Ep18 -- We All Contain Multitudes

 One night back in college,  I'm walking home from a friend's house down Spruce Street in West Philly and it's very late.  There's nobody around and I'm somewhat unsober.  And I hadn't yet learned the lesson I'd pick up later living in DC about how, when you're walking home alone late at night, your best strategy to stay safe is to look crazy. You know,  carry on a heated conversation with an imaginary friend, or dramatically flex and unflex one hand while staring at it wild-eyed.  You know, the kind of charming quirks you pick up living in any major American city.  So back in Philly,  I walk past a pretty skeevy-looking guy, very intentionally not making eye contact and just keep walking.  Then up ahead an old beat-up sedan comes to a screeching stop in the street. 

And two guys get out and start running down the sidewalk directly at me.  I can't say for sure but I'm reasonably confident one or both of them had a gun drawn.  And at that moment, I immediately thought,  just as matter-of-factly as if I was ordering a chicken cheese steak from Billy Bob's,  I am going to die. This is how my life is going to end. That's it.  I had a pretty good run. You know, 21 is obviously too young to cash in, but what choice did I have?  And I don't know if I had the time to go through all six stages of grieving,  all I know is in a split second, I had made it all the way to acceptance.  

Now, of course, I didn't die that night. The two guys ran right past me, wrestled that skeevy-looking guy to the ground, then hauled him into the street, threw him in the back of the sedan, which had since backed down the street fast and they all sped off. And there I was back in that quiet, dark late night. Alone.  

I don't know why that memory popped into my head recently, but it got me thinking about how we humans think about ourselves and our lives and other people and their lives.  Sitting here now, if I think about the possibility of being in a situation where my life would be in imminent danger,  I would imagine that I'd be terrified. I'd be incapacitated with fear.  But in that moment, when there was seemingly no way out and the end result appeared inevitable  I was actually quite calm.  And that got me thinking about how so much of what we think we know about ourselves is actually situationally dependent and is affected by outside forces.  Anyone who has ever noticed how differently they feel and act when they're back in their childhood home, visiting their parents has viscerally experienced this.  So this week, I want to talk about how we all in a very real sense, have multiple personalities. And how realizing that can help us be a little less judgmental about ourselves and others. And hopefully find ways for all of us to live together with a bit more compassion and forgiveness. Stay tuned.  

I'm Craig Boreth and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we've all been conned into accepting a human culture that's out of sync with human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

But first a word about a sponsor.  

The Great Ungaslighting is not sponsored by GiveWell,  a charity assessment website that uses "Effective Altruism" to ostensibly fund charities that have the greatest expected value in saving lives. Now that all sounds good, but just as the gospel of wealth is used primarily to justify massive wealth inequality, effective altruism, which counts Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk as big fans, espouses the "earning to give" philosophy, which basically says that the best way to do good is not to work for aid agencies that actually try to help people on the ground, but rather to earn as much money as possible so you can give some of it away in the belief that it will do the most good.  It's all very self-congratulatory and boasts lots of spreadsheets that aim to maximize expected value on each donation.  The problem is that effective altruism is essentially, as Leif Wenar are described in a recent article in WIRED, "strong hyping of precise numbers based on weak evidence and lots of hedging and fudging.  EAs appoint themselves experts on everything based on a sophomore's understanding of rationality and the world."  So basically if EAs decided that mosquito netting is the most cost-effective way to save lives, then we should obviously invest in that.  The problem is, on the one hand, there's no consideration of potential side effects, like the breakdown of the social contract between the local government and its people because rich Westerners are swooping in to solve their problems, and on the other hand, a paternalistic reduction of the complexity of life in the recipient countries, such that all that's needed to "save a life" is to buy a mosquito net.  As Wenar notes, "extreme poverty is not about me, and it's not about you. It's about people facing daily challenges that most of us can hardly imagine. If we decide to intervene in poor people's lives, we should do so responsibly. Ideally, by shifting our power to them and being accountable for our actions." 

And that is something that GiveWell and effective altruism very intentionally do not do.

And of course, if you believe in EA, you'll eventually start dabbling in what's called "Longtermerism," which basically means that if you want to do the most good for the most people, you should think about future generations, the billions of future lives you can save if you could colonize Mars as a refuge from a dying earth.  It sounds like a great excuse to amass obscene wealth and not give a crap about actual people living today.  Sound familiar?  So GiveWell and other EA proponents can congratulate themselves all they want about the number of lives they've saved, but until they do an honest accounting of the actual impacts, the impacts of extreme wealth inequality on society and the potentially deadly side effects of their swooping in to save those poor wretched souls who really just need a good mosquito net to survive,  then EA will just be as Leif Wenar notes, "a way to maximize on looking clever while minimizing on expertise and accountability."

BREAK 

 And, we're back.  

In 2018,  social psychologist Devon Price wrote an article that eventually became a book called Laziness Does Not Exist.  His point is that when you're looking at someone whose behavior you interpret as lazy, whether it's a student procrastinating or a homeless person who should just, you know, get a job,  and if you actually want to understand why that person is behaving the way they are,  it's the situational constraints that really matter rather than personality traits.  You need to look for barriers to action. 

And as Dr. Price notes, there are always barriers.  But you need to want to understand them. Because, as he writes, "When you don't fully understand a person's context, what it feels like to be them every day, all the small annoyances and major traumas that define their life, it's easy to impose abstract rigid expectations on a person's behavior.  

This reminds me of that saying before judging someone walk a mile in their shoes. 

I know it's just a saying, but it doesn't seem to be enough.  Putting yourself in their shoes just won't do it. You have to really try to be them to understand what their full complex actual life is all about.  And even then it's probably not enough.  Remember when Dave Chappelle made those comments about Anthony Bourdain's suicide?  He was saying, look, this guy had the greatest job ever and he killed himself. So what chance do the rest of us have?  And a lot of people were offended by that saying that Chappelle was mocking Bourdain's suicide. But I don't see it that way. To me, he was just stating a simple truth. No matter how great anyone's life looks from the outside, there were always things you don't know.  And just to drill down on that example a bit,  when it comes to depression, people who've never experienced it imagine that it's like walking around with a dark cloud over your head all the time. If you could just get out from under that cloud, everything would be fine.  But that's not what it's like.  As Andrew Solomon wrote in his atlas of depression called The Noonday Demon,  depression is actually like a parting of the clouds, when you believe you can finally see the truth that you've been in denial about, the truth of just how worthless your life actually is.  

So if you've never been depressed, if you've never been homeless, If you've never actually lived day in and day out in a small town that's been decimated by the closing of a factory, or if you've never actually experienced the whole of life in financially poor malaria stricken areas,  don't judge. Don't imagine there are easy fixes, or even that you get to define what fixed looks like. Maybe just listen and try to understand more than you do now.  

As I mentioned at the beginning, there are things we don't know about our own minds and how we would respond in certain situations. So how could we possibly think we could know anybody else's?  As I was thinking about this week's episode, one line kept popping into my head: "I contain multitudes.,"  which is from Walt Whitman's 1855 epic poem "Song of Myself"  which opens with this stanza:  

I celebrate myself and sing myself. 
And what I assume you shall assume. 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.  

And he goes on over thousands of words to tie all of us together, and all of us to nature. It's really an amazing work of art that explores what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, and what it means to be a part of nature on earth.  And that is the takeaway from this week. Just to recognize and remind yourself that you contain multitudes. And so does everybody else. We're all complicated. We all face barriers that, for whatever reason, we can either plow through or that stop us dead in our tracks.  We should constantly be asking ourselves, what purpose does it serve for me to judge someone else as a lazy, or weak, or flawed?  What good does it do?  And what harm is there in assuming that everyone is doing the best they can and trying to do what they think is right?  And I'm not saying you have to excuse what you see as immoral or unethical.  You may disagree vehemently with what people believe and what they do. But if you can start from a place of common humanity, once again looking for those overlapping distributions, even if it means you have to look all the way down to shared atoms,  you may be able to find a more constructive path forward.  

Well, that's it for this week. Until next time be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack, and use your damn turn signal.