Life in Central America

Reality doesn’t make any sense

You have probably noticed this. And maybe you thought this was your fault. If you were smarter, or better educated, or something else, everything would be clear. Meanwhile, you go on muddling through life, making a much sense of it as you can, and if nothing makes sense, just doing whatever is easiest.

You have a lot of company. And indeed, the smartest, richest, most powerful people in history have not been much better off, if the truth were known. I hope this makes you feel better. The problem is not you; the problem is reality itself—whatever that is.

We have been lied to. We have been told that reality is reasonable. This is simply not true. Reality does not care a fig about reasonableness, and it is not even clear that it cares about little old us; life is not fair.

We are the ones who want reality to be reasonable, to be understandable. This is a strange obsession; none of our animal relatives are worried about it. None of them seem to worry about anything, actually.

I don’t have an answer to this problem. It’s a bit late to change our genetic wiring, we will just have to live with what we got, including our unreasonable need for making the universe reasonable. But maybe we shouldn’t expect too much—after all, we are only humans. Cockroaches seem to be more in harmony with the universe than we are.

Marilyn Monroe, the innocent victim of sexual abuse

There is nothing pretty about sexual abuse, but Marilyn Monroe made it look that way. She helped make sexual exploitation acceptable in our time. She made it beautiful and glamorous.

She will probably be the most famous woman in history – or actually, the most famous girl in history. She was the girl who never grew up. She was also a girl that never existed. She was a stage personality, and like many other stage personalities she was the exact opposite of the real person behind the image. Marilyn Monroe, the happy innocent, was neither happy nor innocent.

I am now reading her biography by Barbara Leaming, which came out in 1998. Norma Jeane Baker’s problems started before she was born. Her grandmother was manic-depressive, and she died in a straightjacket in a state mental hospital. Her grandfather died of syphilis. Many of the men in her family were violent alcoholics. Her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who alternated between violent rages and interludes of rigidity and muteness. Norma Jean grew up in a series of foster homes. At one point she picked up a stray dog, which she named Tippy. Every morning, the little black-and-white dog followed her to the Washington High School, waiting outside until she was finished. When she was seven, a neighbor attacked Tippy with a garden hoe, and in front of the screaming child, sliced the dog in two.

Later, she was expelled from several foster homes after she was sexually assaulted. The abusers were never punished, but Norma Jeane was. In her early years as an aspiring model-actress, she often attended parties for Hollywood executives where the young women at the party often accompanied the men to the upstairs bedrooms.

Marilyn Monroe, a really amazing person, managed to turn this history into a triumph in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. To quote from Leaming:

For all her intense sexuality, Marilyn communicated that on some level, she, too was as uncertain about sex, and as vulnerable to being hurt by it as anyone else. Far from being the doomed sinner her mother branded her, she was actually a sweet, innocent, good girl whom everybody should love. Audiences were thrilled and relieved to discover that is was all right to laugh at sex; but so, in her own, every touching way, was Marilyn. That personal element infused her performance with special power.

Stanford prison experiment

From the Mercury News

There's no way I could be involved in something so revolting, so degrading, so very, very wrong. Could I? I just wasn't brought up that way.

I had to be reminded this weekend that that question was answered long ago at Stanford. The humiliation, the stripping men naked, abuse -- were all perpetrated by some college students on others in the well-documented 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. The point of investigator Philip Zimbardo and research associates Crag Haney, Curtis Banks and Carlo Prescott was to learn what happens when you put good people in an evil place.

Answer: They turn evil.

See the Web site at http://www.prisonexp.org/

Demon Money

I think supernatural beings exist in at least two ways. Take money, for example. The whole idea of money is some kind of social madness. It has great utility, it is true, but it is still crazy. A piece of paper with Benjamin Franklin on it is valuable. No, let me change that: it is not valuable; it is only thought to be valuable. There is a big difference. We have become so used to thinking of money as something real, that we confuse it with wealth, which is something else entirely, something we almost overlook, in our passion to get the fake stuff.

I am not being nitpicking here, this is a serious subject, and I am not the first person to think about it. Contrast our money with the stone money that was used in the South Seas. This money (and it was money) was not very portable but it was thought to be valuable. So it was valuable – in that culture. It had some kind of magical value. But it was also absolutely useless.

The analogy with lots of other human activities is painfully obvious. Consider the statues on Easter Island. These ancient people went to enormous effort to build them and put them in place - and then tore them all down when they discovered they didn’t really have any power. Meanwhile, they had destroyed the ecology of their island, but they believed instead that their gods had failed them. Actually, the opposite was true; they had failed their gods by substituting fake gods for the real thing.

Don’t smile, we are doing the same thing, we are worshipping false gods, but in our case they are even crazier: they are cars and houses and careers - to say nothing about that really strange thing we call the Market, which has taken the place of God himself.

We need to come to terms with our demons, and see them for what they really are.

Maria has a demon

Sometimes, it would almost be more accurate to say Maria is a demon.

I am a firm believer in demons, and indeed, in spirits in general. We made a big mistake when we became enlightened and started believing that spirits were not really real. This was a superstition of the worse sort, and it has caused us all kinds of trouble, as most superstitions do.

We have a strange attitude towards these powerful beings. In informal conversation, people talk about somebody’s demons quite casually, and nobody corrects them, or scolds them for being superstitious. At the very least, we acknowledge that demons are a useful concept, and they can be a big problem. But, for some reason, we balk at the idea of good spirits, and insist that all good things are rational (like money, for example :).

But let me concentrate on my main subject: evil spirits. These things can really mess up our lives. And I will even take that further: these things are messing up our lives. And I include myself here. But I started to talk about Maria’s demons, so let me go on with that.

Maria has a problem with men. When she gets into a relationship with a man, everything goes smoothly for a while. Then wham her demon shows up and her poor man gets battered. He doesn’t know what is going on, and maybe he even thinks the problem is him - but he becomes resentful, in any case. He has the strong urge to get the heck of there, and he probably should.

In the last couple of days Maria has changed, her face looks entirely different, and she has been going on marathon binges of house cleaning. And Javier has been staying out of her way. This is a very serious situation, because Maria needs Javier, or more accurately, she needs Javier’s money. She can’t keep her new house without him. But at the same time, she rebels at being dependent.

She has never come to grips with this issue, and it is one of her demons.

The stubborn vitality of the gift economy

This is the second chapter in the book Silent Theft, the private plunder of our common wealth, by David Bollier.

He starts with a quotation from Thomas Berry: The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

The Gift Economy is sometimes more effective in meeting economic and social needs than the market is. For example, Richard Titmuss made a study of British and American blood banks in the l960s. Is it better for hospitals and patients to acquire blood using paid donors or through a gift economy using donors? His study revealed some of the hidden costs of marketization.

Drawing upon extensive empirical data, Titmuss concluded that commercial blood systems generally produce blood supplies of lower safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems. What can possible account for these counterintuitive deviations from market theory, which hold that the price system produces the most efficient outcomes and the highest quality product? The short answer: the overreaching premises of economic theory and our ignorance of the gift economy.

Donating blood in a safe efficient manner requires an acute degree of truthfulness on the part of the donors (who need to reveal any drug abuse, alcoholism, and disease history) and doctors (who must not take blood too frequently from donors in poor health). It turns out that the introduction of money into the blood transaction encourages doctors to skirt prescribed safety rules, and attracts more drug addicts, prisoners, and disease-ridden poor people than altruistic appeals do. In this case, the consumer cannot exercise meaningful choice in the safety or price of blood supplies.

Titmus concluded:
------
The ways in which society organizes and structures it’s social institutions ... can encourage or discourage the altruistic in man; such systems can foster integration or alienation; they can allow the “theme of the gift” - of generosity to strangers – to spread among and between social groups and generations.
------
The market economy, by comparison, is simply the greed economy, we ought to make this clear.

People are naturally altruistic, as well as naturally greedy. Family life should be a perfect example of the gift economy. Unfortunately, the market sometimes intrudes here too. Babies are bought all the time in Guatemala, by Americans, and these children often have a rough life, as was vividly documented in Mommie Dearest.

What we really want

This from from the book Young Man Luther, by Erik H. Erikson. You may not see the point in this far-out talk about the strange stuff in the deep unconsciousness, but I like it. This motivates all of us, we might as well admit it, and Erikson has done us a favor by writing about it.
------
One of man’s basic desires is a simple and fervent wish for a hallucinatory sense of unity with a maternal matrix, and a supply of benevolently powerful substances; it is symbolized by the affirmative face of charity, graciously inclined, reassuring the faithful of the unconditional acceptance of those who will return to the bosom. In this symbol the split of automony is forever repaired: shame is healed by unconditional approval, doubt by the eternal presence of generous provision.