Dear Fans: I do sincerely apologize for the prolonged absence.  I do have more articles forthcoming and still more in my mind that haven't hit the page yet.  School has become a very high priority as I consider applying for grad school in philosophy.  So while I'm trying to get great grades, I'm also doing the research required for attending school next year.  This entry is quite long.  It has the good thing about it that it unifies many different thoughts, helping me, and hopefully you to comprehend the much bigger picture of why it is so difficult to practice human kindness towards one another.  God Bless, and hopefully over the next few days, I'll make some more posts.

Owen

135-07-13-2009

Diminishing Respect
By W. Owen Thornton

I’ve written before, years ago now, about the lack of respect we show one another in our automobiles.  Human kindness demands that we respect ourselves and others.  While in our cars we turn in front of one another with too little space, accelerate through late yellows – early reds etc.  We make aggressive driving mistakes at the expense of safety in regards to our own and others.  We literally risk life and limb on the roads in an over-inflated sense of our own driving skills.  I use this kind of behaviour now as indicative of our reduced respect for one another in all things.

It is not always clear why we should respect one another just a little bit more on the roads.  One man I know said that doing 110 kilometers per hour he did a shoulder check on a four lane highway in order to begin to change lanes.  The car ahead was going a little slow.  In an instant his wife screamed.  The man ahead stopped in the middle of the road for what appeared to be absolutely no reason (there were no cars ahead for quite some distance as it was early in the morning.)  Our chap jerked the wheel to change lanes faster than he ought to have and over the next few agonizing seconds he overcorrected his steering several times until he did a 180 in the middle of a large major city. 

He lived with only a dent in his rear corner but he came away with two more things than a little car damage.  One, he had a renewed sense of the value of life.  The second was that in a crisis, most normal people cannot handle their car at highway speeds.  Those little aggressive moves we make on the city streets leave people with split-second reactions to avoid a great deal of misery.  At least in the province of Ontario, insurance being what it is, most people will now spend upwards of $5,000 to repair their car on their own, rather than go through the hassles of dealing with insurance hoops and having their insurance rates go up more than the cost of doing the repairs.  Insurance today is seriously unkind to folk who have fender-benders (To be kind to insurance, it still works well when the user needs serious help, however).  And Insurance woes have nothing on the emotional cost of what happens when someone scares themselves silly by having a near fatal crash.  Hence one would think human kindness would be the order of the day because otherwise the cost of lack of human kindness is more than we want to bear.

So, when it comes to respecting one another, human kindness exhibited on our roads is an excellent example.  It shows us why we should practice human kindness because the cost of aggression or rudeness is emotionally visible and financially real.  Likewise we see this to a lesser extent in the contact sport of hockey.  Each time players up the ante for the last check … making the next one a little harder and a little dirtier, this lack of respect means players run the risk of injury and loss of a life-long income.

Oddly, I see lack of respect for others as an internal matter.  Aristotle said that we are meant to live in a political world … that we need one another to live valuable lives.  But today we have the sense that we can and that we should do it all on our own.  And so, because we’re doing it on our own, no longer relying on help from our fellow travelers, we seem to gain permission to ignore them.  We operate in little bubbles of isolation.  Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone tells the story of how the ‘wealthier’ classes get wealthier.  They go to their friends with an idea and ask for help in areas where they cannot readily do something for themselves.  And selflessly, more often than not, these requests are met: Not because the person granting the request expects something in return.  But rather, they know that when you put something good out into the universe, that the universe sees it as a vacuum and … and because nature abhors a vacuum, this means something good, from some other as-of-yet unknown direction will come back to you.  And if it doesn’t happen right away, as Norman Vincent Peale says, the longer it is withheld, the greater the return will be.

Where does doing it on our own come from?  Well, for one thing there are many things we must do on our own.  We must all work in our own jobs.  We must all be diligent and faithful to ourselves and our livelihood because in part we know that we cannot expect others to take care of us.  Doing it on our own, for the most part is a good thing.  These facts are truisms.

But in these pages I’ve also explored how sometimes our greatest traits lead to what I will now call excessivism.  Excessivism is a condition where we enable our best traits, which is normally a good thing, and we take them one step too far.  For example we like to joke to make things light and funny but we do it while teasing people.  Most times this makes someone popular and the atmosphere light and fun … until someone steps one step too far and their teasing results in an unintended but still hurtful insult.  This example demonstrates that we are never truly alone in the world and because of that fact, our actions are monitored and our negative excessivism, whatever trait that might be, can be harmful and demonstrate lack of respect for one another.

Combine our own tendency to excessivism with the false dream of avarice and that money and stuff will make everyone happy when we’re all millionaires and we’re driven to succeed on our own so we can retire at age 40 with our millions in the bank.  I recently read that humanities greatest sin is covetousness.  We all want more.  I remember an episode of West Wing.  One of the president’s men is sitting at a bar in a strange city, socked in by bad weather, unable to return to Washington.  He starts talking with someone who represents Joe or Josephine Q Public.  Without knowing that s/he is talking to a president’s employee s/he says, “It’s hard.  I get that.  Life is supposed to be about the struggle.  It wouldn’t be worth living if life were easy or free.  But it could be a little easier, you know?”

Foolishly we fall for avarice or greed each and every time.  Ponzi Schemes appear to be thriving right now.  Tell people that they can invest money and earn it back faster than it can be believed and … people fall for it.  (Thus the old adage, “If it is too good to be true, it probably is,” comes into vogue!)  But we’re bombarded by images of the ‘rich and famous’ – mostly entertainers and professional athletes – and we believe that we can all have that kind of life: like we can all get people to pay upwards of $1,000 a seat for 70,000 seats in some ‘Dome” somewhere.  But everything has a cost and we continually forget that fact, much to our own detriment. 

The kind of money that the ‘stars’ earn often comes with the sacrifice of privacy and normal lives.  I don’t know much about the story of Michael Jackson when he was alive, but give any fellow with some demons (and we all have a few of those – don’t kid yourself) hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to live out their eccentricities and watch us all go a little weird!  I believe that there are few people in this world who, as Rudyard Kipling once wrote in his poem “If” can approach wealth and fame in this manner: “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue/ or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch.” 

Sadly most of us get swept up by our own success thinking we’re someone important.  We ‘did it ourselves’ didn’t we?  So we must be someone important!  Success often seems to come at a cost to ourselves … to our humanity.  We need to be wary of that fact and ask ourselves if we are willing to potentially give up the great things we have for fortune and fame.  Few people have the virtue that Aristotle believes we can achieve where we can hold onto both ourselves (our humanity) and fortune/fame at the same time.  It can be done, but it is rare and usually it comes with a cost we cannot imagine.

But all this is vastly complicated.  We should do some things ourselves … but not everything.  And which things should we do ourselves and which should we do by requesting help from others?  Sometimes the way is clear.  Other times it is not.  Sometimes we bang our heads upon a ceiling we cannot penetrate it.  We do this out of pride that we can do it on our own, when we should have just asked a friend and we would have reached our destination by now.

And we all want things to be a little easier.  We all want the ability to be able to pay for that renovated bathroom and the new roof and … student fees … and new clothes and Toronto Maple Leafs season tickets at the same time.  But the reality is most people cannot afford to do all of those things.  But the trick of our society today is that somehow through our own gullibility … our own hopes and desires – also two good things that we should hold onto, but that can trick us if we take them to excessivism – is that we believe we can all have all of these things all of the time.

And some government agencies are not helping us.  The Ontario Lottery Commission has the slogan, “Just Imagine.”  This is a modified version of the previous slogan, “Imagine the Freedom.”  So … “Just Imagine” is telling us that we can “Imagine the Freedom” when we win millions of dollars in lotteries.  This message confronts us despite counter notions that might tell us that having money is like living in a friendless prison.  Look at movie stars or the wealthy people in poverty-stricken nations: both live behind walls and barricades to keep out the ne’er-do-wells (that’s people like you and me, you know!).  If you need to live behind gates and have security … who’s living in a prison, I ask you?

When I wrote earlier about unconscious thoughts helping us decide things, we see the danger in messages like this.  If money means freedom and we don’t have money now, we must not be free.  Not being free means we’re imprisoned.  If we’re imprisoned in our own lives … well who wants to live a life in a prison?  “Just Imagine” cannot be a good message to be sending us: that our normal lives are prisons but ones with untold riches mean freedom.  These thoughts enter our unconscious minds and we begin to see how we can make decisions that show others a lack of respect as we all trundle off down the road of life trying to do it ourselves … often at the expense of our fellow travelers.  And who can blame us for acting this way?  All we’re trying to do is get some freedom for ourselves?  And that freedom has a cost more than just living behind walls and bars and chains and security guards, doesn’t it?  It will also come at the expense of friendships.  People will wonder, with all our millions why we don’t buy every round, or why we won’t loan them money for their house or … and therein lies why these people have to build walls and barricades and pay for security people!

To cite another example, too many images of too many female models who are too skinny, and suddenly we have young women unconsciously emulating these models who starve themselves for fashion and we find new dis-eases of the mind: anemia and bulimia!  Look.  In a psychology experiment when people were asked to work with words and create sentences from them where some of the words they work with remind them of being ‘old’, these people will later walk more slowly than those who work with words that do not remind them of being old.  Let me restate that.  If you work with words that remind you of being old, you will unconsciously walk more slowly.  Mad-eye Mooney of the Harry Potter series has it right.  When it comes to the things that enter inside our minds we must have “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”  Therefore we should not look at magazines with too-skinny models otherwise we will come to see that as the new way we ‘should’ be … whether we consciously decide to be that way or not!

And here’s a second complication: money in and of itself is not evil.  So it should be okay to accumulate it without becoming corrupted.  So what’s the deal with it?  I recently read a book by a pastor who was driving down the road listening to an evangelical pastor on the radio.  The man on the radio was going on and on about the evilness of money: like everyone who had it was evil.  The author writing the book said that he wanted to drive down to the radio station and correct this terrible mistake: this terrible misread of the Bible.  Money is not evil.  Christ did not say that!  He said the ‘love’ of money is evil: that one cannot serve two masters: God and Money, for if you love the one, you will not have room in your life for the other.

So money is good because we need it to live, but loving it too much is an evil and this corrupts us.  And corruption in regards to money is so destructive because it is so seductive.  A little money makes things easier and we can have some fun, so a LOT of money should make life completely simple and provide an endless future of fun.  Wow!  That seems to make so much common sense.  But when we consider another human foible … that of taking what we have for granted … I’m betting we get used to having a lot of money very quickly.  And then life goes back to normal … with its good days and its bad days … and once you have money and life isn’t ‘perfect’ like you thought it would be … do you give up the quest?  Nope!  Most of us think that we need MORE money … then we’ll find happiness.

Aristotle said that everything we do, we do to bring about our own happiness.  We might decide to do one thing in order to bring about the next in order to bring about the next such that once we’ve done these things we will be happy.  Working to earn money to buy the things we need to live and be comfortable will make us happy.  But fall into the trap of the love of money and suddenly the means to our goal – that of happiness – or should I say the means to the end (the target called happiness) becomes our focal point.  And Aristotle said that a means can NEVER become the end in itself.  It will leave you hollow … always chasing the means and never reaching the end.  The love of money is a deadly, depressing trap, I’m afraid.  Money can only ever be a tool … a step along the way … that can lead us towards happiness.  And in the process, the pursuit of too much money has devastating consequences for human kindness.

Many philosophers believed that the way to happiness would be to have enough money to live and to spend some time with friends where you can talk about the big issues that trouble us … the philosophical issues.  In fact, living a life like this would be a relatively simple one where we didn’t have many excesses.  But, philosophers know too that should people aspire to this kind of happy and joyous life, that they would look very strange to most people: because most people think happiness is about s/he who has the most toys wins!

So that’s a complication too … isn’t it?  If we don’t fall in line with what society thinks is important – the almighty dollar … then we’ll look weird.  And we want to fit in.  We don’t WANT to be weird.  But if we want to fit in, which means being like everyone else, then why would we want to do it all ourselves because ‘fitting in’ doesn’t seem to matter when we’re out there doing everything on our own.  So that’s really strange isn’t it?  We want to do everything on our own so we can fit in with everyone else who is doing it all on our own … but in that world, then it would seem that we don’t need to fit in because fitting in wouldn’t seem to be an important priority.  But it is in the human kindness sense of desiring to ‘fit in’ which seems to be a natural human tendency that we learn to accept that ‘doing it all on our own,’ cannot be the right normal tendency that we first thought it was!  Doing it all on our own to fit in becomes an oxymoron: an impossibility. 

So to conclude this section: take a positive trait like a person’s independence – that of doing it on their own – and drive it to excessiveness.  Then combine it with the falsity that materialism and wealth – and all the tricks that lay in that minefield – are major, prime desires and people fall in love with money as the means to the end: they think money will “buy happiness”.  And they fall for things more easily than they might think because of the emotional and societal atmosphere around them and they make unconscious decisions based on the words and images that repeatedly strike them.  Because of these things they believe the false promises that doing it on their own and that money buys happiness and then because they’re on autopilot they do things for themselves that show a complete lack of respect for one another. 

In our cars we pull out in front of one another where had we waited just a few seconds the road would have been empty.  We pummel one another for slight offenses in hockey rinks.  We take advantage of others to garner gains in our business and financial lives because everyone else is doing it.  And we do all of these things for good theoretical reasons which are all taken to false extremes.  We forget that “holding hands and walking together” makes us feel better than isolated “money” dreams or goals.  And we forget that sometimes we simply cannot do certain things alone.  We are often better off when we work as a team.  All “isolated-greed-goals” lead to a complete lack of respect for others in the process.  But, if our goals were realistic, based on working together and refusing to allow the love of money to overwhelm us then we’d do different and truly meaningful things.  If we REALLY did things to “fit in” we would be practicing human kindness towards one another and the entire world would really be a better place: rather than each one of us “going it alone” and never really arriving at that better place.  We would do things that would be kind to others and towards ourselves.  And then we would all feel better.

Maybe part of the problem is that we don’t have a vision for what that better life means.  Maybe that is why we find it easy to be caught up by the world telling us that we should live our lives alone and for the almighty dollar.  Perhaps the problem is that many of us have never been given the knowledge and the tools that we can really do that for ourselves: figure out the thing that would make us happy and then do the right things to enable us to go for it.  Maybe some of our platitudes, that each person can become Prime Minister or President, fail to come with a list of behaviours and attitudes required to get there.  Maybe that’s the thing we lack.  Maybe we all want too much handed to us rather than desiring to work for it … yes … on our own … or maybe working for it on our own together with others who all want to achieve the same goals. 

The world is a great and tremendous place.  We have so much.  I believe each person lives in a world where we can all achieve our dreams and desires.  And if we don’t know how to get there, we can find those who can help us along the way … while we help others to achieve their goals and desires.  And if we don’t know what our goal or desires need to be for us … we have people who can lead us out of that wilderness too.  We can all have the kind of inner wealth we cherish and desire.  No one ever needs to go hungry.  No one ever needs to worry.  No one ever needs to lose sleep at night.  No child ever needs to go hungry.  No child should ever be abused or neglected or die of diseases that could be cured.  We have had that legacy given to us.  But in our isolated struggles for our own results we fail the world a little bit, every day.  We could all be heroes to the world.  I believe that.  The answers are out there.  We just need to stop doing some of the things we are doing and to start doing something different: rather than continuing to do more of the same kinds of things. 

Human kindness is the way.  It is the focus that can turn our isolated and selfish considerations into a beautiful reality.  It is not easy.  But it is not as hard as we think.  It takes some sacrifice, but had we the vision required the rewards would be greater than we can know.  The sacrifice would not seem like a sacrifice in hindsight.  Human kindness is love and respect for ourselves and for others.  We need to become selfish about doing deliberate acts of kindness for others.  We need to absorb good things so our auto-pilot does good things.  We need to have constant vigilance against words and images that lead us to bad unconscious decisions.  It’s all right to win a lottery as long as you have your eyes wide open and that you realize money is not equivalent to happiness: it only lies on a path towards happiness.

I think I could go on … and if this doesn’t feel like an ending … which it does not … I don’t know what to tell you.  Maybe this essay shouldn’t end.  Maybe it should be the beginning of your own thoughts leading towards kindness.

Cheers

Owen