Accidental Historian

Being Me 4: Resentment

The first time I lost weight I had a somewhat incorrect interpretation of what it would mean to no longer be the fat kid.  Life for most people is pretty much event based.  We all think that when A happens then B and B means that I have arrived.  So when you’re the fat kid who gets picked on you think things like, “When I lose weight everyone will like me.”

The harsh truth of life (or, maybe not, depending) is that nobody chooses to like or dislike you based on your weight.  Well, most people don’t.  Some people are shallow assholes like that.

Still, I did not know that.  Or if I did know that I chose not to believe it.  That might be one of those six one way, half a dozen the others sort of things.

With my goal in mind I worked obsessively.  I dropped 110 pounds in about nine months.  If my weight went down by less than 3 pounds a week I started to worry.  If anyone presented me with food outside of my narrow limits I got mad (including birthday cake, might I add.  On my own birthday).  I also worked out five or six days a week, generally by riding my bike twenty to thirty miles.

I’m naturally athletic to a certain extent.  I’m coordinated, I’m physically capable, and I can generally pick up a sport pretty easily.  I’m never the best player in any given game, but I’m usually not the worst by a wide margin.  That said, endurance athletics really aren’t my thing.  Once I get in the groove I can take a bike for 20 to 30 miles pretty easily.  I just can’t do it fast.  And by the end of my rides I’d be huffing and puffing.  This, of course, is the goal of exercise.

Everyone needs motivation when there’s a little ways to go and they just want to die.  When I needed motivation I thought about my friends.  Specifically, I imagined that my friends were laughing at me and telling me that I’d fail.  My motivation came from wanting to say, “Fuck you, I did it in spite of you,” to my friends.

That’s…that’s a little weird.

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Like I said, life is pretty much event based.  That isn’t really a good thing or a bad thing.  It’s just a thing.  It’s an inevitability of the human condition and the way we think about time.  We want to see a beginning, a middle, and an end so we invent them.  Then we tell stories about them.

My events, being the social outcast loner type, were all of the events that said, “You’re accepted,” or the seemingly far more common, “You’re not accepted.”  Generally the future ones were places where I could, theoretically, finally say, “I have arrived and people like me,” and the past ones were all places where that had explicitly not happened.

I didn’t really get invited to parties.  In high school I found that out because I’d hear people talking about their parties the following week.  In the few years after high school I thought I’d left that behind.  Then I started hanging out with a bunch of people who I met at church and hung out with at least two to three times a week at officially sanctioned events.  I thought we were really good friends.  Then it gradually dawned on me that I was still the odd man out.  I learned about it the same way I learned about it in high school: by hearing people talk about stuff they did when I wasn’t around.

It hurt.  I didn’t know why I wasn’t being included and, more importantly, I didn’t know how to ask.  To this day I don’t know why I wasn’t included in things.  I don’t think it’s because they didn’t like me.

I do know, however, that when I needed motivation to accomplish my own things I was able to summon more than enough from imagining proving them wrong.  I reserved all of my spite for the people I called my friends.

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When I first ran across the Pick-Up Artist community it seemed like it was just a bunch of people tossing around truisms that I’d picked up over the years.  That’s the funny thing about the internet.  There are all kinds of people who have all kinds of ideas and they generally present said ideas in such a way as to seem pretty reasonable.

So when I first ran across the idea that the way to get women was to treat them like shit it made a certain amount of sense.  The logic was fairly inescapable.  It’s common knowledge[1] that chicks dig bad boys, after all.  So the idea of finding a woman, treating her like shit, and thereby getting her attention and lovin’ made a certain amount of sense.

I didn’t pay that much attention, though, because being a jerk to get my own ends really wasn’t that high on my list of things to do.[2]

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Eventually I realized that the PUAs were basically a sub-set of the Mens’ Rights Activist groups and those guys were self-evidently assholes.  I also realized that there was a specific and familiar air of resentment that fueled both groups.  I recognized it because, well, it was a message that resonated with me.

See, when you’re the socially maladjusted nerd you wait for those moments that offer you validation.  The best person to provide that validation is the most attractive girl you can find.  If you date the most attractive girl in your class it must mean that you’re cool, right?[3]

If you pay attention to how the PUAs and MRAs talk about what they do (and, y’know, who they did it to) it’s obvious that they literally do not give a shit about women.  All they’re doing is making sure they can brag in front of the other guys.  This is the irrevocable mark of the guy who is still smarting from rejection and doesn’t know any healthy ways to deal with it.  So he takes it out on someone else.

If anyone then tells him he’s being an asshole about the whole thing he resorts to bullying.  It’s that same high school locker room level of bullying, too.  The PUAs will say that anybody who criticizes them must be an inferior specimen of manhood.  Or gay.  Or a quisling trying to curry favor with women who will never sleep with them.

It’s pathetic, really.

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The only way to defeat resentment is through a combination of self-sufficiency and empathy.  I believe that resentment and empathy are opposing forces.  The tie breaker in the tug of war between the two is how the person making the choice views him- or herself.  If you’re confident in who you are it’s much easier to choose empathy.  Empathy requires vulnerability and powerlessness to function.  Resentment covers up vulnerability and trades powerlessness for the feeling of power that comes from lashing out and causing pain to others.

Resentment, in short, allows a form of bullying.  It’s why one of the common responses of the bullied is to become a bully.  It’s much easier if you’re the sort who overcomes some bad thing to then see that same quality in another and resent them for it or to see people who you believed could have helped you escape it but didn’t and resent them for not taking action.

Resentment, in short, is a gateway to hatred.  That’s why it’s the opposite of empathy.  And we’re going to talk about that next time.

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[1]”Common knowledge” and “accurate notions about reality” are often non-overlapping magisteria, after all.

[2]Being a jerk in general, though, is always an option.  As is being a jerk for the lulz.  What’re ya gonna do?

[3]This, I’m convinced, is the source of all of the TV shows and movies and whatnot where the big, fat, selfish slob is dating/married to the hot chick in spite of the fact that all the slob seems to have going for him is a long-suffering companion and (generally) a sense of humor.  Although I will say that the trope got subverted in Superbad between Emma Stone and Jonah Hill.  That one at least set up Jonah Hill as the loveable loser who managed to learn how to not be a selfish slob.  I think.

I feel like I need to go watch Superbad now.

Group Dynamics, Part 4

I’ve been engaging in a bit of an experiment of late.  I’ve made it a goal to perceive absolutely everything at once.  What I do is take a walk.  Specifically, I take my usual lunchtime walk through the Loop in Chicago and I try to see everything all at once.  This requires a complete lack of actually looking at anything.

Try not looking at anything some time.  I dare you.  It takes an extreme amount of effort, since the human eye simply doesn’t not look at things.[1]  Oh, and try doing that while your eyes are open and you’re walking through a major metropolitan area during the lunch hour.

I actually got pretty good at it after a few tries.  I find that I sometimes actually drop into soft focus by accident.[2]  I notice things, though.  For one, I blink less.  Part of it is because it’s really hard to re-not-focus after blinking, but part of it is because the part of the brain required for blinking seems to kind of turn off.  For another, I notice how not smooth bipedal locomotion really is.  I think that when I focus on things I tend to automatically rule out the natural sway in my field of vision.  Fixing on a specific point will do that.  But when I stop focusing I become far more aware of the edges of my vision and the edges of my vision are constantly shifting.

The most interesting aspect of the whole thing, though, and why it matters that I’m doing it in the Loop, is that people are a constant source of potential distraction.  I’ve noticed that some people tend to grab my attention.  People who are wearing bright colors or that are behaving in a way that’s out of the norm seem to result in a sudden, unwelcome focus.[3]  Overall, though, it’s not actually necessary to look at people directly to figure out what’s going on.  This is true even for people who are walking directly at me.

I can figure out anything I need to know about a person by where they are in relation to me and their direction of travel.  I can, in fact, know nothing about another person save that necessary information about where they are and where they are going.  Once I figure that out, even with someone who is walking directly towards me, I can let them slide away and become part of the background.  I don’t need to know anything else about them: their clothes, their mood, even their gender.  It is, in short, possible to know a person only and entirely by their velocity.

I’ve developed, thanks to my odd little experiment, a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of human interaction.  It’s possible, in short, to know someone or to know where that person is going, but it’s not really possible to know both.  This is, ultimately, the least surprising revelation I’ve ever had about human nature.

Think about yourself for a moment.  Where were you five years ago?  Would the you of five years ago hear about where you are and say, “Yeah, I saw that coming?”  Does the you of now know exactly who the you of five years from now will be?  Can you answer “Yes” to those questions in relation to your friends, your spouse, your parents?

Some people are incredibly predictable.  Even predictable people can surprise you from time to time, though.  On many occasions the unpredictable moments are based on either an incomplete understanding of the other person or a lack of awareness of what that person is really thinking about at the time they do the unpredictable thing.

This last bit, of course, is because it’s impossible to actually perceive everything at once.  This goes beyond eyesight.  There are some things that simply can’t be seen or heard or tasted or smelled or felt.  There are people who pop in and out of our perception, but who have been living their own lives in the interim.  We only see them for brief moments in time.  We can only perceive where they are or where they are going.  We  might be able to briefly modify their course, but all we’re doing is getting in the way or trying to get out of their way.

I’ve decided it’s profoundly weird to try to label people.  I’ve realized this because I don’t know how to label myself anymore.  I figured this out a month or two ago when discussions of religion caused me to refer to myself as, “Whatever it is I am these days.”  At first I thought it was because I was wimping out and trying to avoid allowing people to pin any particular label on me.  Then I realized that it was really because I don’t know what my religious views are anymore.

After that I realized that it’s profoundly weird to think that anyone knows what their religious views are.  There was a time in my life when it mattered deeply whether or not the person I was talking to had compatible religious views.  Now I find I can go for months without bothering to care about the religious views of a new companion.  In addition to that, I find that most people I’ve met in the last couple years seem to be able to go for long stretches without bothering to ask about my religious views.

What I’ve realized, ultimately, is that I grew up in a weird place where religious views were all that mattered.  It was like, say, being in a group where only people with brown hair could join.  If that’s your main criteria for group membership the first thing you’re going to do with anybody is look at their hair when you meet them and try to determine if they’re a brunette or not.  You’re then going to try to decide if that brown haired person over there is really a blonde with a bottle of hair dye.

It’s hard to leave a group like that and not look at the hair of the new people you meet.  It’s also hard to fathom that you might end up leaving the brown haired group and then meet a blond and a redhead who are really cool and just be able to get along with them because nobody really cares.

It’s all a matter of perception.  Is this person walking alongside me or is this person going to get in my way?  Is this person crossing my field of vision or overwhelming it?

That’s what matters.  We cannot know a person by anything but their velocity, after all.

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[1]Weirdly, I conceived of this idea while reading Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting…, which is about Robert Irwin’s attempt to take labels and figure out of art.  Since that point I’ve started re-reading Lawrence Weschler’s True to Life, which is David Hockney’s counter-argument.  Hockney makes the point in one of the earliest essays that comprise the book that the human eye is always darting around and focusing on different parts of the whole it is attempting to see.  I can tell you from direct experience that he’s absolutely right.

Either way, the idea came up because of one book and now seems like an exercise in futility because of the other.  I’m totally okay with that.

[2]I call this “soft focus” based on, of all things, a character in an old sci-fi novel who was a forward scout for a military unit.  She would walk around not looking at anything and then suddenly recognize and focus in on a threat.  I always thought that was cool and would play around with trying to do it from time to time.  As such, it doesn’t surprise me that my little experiment was my immediate response to reading a book about Robert Irwin.

[3]Blondes.  I also tend to find myself looking at blondes.

Group Dynamics, Part 3

Groups have three general participation strategies.  They’re generally inclusive, generally exclusive, or, for lack of a better term, default.  There are different levels of grouping that may or may not change participation, but I think it’s pretty defensible to say that they all can be described in one of these three ways.

Default is probably the easiest and least worth discussing.  If you want a group of all people between the age of 20 and 30 you just need to find everyone born between this day in 1992 and 1973.  Someone born in 1985 can’t say, “Nope, I’m not part of that group,” or, “Fuck, no, those 1978 bastards don’t get to be part of this.  I guess they could, but it’s not going to work too well.  Default groupings are generally external and created by proximity.  We can talk about Illinoisans and how they’ll impact the Presidential election and the people who will vote in Illinois won’t be able to say, “Nope, you can’t talk about us like that.”[1]

So let’s talk about inclusive versus exclusive.  In broad strokes, I find that most groups are a balance of inclusivity and exclusivity, with exclusivity in general being more likely than inclusivity.  I’ve also found that the group’s reported level of inclusivity is generally overreported by its members, unless those members are part of the Westboro Baptist Church or a similar organization.

The problem here is that most groups are identity based.  Identity pretty much requires a demarcation between us and them, which requires a group to be exclusive.  In some cases this makes sense.  It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to start an LBGT Alliance group and have a bunch of people show up who only want to bash gay people, then invite them back the next week.  It also wouldn’t make much sense to start an Indian expatriates in Chicago group and then only have a bunch of Italians show up to trade pasta recipies.

Interest based groups can have this same problem.  You wouldn’t want to create a group of RPG players, then have a bunch of non-roleplayers show up and eat your Doritos for four hours while nobody pretends to be a motley crew of adventurers out to kill shit and take its gold while completely ignoring the larger purpose of the quest in search of ever more XP and ridiculously named killing sticks.  That would be silly.  But, by the same token, a non-gamer who shows up probably won’t be rejected if they seem interested in the whole enterprise.

The problem isn’t necessarily that some groups are exclusive.  Every group, by definition, has to exlude someone on some level.  The problem starts when exclusive groups think they’re inclusive.  For this, I shall talk about religion, specifically religion and atheism.  Stop me if you’re surprised.

Christianity as a whole imagines itself to be an inclusive thing.  The practitioners bring out John 3:16 or similar verses and talk about how god loves everybody and everybody is welcome.  That’s the whole message of evangelism.  “Come in, sit a spell,” they say, “Learn about how much god loves you.”

This is great in theory.  As long as you are of the Christian identity or thinking of becoming of the Christian identity they’ll let you hang out and ask questions and try to avoid firebombing your house.  If you’re a Muslim and intending to stubbornly refuse to stop being a Muslim, however, the story will change and change quickly.

This, in and of itself, is still a basically neutral thing.  Taken in a vacuum, the attitude of, “We’re Christians, so we want to be Christians together,” doesn’t really harm anyone.  The harm comes when people in that one exclusionary group begin expecting the members to make decisions on other aspects of their lives based on the same criteria.

Fred Clark’s been doing an amazing series on exactly this.  He’s of the mind that Christianity can be inclusive of homosexuals and welcome homosexuals as Christians.[2]  His is a long-winded and eloquent defense of the idea, so I’ll break it down to its basic components.

Evangelical Christians have, by and large, decided that everyone’s identity must come from their basic group identity, which can be summed up as, “We must interpret the Bible literally and at its face value.”  Their “literal” interpretation of the Bible, however, is anything but and it’s also based on choosing to only literally interpret the parts of the Bible that seem to condemn and/or regulate a very narrow range of human activity while totally ignoring or discarding wide swaths of the Bible that say other, inconvenient things about human activity.  Moreover, Evangelical Christians have decided that anyone whose identity does not come from this very narrow idea of what it means to be a worthwhile human being is not only wrong, but a terrible monster.

Fred Clark has chosen the same original base identity, but he’s chosen a far more inclusive idea of what it means to be a member of that group.  He’s chosen an even larger and more inclusive definition of what it means to be a worthwhile human being.  His entire argument, then, boils down to, “My identity isn’t defined by the haters and yours doesn’t have to be, either.”

This difference in self-definition is where groups tend to get in trouble.  There is no single set of values that every human has that leads to their interests or views on what is important.  Moreover, there is no set value where belief in Thing A leads inevitably to View B.  There is also absolutely no reason to believe that Belief B and dissimilar Belief C can’t actually result in two people coming to two separate but remarkably similar Conclusion Ds.

A lot of Christians get themselves into trouble through this exact type of mistake.  They think, basically, that everyone who joins the Christian movement does so out of a desire to find purity and avoid Hell.  In Evangelical Christianity the primary way to do that is to not be gay, not have extramarital sex, and also be a witness to Jesus.  Because this is important to them, they think that it necessarily follows that all Christians will agree with them and have the same views.  This also leads, nearly inevitably, into some crazy beliefs on the infallibility of the Bible and the evilness of learning about evolution and the actual size and age of the universe.

Since I grew up in exactly this sort of situation I am wary of any group that attempts to mimic these attitudes.  This brings me to Atheism+.  As is my custom.

Atheism+ is an exclusive group, but not in the way it thinks it is.  It thinks it’s excluding just the douchebags of the atheism movement[3], but what it’s actually doing is excluding everyone who doesn’t think exactly like its members do.  This is a key distinction, especially since I’m a person who thinks in ways that are largely similar to Atheism+.

Let me loop back around to explain.  I am remarkably similar to Evangelical Christians in several respects.  One of the big ones is the fact that I’ve never had gay sex and can’t imagine having gay sex now or at any point in the future.  If you consider not having gay sex to be a major component of Evangelical Christianity, then you could say I’m probably an Evangelical Christian.  Of course, I haven’t had gay sex because I’m not in to dudes, but I have absolutely no problem with dudes that are.  Still, the end result is that I haven’t had gay sex in exactly the same way that Evangelical Christians haven’t had gay sex.

My motivations are totally different and motivations matter a great deal.  The way I came to those conclusions also matter a great deal.  For me it’s a combination of fuzzy inclusiveness and general lack of a belief that it matters what other people do in the privacy of their own homes, hotel rooms, cars, or whatever.[4]

By the same token, my lack of dislike for gay people didn’t come from atheism.  I was already at the very least uninterested in worrying about the activities of gay people before I officially left the church.  Really, as I’ve said before, atheism didn’t create any of the opinions I currently possess.  I made my first steps over to the fuzzily inclusive side long before I decided to leave religion.

It’s a fine point, but it’s one that matters.  The introduction I got to Atheism+ was equal parts, “You should agree with us because it’s the right thing to do,” and, “You should agree with this because it’s the inevitable result of agreeing with this other thing.”

One of the things that’s probably the hardest in creating any group is realizing that not everyone cares as much as you do about the things you care about and won’t draw the same conclusions you will about them.  I am an atheist, but I’m not an Atheist, if that makes any sense.  It’s something I am because it’s the logical conclusion I drew from other observations and it seems more intellectually precise than saying I’m agnostic.  I’m more likely to say that I’m non-religious, however.  I’m far more likely to say I’m a writer, a storyteller, a historian, and a White Sox fan because those are the things about which I actually give a shit.

I’ve hung out around the atheism movement because there are people in the movement with whom I agree about things.  Overall I reject any arguments that atheism is a religion because I find those arguments fundamentally silly.  What I do find, though, is that atheism is an exclusive group and Atheism+ has a high risk of becoming a closed system.  If they want to create a cool kids club that’s fine, I won’t stop them.  What they need to realize is that telling me I’m an idiot for not wanting to be part of their cool kids club isn’t exactly a great way of winning me to their side.

And that’s the biggest problem of all.  If you’re creating a group you can be exclusive and worry about purity all day long.  If you want to have a movement you have to be inclusive.  No step in creating a movement should involve intentionally burning bridges with people who agree with you on better than 90% of the things you believe but who came to those beliefs through a different avenue.  That’s just bad planning.  It's also easily avoidable.  Step one: don't immediately dismiss me and tell me I'm stupid for not seeing the world in exactly the same way you do.

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[1]Complicating things, of course, is the problem that even when my address was in Texas I did not consider myself a Texan.  I considered myself a Chicagan living in Texas.  Further complicating that is the bit where I’ve never actually lived in the Chicago city limits.  That’s because I’ve made Chicago a part of my identity as well as a fact of my proximity.

[2]This is an important reciprocal relationship of inclusion.  Evangelical Christianity regularly tells homosexuals that they will be welcome in church as long as they stop being homosexual.  This is not inclusion, it’s exclusion.

[3]Who, really, could use some good excluding.  I mean, really, who wants to hang out with a douchebag?

[4]True story: I have now been in enough situations where I’ve seen two dudes kissing that I think either, “Oh, that’s adorable,” or, “Aight, whatever,” rather than, “Ew, that’s gross.”  I don’t know where that switchover occurred, but I do know that there was a point several years ago where squicked out was definitely the way I felt if I saw that.

Group Dynamics, Part 2

So…group dynamics.  I decided to launch in to a discussion because a lot of the big things I’m paying attention these days kind of hinge on my observations of how groups form.  Atheism+ was a big catalyst.  It should surprise absolutely no one that politics is another.  I’ve become something of a politics wonk these days, complete with a collection of strongly-held beliefs.[1]  As such, we’re gonna talk about politics.  Hooray, us!

Oh, actually, before I begin, a bit of housekeeping: in the comments on the last post Janet asked why I consider age an issue of proximity rather than identity.  The short answer is, “I dunno, seemed like a good idea at the time.”  The long answer is more of a feeling I get when thinking about age.  See, no one chooses to be 30 years-old.  All 30 year-olds, however, are largely grouped together.  This actually makes a certain amount of sense, I think, since everyone within five years of me grew up largely with the same influences and experiences.  I can talk about, say, Saved By the Bell to my peer group and they get it.  We all hit puberty thanks to Kelly Kapowski, basically.  A fifty year-old won’t get it.  A teenager won’t, either.

There are some things where age is actually a better demonstration of commonality than geographic location, too.  This is largely a factor of mass media and communication and probably an artifact of the last half of the 20th Century going forward.  To take the obvious example, I grew up with The Simpsons and so did pretty much everyone else in my age range.  I can use The Simpsons as a sort of lingua franca to engage with people from all over the United States and all over the English-speaking world.  Yes, older people watched it and now it’s been around long enough that younger people have grown up with it, too, but it’s a key point of commonality for my generation.

In short, I don’t really feel that I identify as a 31 year-old male.  There are, however, a bunch of things that I identify with because of my age that I share on a deeper level with people between, say, 25 and 37 than I would with someone younger or older than that.

Okay, then, back to politics.

I pretty much see American politics as primarily a fight between Team Red and Team Blue.  This, I think, is a genuine failure of the American winner-take-all electoral system.  See, it’s been this way since the very beginning.

The second President of the United States was John Adams.  He was a Federalist and terrified of what would happen if the Democratic-Republicans took over the country in 1800.  As such, he passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were really four different acts.  The two biggies for the purpose of this discussion were the Naturalization Act, which increased the period of citizenship from a 3 year notice and 5 year residence to a 5 year notice and 14 year residence, and the Sedition Act, which made it illegal to say anything against the government or its officials.  The Naturalization Act was supposed to be for national security purposes, but was really an attempt to keep naturalized citizens from voting for the Democratic-Republicans.

If these sound familiar, well, America has a rich and disturbing history of hypocrisy.  We’re supposedly a nation of immigrants and a great melting pot that also turns on immigrants and non-whites in general at the first possible opportunity.  Other than a brief stretch in the 1870s it was impossible for blacks to become naturalized until 1952.  The Chinese, well, the Chinese got the short end of the stick time and again.  And the whole thing where criticizing the Bush Administration was considered treason?  Yeah, that goes back to the Sedition Act.[2]  Also HUAC and probably a bunch of other things I can’t remember or don’t know about.

The guy the Alien and Sedition Acts was directed at must have been dangerous, right?  One of the Founding Fathers was prepared to drive a dagger into the very heart of the American experiment barely a decade after the Constitution was written, so it must have been to fight a deep, existential threat.  It’s fortunate, then, that John Adams won the election of 1800 to defeat potential Democratic-Republican President Skeletor von Hitler, a/k/a Snooki Zuckerberg.

Wait, what’s that?  He lost.  Well, fuck, I guess that’s why America sucks.  The third President must have been…Thomas Jefferson?  The guy who wrote the goddamn Declaration of Independence?  That Thomas Jefferson?[3]

Anyway, the election of 1800 was, by all accounts, a vicious campaign filled with the surrogates of two of the Founding Fathers slinging as much shit at each other as possible.  Knowing this, I have a hard time engaging in the Founding Father worship so prevalent in the American people.  I actually pretty much think that the Founding Fathers were douchebags.[4]  I also think that they were forward-thinking revolutionaries who wrote an amazing-for-its-time, but ultimately heavily flawed, document.

That’s the true legacy we received from the Founding Fathers.  Most voters pull the lever for the Republican or Democratic candidate not because they’ve thought through the issues, but because they know that their guy is the good guy and the other guy is the bad guy.  It doesn’t matter if the good guy is John Adams or the bad guy is Barack Obama.[5]  That’s not a good reason to vote for the leader of the country.

So everyone knows that the Republicans cynically misrepresented Obama’s, “You didn’t build that,” line to create a totally disingenuous campaign.  This cynical misrepresentation goes far enough that it was an entire day at the Republican National Convention.  It’s unconscionable, right?

Well, has anyone on the Blue Team actually listened to Romney’s, “Corporations are people,” line in context?  Take a look:



If you actually listen past the first line and the boos, and consider that it was originally a quick answer to a shouted question from the crowd, Romney’s point was that corporations are made up of people and that the money made by corporations ends up in the hands of people.

From here you could have an actual conversation.  It would probably be pretty much be the same crap we’ve got now, where it’s Reaganomics v. an increase in the top marginal tax rate for people earning more than $250,000/year and we’d probably still be stuck where we are.

However, Romney’s comments basically got conflated with the Citizens United decision that for corporations money = speech and that corporations should have First Amendment rights just like people.  Or that’s how I seem to recall that whole thing going.  It’s still so far outside the realm of sane jurisprudence that my mind boggles at the whole thing.

For the record, every single time I hear someone level that attack at Romney, including Elizabeth Warren doing it at the DNC, I get slightly annoyed.  But it’s going to keep happening, because, dammit, somebody’s got to score points for the Blue Team.

Oh, and, seriously, the only reason I’m going with that example is because I can’t talk about the use of the words “socialist” and “fascist” in American dialog without going in to a frothing rage.  I also can’t help but remember that there were a lot of people about this time four years ago claiming that Gee Dubs wasn’t going to leave the White House when his time was up.  Basically, the reason we can’t have nice things in America is because most of the electorate on both sides of the aisle is made up of fucktards.  But, thanks to the internet, they pretty much make that obvious.  I’ve had a better time of it since I realized that anyone who spells America as Amerika or AmeriKKKa can be safely ignored.  They might be Blue Team and I might be somewhat aligned with the goals of Blue Team, but, seriously, fuck that person.

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[1]While many of my beliefs are in line with the Democratic Party’s platform, I do not consider myself a Democrat.  I consider myself an independent progessive who will vote anti-Republican as a tie-breaking decision since, holy shit, the Republican Party as it’s currently comprised scares the crap out of me.  I would really like to live in a world where the opposition to Barack Obama is pointing out that he’s mushy on issues like civil liberties and torture, rather than calling him a Kenyan Muslim atheist White House usurping baby eater.  Call me crazy.

And, y’know, “We need to vet the Democratic candidate for President,” is pretty goddamn weak sauce when he’s the fucking incumbent.

[2]The Obama Administration hasn’t been so great on civil liberties, either.  We were promised the most transparent presidency ever, but Obama and his DOJ seem to have state secrets Tourettes, claiming that every fucking thing is a state secret no matter how stupid.  Oh, and try not to be a whistleblower, either, since you’ll get your ass in a vise if you try it.

[3]Jefferson’s overall positions are interesting to consider in light of modern American politics.  He was an anti-Federalist, which means that he didn’t like the idea of a strong Federal government, preferring to have most power devolve to the several states instead.  This tracks well with modern Republican thinking.  He also was not a big fan of a powerful military, because, y’know, a strong federal army is just asking for trouble.  This tracks well with, well, basically no one in modern America.  However, it’s the antithesis of modern Republican thinking, as demonstrated by that bit where Paul Ryan wants to give the military more money than the Joint Chiefs asked for.

Jefferson also proposed nullification and anonymously advocated secession for Kentucky over the issue of nullification over the Alien and Sedition Acts.  This pretty much puts him in line with John C Calhoun and South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis and, later, the Confederacy.  Also, too, the Great, Semi-Independent Republic of Texas’s own Chief Head of Hair, Rick Perry.  However, we act like there were only two nullification issues and one laughable attempt by Rick Perry.  There were, in fact, eight total antebellum issues where nullification was a thing, including Jefferson’s original case with Kentucky.  The first involved Kentucky, the second involved New England’s opposition to the Embargo Act of 1807 and subsequent serious consideration of secession followed by a separate peace with England in the War of 1812, the third was from Virginia in reaction to federal judicial review of criminal cases, the fourth was an attempt to illegally tax the Bank of the United States by the State of Ohio, and the fifth came from Georgia because they thought the feds weren’t being nearly mean enough to the Cherokees.  Then came the Nullification Crisis, followed by various Northern states’ attempts to nullify the laws of the Fugitive Slave Acts.

Post-Civil War nullification issues were generally attempts by states to override Federal equal treatment laws.  But there’s absolutely no historical reason to think that state’s rights are exclusively an issue of racism and discrimination.  And all of that is thanks to Thomas Jefferson.

Come to think of it, maybe John Adams was on to something…

[4]Seriously.  John Adams was kind of a dick.  Thomas Jefferson, like many of the others, was a slave holder and a genuine racist.  Benjamin Franklin was an arrogant womanizer.  The big argument in the writing of the Constitution wasn’t whether the slaves should be freed, but how many should be counted in the census to divvy up the seats in the House of Representatives.  They genuinely thought that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.  They were, in short, the elite, out of touch men of their age.  And their age was filled with douchebags.

[5]Again, I think that there are a bunch of people running for office as Republicans that could be genuinely considered bad guys.  You couldn’t pay me enough to vote for Romney and Ryan.  I feel the same way about pretty much everyone in the Tea Party.  By the same token, I don’t think that the Tea Party in specific or the Republican Party in general is entirely filled with racist freaks who only want to get rid of the uppity black usurper.  There are plenty of racist freaks in the ranks of the right, but there are also a lot of people who are just Red Team players and there are still old-school conservatives who still feel they should stick around.  Also, too, there are the cynical operators who are just manipulating the whole thing for their own gain.

There’s also a great Daily Show bit from last week that pretty much puts to rest the idea that there are only fuzzy inclusive folks on the Blue Team:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Hope and Change 2 - The Party of Inclusion
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Group Dynamics, Part 1

Before I start this out I think I should point out that I am not a sociologist.  This isn’t to say that I’m not qualified to say the things that I’m about to say, it’s to point out that I’m probably not going to be saying anything that’s as revolutionary as I like to think it is.  That’s just kind of the nature of things, I suppose.

See, I’m not a sociologist.  I have taken a few courses on psychology, so I have a good groundwork for basic conversation about human behavior.  More than that, though, I have been an insider and an outsider in many groups.  I have been a leader and a follower.  Through it all, I’ve been, primarily an observer.  As such, I have a few theories about how groups come together.  I’m also a massively unpopular blogger, so I feel no shame in sharing those thoughts.

The way I see it, there are two major axes around which groups form.  Each of those, in turn, have three components.

The first grouping is the organizing principles group.  Groups organize based on three general principles: identity, proximity, and purpose.  These three principles rarely work in a vacuum, however.  It is, for instance, not likely to see all Illinoisans going in the same direction.  It is, however, possible to see a critical mass of Illinois Republicans moving in the same direction.  I suppose that means very little.  So let me break it out some more.

Identity is, generally, the easiest organizing principle to work around.  Everyone has a collection of identities that they work from.  I, for instance, am a white, heterosexual male.  I am also college-educated and non-religious.[1]  All of these are part of my identity.  Four of them are pretty much completely immutable.  The fifth is not, as evidenced by the fact that I was, in fact, once religious.  So it’s possible to add a second level of identity: temporary identification.  In that, I am a home- and dogowner.  I’m single.  I’m a White Sox fan in specific and a baseball fan in general.  I strongly identify with all of these things, but they’re also things that could change tomorrow and could, conceivable, change faster than the whole white male thing.  All of these things, however, are part of my identity.

People defining groups love identity.  It tends to give big groups with seemingly non-porous borders.  So you hear about how all Christians believe in Thing A or all homosexuals do Thing B.  It’s also why people become surprised when there’s a Christian who doesn’t believe in Thing A or a homosexual who totally isn’t a fan of Thing B.  This is where the interaction between identities comes in.  It’s also where the interaction between identity and the other organizing principles comes in.

Proximity is both a measure of age and distance.  In broad strokes, an American will have different ideas than a European on politics.  An American in Alabama will have different ideas than an American in Massachusetts.  A teenager will also have different ideas than an octogenarian.

People defining groups also love proximity.  They love to talk about The South as a voting bloc or Generation X as a fuckload of people who are entirely in love with flannel and slacking off.  Again, though, not every resident of Phoenix, AZ believes the same thing.  Not every 15 year-old does, either. Still, people tend to think in those broad demographic categories.

Purpose is the most malleable of the three organizing principles.  It tends to be less permanent and more results-based.  It can, however, be a key organizing principle and I think it’s the one that’s most likely to be a standalone principle.  For instance, my career is, for me, a purpose-based principle that has very little to do with my identity and is only related to my proximity in that I work for a company headquartered near where I live.  I work with a couple hundred people with whom I share somewhere between nothing and a whole lot of things in terms of identity and with whom I share proximity simply by geographic accident.  Yet we all work together for the common purpose of the goal.

Still, purpose as an organizing principle is usually subordinate to the other two organizing principles.  As such you might have Christians who gather once a week at a soup kitchen to feed the hungry.  You might have atheists who join together to fight creationism on the local school board.  You might also have Christians and atheists who join together to fight creationism and then decide to go feed the homeless.

These three main organizing principles are then influenced by what I see as the three decision making principles: personality, interest, and access.

Personality is both a personal and a corporate-based principle.  Quite simply, someone who is not prone to join a group probably won’t join a group even if it is exactly in line if their principles.  Someone who wants to join a group but doesn’t like the people who are in the group probably won’t join, either.  On the flip side, someone who is lukewarm about something might be influenced positively by a passionate and welcoming community.[2]

Interest is somewhat harder for me to define as a separate issue from the organizing principles.  On the negative side, someone might simply not be interested in, say, joining the church group on a missions trip to build houses for Habitat for Humanity.  On a positive side, someone who is really passionate about helping out at the animal shelter might get a bunch of friends with whom they generally only watch football games to go down and play with the puppies and kitties before kickoff every Sunday.

Access, on the other hand, is something that might actually be wholly dependent on personality or proximity.  Someone who is, say, passionate about feeding the homeless might find themselves in a place where there are several soup kitchens, but those soup kitchens are run by people who only give food in conjunction with a sermon, which goes against the principles of the person who wants to feed the homeless.  It might, however, be as simple as lack of transportation or the group only meeting at a time when the potential member is at work.

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What I have here is a very rough outline of the two basic levels and six associated dimensions on which I think all group dynamics hinge.  It’s probably a bit sloppy from a group demographics standpoint and it’s definitely not going to get me published any time soon.  But it serves, I hope, as a jumping-off point to discuss some big ideas I want to cover.

Mostly, though, it’s about how I should have approached the stuff I wanted to discuss in my Atheism+ posts.  It’s about how I can agree with an idea, not want to participate, and think that the people involved are either naïve, assholes, or naïve assholes.  It’s also about how to attempt to talk about people who have interests and goals that are outside of my general understanding, experience, or – to put it bluntly – care.  I hope to be able to provide some thought-provoking ideas.

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[1]I identify myself as non-religious far more consistently than I identify myself as an atheist or an agnostic, both of which also apply.  There’s a reason for this, but it’s hard to explain.  Basically, I consider atheism and agnosticism an intellectual issue, whereas non-religiousness is my basic, overall functional attitude.

[2]This is pretty much the end-goal of all of the Christian outreach in which I was engaged.  The whole idea was to get someone to come by hook or by crook, and then overwhelm them with the whole love o’ Jesus thing.