of life events, or responsible
for their successful outcome. Each of us is a mere speck in the vast panoply of
a universe that seems to have no end. Billions of years of evolution have made
each of us improbable and improbably-complex beings possible. The very elements
like carbon and iron of which we are made required the massive heat of the
interior of stars to forge their structure, and further billions of years—once life,
another massive improbability, had somehow emerged—to perfect the intricate
structures of cells, and then organs, and then sophisticated neural systems and
finally consciousness itself. How much did any single, proud “individualist”
have to do with that? How much do any of us have to do with the maintenance of
the ideal conditions on this planet—another massive improbability—that keeps
oxygen at levels sufficient for us to even breathe? How much do individuals
have to do with their own breathing, with the pumping of blood through their
organs and arteries and veins? How much control do they have over their
cellular machinery and its myriad changes and creations of enzymes and
depletion of wastes? The mystery of all this, plus the chance encounters that
often determine the courses of our lives—the meeting with someone with whom we
find a common objective in life, a compatible heartbeat in love—and the very
fact that we take the right turn on a highway to avoid a collision or the right
airplane to avoid a crash or have had the good fortune to be born in a country that
has never been invaded or at a time or a place with parents that foster our survival,
is enough to humble even the proudest among us. Or should. And isn’t it this
that is the basis of the most wise of religions, of the most sophisticated of wisdom
traditions? Is it not this that is the basis of the gratitude and the sacrifice
that is traditionally offered to those deities who are seen to be in charge of
this unimaginably complex and favorable (to us) system of life?
Sadly,
our hyper-individualists seem to think that recognizing this, recognizing our
truly deep dependency on and identity with all else in the universe, on all
others on this planet, on every tiny mite and spider and amoeba and the
bacteria in our guts and in our very mouths that make our digestion possible;
and the processes of mineral uptake in plants and their ability to synthesize from
the very air, from sunlight, the nutrients upon which we as mammals depend for
our very existence—this dependence on all else (including the roads and bridges
and schools and fire departments all built and managed and maintained by those
governments they love to excoriate) somehow diminishes them. Diminishes their
glory. Diminishes their sense of self-sufficiency. But that self-sufficiency is
an illusion. A most pernicious illusion in fact. For it allows them to exult in
their pride—the deadliest of sins—and delude themselves into thinking that they
can ‘make it on their own.’ True wisdom has always known that this was wrong.
Wrong headed. Wrong minded. The source of the deepest ignorance. And yet, our
entire nation is built on this ignorance. We alone discovered the New World,
the New Man. We alone conquered an entire continent. We alone, the special
nation, subsequently conquered the world. We the unique nation, the nation
blessed uniquely by a unique god, are the nation destined by god to be a model
for all nations. The model itself based on the uniqueness of the individual,
self-sufficient, making it on his own. With the contrary notion—that of
dependency, that we are all, all humans, all creatures, all beings in this
together—taking the form of anathema. Paganism and devil worship. The corruption
of slave nations, the antithesis of freedom.
In
fact, that dependency, that togetherness and its nobility is just the opposite,
the real way to true freedom, true worth, true uniqueness. I have always liked
the take of the Hwa Yen Buddhists in imaging this, this reverence for all life,
for all being, this knowing that all, no matter how humble or apparently
useless or failed, have equal worth. The world, said the Hwa Yen Buddhists, is
like a huge structure, a house. And each of us, each allegedly separate being,
is like one of the rafters of that house. Or one of the nails or one of the
roofing boards or windows or pieces of concrete holding it up. Both unique, and
integral to the whole. For without each rafter, each nail, each bit of wood or
steel or concrete that goes into making it up, without each element in place, there
is no house at all. A house without one of
its rafters is not actually a house, said the Hwa Yen Buddhists. A house, to be
a house, must be a complete house. And that is what life is like. That is what
being is like. A whole. Each element, each
component, each being, each organ, each cell is necessary and integral to the
whole. And so deserves the utmost respect. Deserves the acknowledgment that it
depends, intimately and mutually and utterly, on all the others. None of us can
thrive, none of us can survive, none of us can even pretend to be on our own. None. Not Mitt Romney, not Paul Ryan,
not the homeless guy stretched out on the sidewalk, not the Olympian who wins gold,
not the most despised of creatures in a sewer or the most venerated bishop of
Rome or president of a republic—none can survive on his own or her own. To
pretend that one can, to pretend that one is a self-sufficient individual with
no need or concern for others, or for government, or for regulations, or for
public schools or a decent system of care for the aged or the halt or the lame,
is simply ignorant. Ignorant of the most fundamental laws of life. And to put
faith in such ignorance would be ignorance itself.
Which
is not to say that millions of people won’t do so. Which is not to say that
millions don’t already pervert the teachings of the very god they claim as
their own, the god who said “whatever you do unto the least of these, you do for
me.” No, they will pervert it and distort it and deceive themselves into the
idea that their only connection to the “least of these” is to horde enough
wealth to be able to trickle some charity upon them. A penny from the heaven
they imagine themselves inhabiting. But this is ignorance, pure and simple, and
will, sooner or later, be seen through. And all the alleged wizards seen as the
pathetic, frightened faux-individuals that they are.
Lawrence DiStasi
