How Conspiracy Theories Help Us To Feel Alive

            Our news these days seems to be literally overflowing with stories about conspiracies and accusations of conspiracies.  One very prominent conspiracy to come to the surface recently is that where Russia supposedly influenced the American presidential election through hacking into the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee as well as those of other organizations and individuals.  Trump, who is an admirer of Putin, of course, vociferously denies this possibility and says that because the C.I.A. made a mistake with regard to missiles in Iraq that, in effect, it can’t be trusted about anything.  However, supposedly the C.I.A. has made corrections to its methods since the Iraq days.  And a bipartisan group of members of Congress wants to further delve into this matter.  The truth is that it is a rather serious accusation that is being made, and, therefore, one that merits further investigation.

            But some accusations of conspiracies remain accusations without any foundation to them.  For instance, the accusation that the news media were conspiring against Trump in his bid for the American presidency.  This accusation has turned out to be totally baseless.  If anything, the ongoing free coverage in the media that Trump and his outrageous statements received were a major factor in his election.  But the accusation of conspiracy certainly riled up Trump’s supporters and helped to stimulate them to life out of their numbness.

            This is because, in general, the accusation of conspiracy generates a lot of abrasive friction both between people and within people.  The accusation of conspiracy creates a little focused tension-pocket of overstimulation.  And we can define the idea of a conspiracy as a focused tension-pocket narrative where one person or group of people supposed tries to secretly control and manipulate some aspect of the life or lives of another person or group of people.  Obviously the individual or group of people supposedly being controlled or manipulated resents this considerably and wants to shut down the supposed actions of the perpetrator or perpetrators and wants to see some kind of justice appear.  Perhaps even punishment if possible.

            In more traditional organic societies, a focus on a conspiracy was a way for a person to handle excessive flowing blendable continual emotions that threatened to swallow up his sense of self and cause him to lash out uncontrollably in an undifferentiated manner.  Such emotions tended to predispose a person to act like a savage, an animal.  With a focus on a conspiracy, a person could channel his strong emotions in such a way that he could more easily maintain the integrity of his sense of self and thus maintain his identity as a human.   The conspiracy theory allowed a person to expel his excessive flowing blendable continual emotions in a safe way.  There could be a focused target for his emotions that would necessitate his concentrating his emotions so that they could be directed outside of himself in a defined way.

            In modern technological society, a focus on a conspiracy serves a different purpose.  Now the emotional problems that a typical conspiracy theorist would experience are numbness and jadedness as a result of a lack of organic stimuli in living environments today.  So the conspiracy theory today is not used to help shape and guide an excess of organic stimuli but rather to shock a person to come alive with the abrasive friction generated by the presence of a supposed conspiracy.  As in other forms of abrasive friction today, the conspiracy theory is like an addiction that gives a person kicks and that never fully goes away.  Because once you believe in it, and it keeps you alive, it’s hard to give up.

            And, in truth, it almost doesn’t matter if the conspiracy is real or not.  In both cases, the belief in a conspiracy in today’s world helps to pull a person out of the numbness and jadedness that he is experiencing, helps to pull a person out of the sensory distortion – the understimulation and the overstimulation – that he experiences living in modern technological society.  Perhaps it could be said that it is almost better that the conspiracy is a product of the believer’s imagination.  A real conspiracy is subject to being exposed.  Then the perpetrators can, at least potentially, receive their appropriate punishment and the conspiracy terminated.  And the perpetrator loses the source of his focused abrasive friction, his kicks, his shock therapy.  Whereas, if the conspiracy is imaginary, no perpetrators can be effectively brought to justice.  Unless charges are effectively trumped up (no pun intended), there usually just isn’t enough evidence to charge a supposed perpetrator for his misdeeds in an imaginary conspiracy.  As a result, the believer can feel perpetually aggrieved. There simply do not exist the means to get to the bottom of the perceived conspiracy, to resolve it by effectively exposing the perpetrators and punishing them and preventing them from ever trying to repeat the conspiracy or create a new one.  Having the lost cause of perpetually fighting an imaginary conspiracy can pull a person out of his numbness and jadedness and keep him alive indefinitely.

            The case of Russia may be the one instance where Donald Trump is fighting against a conspiracy theory.  Most of the time, Donald Trump is constantly coming up with his own new conspiracy theories.  To the extent that his supporters psychologically merge with him to become a part of the collective sense of self that he generates, they too believe in all of his conspiracy theories.  The supporters, together with Trump, are all stimulated to life by the abrasive friction generated as a reaction to these theories.  And the fact that Trump is always coming up with new conspiracy theories, new surprises, new shocks to his supporters nervous systems, gives them ongoing new kinds of abrasive friction, new stimuli to give them new kinds of kicks.  Trump is an addiction and each of his conspiracy theories is an addiction.

            The notion of Trump being like an addiction to his followers is, of course, just a metaphor.  It gives us a handle on what he is doing to his followers, so we can understand how he was, as it were, thrust upon us.  Just as a metaphor I used in a previous article of Trump being like political Viagra also gives us understanding of the strange political situation he presents not only to Americans but also to people in the rest of the world who are going to feel the effects of his governance.  To the extent that Trump jolts people out of their numbness, he is like a political addiction.  And to the extent that Trump gives numb people a way of feeling a sense of potency in their lives again, he is like political Viagra.  So both of these metaphors can be used to explain Trump’s meteoric rise on the American political landscape.

© 2017 Laurence Mesirow

Robots That Deliver The Goods

            In the ever increasing search to find ways to eliminate unnecessary human connections in the modern world, an online food ordering and delivery service company from the U.K. called Just Eat is going to be using robots to deliver food that has been ordered online.  Seven of these special robots, which are really sort of like boxes on wheels, have been leased from Starship Technologies, the British company developing these sidewalk self-driving drone robots.  Each of these boxes can hold a large bag of delivery food.  No longer are customers, who receive their deliveries from these robots, going to have to worry about tipping a delivery boy or girl.  In addition, sometimes there just simply aren’t enough humans to deliver all the orders that are generated at peak times at traditional delivery restaurants.  With these robots, no one is going to have to wait an unusually long period of time for their food.

            In the U.S., there is a gourmet sandwich company called Jimmy John’s that prides itself on how fast its delivery people can deliver its food.  It has these ads where there are conversations between a driver and a manager, and both people are talking superfast as a sign that the company is aware of how important time is for its typical customers.  Sometimes people’s work in today’s world doesn’t allow them much time to eat, but very often it is simply a matter that when modern people are hungry, they want to eat right away.  It’s not just that they feel physically hungry.  It is also that they want immediate gratification to fill the experiential void they feel inside themselves.  By talking fast, the actors for these ads are trying to indicate that the people at Jimmy John’s can operate like high-speed machines to help customers fill the void.  A machine is thought of as being fast and efficient and it doesn’t waste time.

            But now with the Just Eat robots, we won’t have to worry about people who try to work like machines, and who, therefore, inevitably make mistakes.  We will have machines making the deliveries, entities that can just be themselves and do the work they were meant to do.

            Now pretty soon, even without these chests on wheels, machine delivery for all sorts of items will become fairly common, as all kinds of drones are used more and more.  But there is something particularly disturbing about the Just Eat robots delivering food.  Food is perhaps the most experientially grounded thing that humans produce.  It is nutritious for the body and nurturing for the mind and the spirit.  It provides an important grounded component to a person’s field of experience both internally and externally.

            And because it is such a special phenomenon for human beings, it was traditionally surrounded by other grounded components to make a more fully grounded field of experience in the lives of people.  In traditional societies, people would normally sit down together at meals with family and guests and break bread together.  Among many groups, people would give thanks to their spiritual entity through prayer for the bounty of their meal.  The grounded connection was made of food, family or community, land or sea, and spirit or spirits.  All was part of one organic entity.

            As societies evolved, and more vocational specialization occurred, there developed inns, tea houses and public houses – gathering places where people could eat, drink, and sometimes sleep away from home and family.  Nevertheless, there was still the idea of bonded human connections between the server and guest.  Frequently, along with food, the server would provide the guest with conversation to make him feel welcome.  These places could be so welcoming that community meetings were sometimes held in them.  As the food business grew, and more and more people ate out – sometimes because of work and sometimes because people simply had the discretionary income to eat out more and didn’t want to bother with cooking – restaurants evolved and servers became more focused on serving food rather than on making small talk.  Dining became less leisurely, and most restaurant owners and managers became more focused on volume of customers – getting customers in and out.

            The trend of perceiving food as defined discrete hopefully tasty nutrition and less as flowing blendable continual nurturance has continued to grow with the advances in technology.  The availability of the car meant that food could be acquired even more quickly at drive-ins.  Furthermore, the use of advanced cooking machinery meant that food could be acquired quickly with a minimum of bonded connection with a server.  Hence, all the fast food outlets that serve people quickly, even when the people don’t use the drive-through windows.

            There has also been the acquisition of food at automats and vending machines.  Automats seem to be extinct now, but vending machines continue to be as popular as ever, and many places like hospitals have rooms filled with them.  At both automats and vending machine rooms, there has been no bonded connection between the customer and the person who puts the food in the appropriate places in the machine.  Here the customer receives his food from within the complete experiential vacuum of the machine.

            And yet to use an automat or a vending machine, a person still has had to go out into the external world, where he is likely to encounter other people with whom he can socially interact.  With the Just Eat robot, a person can stay in his home and have food delivered to his home and, if he is not living with someone or some ones and if he is not having people over to visit, he never has to encounter other humans.  He can build a social vacuum in his home.

            For many food service places, the idea of a delivery robot is very appealing.  As robots replace humans in the food services industry, it will mean getting rid of the cost involved with wages and insurance for delivery boys and girls.  It will also mean that food service places won’t have to purchase vehicles for delivery people.  In addition, robots don’t take vacations and don’t need days off (unless, perhaps, there is a repair issue).  So robots could be potentially a cost effective substitute for human delivery people in the food services industry.

            But, as has been discussed many times previously in this column, there is a different kind of price to pay for the substitution of robots for humans.  Not only does it involve shutting humans out of one more form of work, but it involves disrupting one more area of human connectedness, one more part of the larger social grounding in human communities.  If robots take over everything in the area of human services, the experiential distortion will be enormous, and social isolation in an experiential vacuum will lead not only to growing mental health problems but also to growing robotization, as people become more and more like the complex behavioral entities (namely, the robots) that surround them.  And this will be because more and more robots and other complex machines will become their dominant sources for mirroring and modeling.  In short, we will increasingly become like the complex behavioral entities that we use.

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow

Can Apps Improve Mental Health?

            People are increasingly turning to psychiatric apps these days for all kinds of mental health issues.  Among other things, these apps help to monitor psychological symptoms, give advice and counseling, teach relaxation exercises, give cognitive behavioral therapy, and alert friends and family members in support systems when a person is having a crisis.  There are many concerns about the effectiveness of these apps, leaving aside any concerns that some people may have for the whole concept of using a kind of intimate contact with complex machines in order to improve mental health.

            In the past, there has been an article in my column about potential negative consequences of using Skype as a vehicle for obtaining psychotherapy from a therapist.  But the number of apps that create different kinds of interaction within supposed therapy situations between computers and clients has proliferated enormously.  It would be beyond the scope of this column to do a systematic review of even a few of these apps.  Such a review has been conducted often in other places and continues to be conducted on an ongoing basis.  Instead, the focus of this article will be a continuation of an ongoing general discussion about the intense interaction of humans and computers with a focus on the use of these machines for mental health issues.

            For those of you who have read this column regularly, you will know that a recurring theme has been that the continual use of computers creates sensory distortion, which, in and of itself, can lead to mental health problems.  The computer screen is an experiential vacuum, something that numbs a user as a result of its smooth frictionless empty surfaces and its intrinsic capacity to separate a user from all the activity on which he is focusing behind the screen.  At the same time, many of the digital data and images that streak across the screen create tension pockets of overstimulation.  So the computer environment is a self-contained vacuum and tension-pocket environment, alternating understimulation and overstimulation, thus creating sensory distortion and making the user alternately numb and jaded.  Independent of specific content, the computer environment by itself can create mental health issues.

            And apart from the computer as an environment, the computer as a complex behavioral entity can create problems.  Particularly with children, but also with adults, computers can begin to replace humans as sources of both mirroring and modeling for users.  The user starts to see himself through the “eyes” of the computer and, furthermore, starts to unconsciously imitate the behavior, the activity of the computer.  In the process of unconsciously imitating the behavior of the computer, the user starts to become more like a robot or more like an avatar. He unconsciously imitates the processes occurring in the computer.

            So as a medium, the computer creates such sensory distortion and such inappropriate channels for mirroring and modeling, that it stimulates pathological states of mind and pathological behavior.  This is true even as the user attempts to heal his psychological disturbances with the psychiatric apps.  And even here, many independent mental health workers are themselves not convinced of any positive effects from these apps.  The one thing that can be affirmed is that the content of these apps is so filled with defined discrete stimuli - questions, directions, and descriptions – that it may be easy to absorb it cognitively, but not necessarily so easy to absorb it on a more primitive emotional level.  It is this emotional level where absorption has to take place in order to truly heal a person’s sense of self.

            It may sound old-fashioned, but to heal from deep emotional problems, a person needs another human, a professional psychotherapist.  And preferably a therapist with whom a client can be in the same space rather than a therapist that a person communicates with over the phone or through Skype.  The therapist has to be experienced as a total sensory entity in order to be able to provide the sensory grounding that a patient needs, while he goes through the personal transformation process that is needed in order to heal.  The physical process of the therapist’s behavior is like a full affirmation of a healing reality, something to which a person can anchor while he tries to deal with his distorted feelings and thoughts.

            But people today are obsessed with apps of all kinds, so why not be obsessed with psychiatric apps as well?  The obsession to interact with apps in general is basically founded on the craving to interact with and become more like the technology that is being used today.  For more and more people, becoming more and more like a robot or more and more like an avatar is the only the way that they feel they can defend themselves against the sensory distortion that surrounds them in their living environment.  On another level, it becomes a very meaningful way they can identify with and become more like a complex behavioral entity that seems to be impervious to organic perishability and that looks like it could just go on existing forever.  But this is a false immortality, because neither a robot nor an avatar has the coherent organic consciousness or the coherent sense of self that are the hallmarks of a human feeling vibrantly alive.  What good does it do to go on existing forever (which neither a robot nor an avatar actually do anyway), if a person can’t feel vibrantly alive in his eternal existence?  Apps in general are a false road to true human immortality.

            And as long as we haven’t yet found a provable way of achieving immortality in this life, let us at least try to make these years that we do have as filled with vibrant life as we can.  And let us use these vibrant life experiences as a foundation for making and receiving good life imprints and then preserving some of our imprints to form a meaningful surrogate immortality.

            And let us use the organic healing power of good psychotherapy with a real live human therapist to help a person arrive at a state of mind where he is capable of fully experiencing and participating in a rich vibrant life.  A rich healing primary experience that leads to rich primary experiences for everyday life.  Psychiatric apps are a false road to organic human healing.  Let us use people and not machines to make us psychologically well.

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow

Trump As A Form Of Political Viagra

            One of the most significant threats that can occur to any democracy is that of the election to a position of leadership of someone who has the potential to be an autocrat.  Such a person can attempt to undermine the checks and balances with respect to other branches of government in order to use dictatorial powers.  Such a person can consolidate his control and decide that elections would only potentially upset his long-term plan for the country.  It would then become much simpler to declare himself president for life.  This course of events has unfortunately happened before in history.  Two of the most notable examples of this happening in the last century were Russia under Lenin and Germany under Hitler.  In many cases, autocratic leaders maintain the pretense of multiple candidate elections in order to satisfy the expectations of the world community.  The elections are fixed, as the autocrat keeps winning election after election.  A good example of this is Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

            One of the secrets of an autocrat’s success is his capacity to take advantage of the frustrations of the populace in order to get the populace to back him.  It is a matter of getting people to back him and his vision and his sense of destiny.  It is a matter of getting people to merge psychologically with him and to make the imprints that he wants to make and preserve on the world their imprints.  The reason that people are willing to give up so much of their individual identity and merge with the autocrat is that they perceive their own opportunity to make and preserve individual imprints to be significantly diminished.  A major reason in the modern world that the opportunities to make and preserve individual imprints are significantly diminished is the effects of modern technology on human fields of experience in the external world.

            This diminishment occurs on several distinct levels.  First, technology has replaced what once would have been called artisan work with mass production by complex machines in factories.  Second, robots are replacing the human workers who used to work with the mass production machines.  Third, more recently, there has been the introduction of 3-D printers which make products from scratch with only the most minimal involvement of human beings.

            Finally, there is the replacement of natural organic surfaces and the surfaces of artifacts and architecture of more traditional cultures with the hard cold unyielding surfaces of modern technology, modern technology-based artifacts and modern technology-based architecture.  The more natural and traditional surfaces created fields of experience that yielded to new ongoing organic imprints, so that a person could feel potent and fully alive, able to make and preserve his own organic imprints and create a surrogate immortality built both on actual products and on the memories that remained with other people after his death.  But now that technology is so good at preserving indefinitely all kinds of imprints, there seems to be less and less room in the fields of experience of people today for truly new imprints. That is, apart from the invention of new devices, that either get rid of work and the possibility of new imprints being made by other workers, or else create more and more layers of mediated experience that remove people more and more from the immediate sensory world and the opportunity to make and preserve new meaningful organic imprints.

            So this is a difficult time for people in a country like the United States, people who want to feel alive and create their own individual surrogate immortality.  Along comes someone like Donald Trump, who not only offers to bring back manufacturing jobs, but who, on a deeper level, offers to restore a sense of potency.  Believe in Trump and you can participate in his vision which will create a collective imprint on the U.S.  A collective imprint that will endure and turn into a collective surrogate immortality.  Believe in Trump and blur into him.

            Blurring into a political leader in order to leave a collective imprint is not what one would normally consider a typical strategy in a modern democracy.  One of the supposed advantages of a democracy is its focus on the individual.  In the United States, according to the Declaration of Independence, there is a fundamental belief that all human beings have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The implication is that each individual has a right to pursue his own distinct path to personal satisfaction and will not feel predisposed to give up his own distinct path by blurring into someone else’s path.  Although political leaders can be charismatic, they are not supposed to use psychological tactics that seduce people into becoming a part of an enveloping collective identity.  Having a good chunk of the populace merge into an enveloping collective identity is the foundation for setting up a totalitarian government, which, of course, is antithetical to the maintenance of a democracy.

            And this is why Trump is such a dangerous man.  His sense of entitlement, his belief that he has the right to go around all kinds of established rules and conventions with regard to the American government, complements perfectly the desperate dreams of his supporters who want nothing more than to believe there is some magical way for them to bypass their sense of impotence with regard to their daily lives.  Trump allows them to live their dreams, if only vicariously, through him.  By letting them blur into him, Trump allows these people to participate in creating vicarious organic imprints on their field of experience.  The vicarious collective organic imprints of a Trump presidency.  In so doing, it allows these supporters to feel fully alive and to feel they haven’t lived their lives in vain.  So that when they are about to die, they will know they have participated in leaving a meaningful impress on the world.

            Trump is unique in the way he changes many of his positions so often both out of expediency and out of a desire to be able to control and manipulate Americans by throwing them off balance.  He also is constantly making new surprise attacks on individuals, corporations and movements with no warning.  And although it throws them off balance, Trump’s supporters love the abrasive friction of all of his changes and surprises.  But in other parts of the world, there are leaders and movements that are also penetrating the numbness and the jadedness of their constituents by coming up with revolutionary proposals to change things dramatically.  The change is not necessarily focused on actually fixing particular problems with particular solutions, but rather is oriented to leaving new dramatic splashy collective imprints that pull people out of their numbness and jadedness and allow them to feel more fully alive.  Many times the changes brought about by these new leaders and movements don’t really fix the problems of their supporters and may actually exacerbate existing problems situations.  But, on some levels, increased abrasive friction may be exactly what these supporters need.  And someone like Trump, who flip-flops on many issues and creates ongoing shows and surprises is actually perfect for creating the ongoing intermittent kicks that keep these people alive.  And his flip-flops and surprise attacks are perfect for making many new imprints in which his supporters can participate.  And many of these imprints can be preserved in people’s memories leading to a constantly expanding collective surrogate immortality.

            Now Brexit was a big collective imprint and a big shock and it is going to precipitate all kinds of other shocks as the leaders of Britain and the European Union try to navigate Britain’s separation from the European Union.  This was not a change that was very well thought out by most of its supporters, and it could very easily produce unforeseen consequences that will repeatedly impact in a negative way the very people who wanted to promote it.    

There will be more votes in the future that bring about unfocused dramatic change, as people try to promote the kind of change legislatively that they can use as a psychological substitute for the kind of change they would actually desire to bring about in their fields of experience within their daily lives.  It is highly unlikely that these changes will deal effectively with the underlying problem that people have today of a loss of organic grounding in their living environments.

In one of my earlier columns, I wrote about two different kinds of crime that corresponded to adaptations to two different kinds of living environments.  In more traditional more natural environments, a person could be overstimulated by organic stimuli, by the flowing blendable continual stimuli that are the foundation for strong emotions.  This, in turn, created the foundation for crimes of passion.  I use the term crimes of passion in a much broader sense than it has been traditionally used.  In my construct, it means not just revenge for unfaithfulness in love, but also any crime based on greed, lust, anger, envy and other strong emotions.

Then, as modern technology started moving into living environments and creating sensory distortion: understimulation and overstimulation, people started to use crime to pull themselves out of their numbness and jadedness in order to feel simply alive.  Thus began all the seemingly senseless crimes like the mass shootings by one or two gunmen that have become so prevalent in modern American society.

Somehow, I am beginning to think a similar pattern is appearing in the process of voting in modern democracies.  People used to vote based on passionate beliefs, passionate connections.  This was how it happened as people were transitioning to modern technological living environments.  During the transition, people still had some significant connection to more traditional styles of living environments.  In America, homesteaders kept pushing further and further west, keeping alive the idea of the American frontier.  Even those who remained in the big cities could fairly easily escape to rural areas.

But now even rural areas are dominated by the transformative experiential effects of modern consumer technology.  People are increasingly numb and jaded and feel increasingly impotent in terms of their capacity to make and preserve imprints in their fields of experience.  A man like Trump comes along and he pulls people out of their numbness and jadedness and out of their sense of impotence.  And the more he flip-flops, the more he makes people feel more alive and that they are part of a movement that is making things happen.  It doesn’t matter what is happening, just that something is happening in their lives.  This is what we are dealing with in the Trump phenomenon.

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow

One Reason That Trump Won The Election

            Trump!  Trump!  Trump!  That’s practically the only story that is being discussed by the news analysts in the United States these days.  And it’s practically the only story that is being discussed by my friends in Chicago.  Everybody is in disbelief.  How did this happen?  This man who comes across as a narcissistic, vulgar, offensive, racist, sexist shapeshifter, a man who shocks his audiences by constantly putting on new faces for them and constantly modifying and contradicting things he had previously said.

            News analysts are explaining the Trump election surprise by suggesting that the fundamental problem was that the established Democratic and Republican power structures had simply not taken into sufficient consideration the anger of white working class men, who saw their jobs going overseas as a result of the multinational trade agreements or else being taken over by machines and robots and who felt that the principal beneficiaries of these economic changes were the very wealthy.  I share this analysis as far as it goes.  Trump has focused on the issue of economic policy, although he has not come up with any specific solutions.

            But I feel very strongly that the content of Trump’s message was not the only level on which he seduced people to take up his cause.  As people who have regularly read my column know, I am very interested in the way people experience life situations.  And the way his supporters experience Trump tells us a lot not only about Trump himself, but also about his supporters.

            To some of us, the fact that Trump was constantly switching his positions on many different issues and that he was constantly finding novel outrageous ways to attack his opponents and other people was a really indicative sign of his lack of emotional stability.  Was this the kind of person one would want to have as the person who could determine whether or not the U.S. would use a nuclear bomb?  But what us skeptics did not understand was that what we found to be concerning, a lot of other people found to be delightful.  This second group of people liked Trump’s vulgar, offensive, outrageous comments, his threats to put Hillary in jail and to carry out law suits against different imagined enemies.  This second group loved all the media coverage that Trump got for nothing.  They loved the fact that he was always throwing us skeptics off balance and making us angry with his comments.  They loved the fact that he was always adding so much tension, so much friction to normally orderly campaign events.  To his supporters, Trump gave vulgarity, offensiveness and outrageousness a good name.

            And, of course, the news media ate up Trump’s behavior.  Every time Trump changed his position on something or attacked somebody verbally, it became a newsworthy event.  Trump didn’t have to spend a whole lot of money on campaign advertising, because his outrageous behavior drew so much media coverage.  The media paid attention to him the way an audience  would have paid attention to a clown, a magician, or a mud wrestler.  He was simply mesmerizing.

            But it is one thing to pay a lot of attention to someone, and it is another thing to vote for him.  To vote for him is to say you want to see his continued presence in your life.  It is to say that you don’t want the stage act to end for a while.  The truth is that many people in the United States, including the people in the news media, got kicks out of his constantly shifting positions on most things as well as his outrageous attitudes and behavior.  Trump jolted them out of the experiential vacuum in which they live, all the mediated experience in which they were living.  These people spend a lot of time being numb spectators of consumer technological processes on their televisions, computers, and smartphones.  And all those workers who had been displaced by technology and the movement of factory work overseas had another layer of numbing vacuum in which to live: all the unemployment, all the partially employing jobs and all the underemploying jobs.  For numb people like this, what could be more exciting than a presidential candidate who was constantly in people’s faces, a person who acted assertively on his impulses.  To experience Trump is not the same as getting the organic stimulation from a more traditional natural living environment.  Such an environment would give a more sustained source of stimulation that would pull them more completely and more permanently out from their numbness.  But lacking this sustained organic stimulation, people in modern technological society look for quick fixes: alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex and risk-taking in general.

            And Trump falls into this category.  He has become a high-risk addiction for many Americans.  And the more changeable he is, the more outrageous he is, the more intense is the kick that he gives.  The more he pulls Americans out of their numbness and their jadedness. The more abrasive and unpredictable he is, the more these people feel the shock, the kick.

            Since winning the election, Trump has been very conciliatory and has pulled back from many of the threats he has made.  He is no longer going to try and lock up Hillary.  He is going to save parts of Obamacare.  And suddenly, Obama is a man who advises him and is a man with whom he wants to continue to confer.

            But Trump is a shapeshifter.  He is constantly reinventing himself.  Right now he wants to pacify all the groups of people he has offended, although as the demonstrators show, he is obviously not succeeding.  Nevertheless, the people who voted for him, believe in him, and believe in him no matter what.  When asked about his offensive behavior or some of his controversial positions, many people defend him by saying that he will change.  He will change all right.  He will change and change again and change again, giving whatever presentation of himself is appropriate for a particular situation.  Such is the nature of a shapeshifter.  And this is what is so worrisome.  He can take some very dangerous positions for the purpose of expediency.  Like verbally attacking certain groups, so that his followers can have their scapegoats.  And he can turn the hatred on and off as is needed.  All for the purpose of solidifying his strongman position by being a supposed savior.

            And, on one level, he is a “savior”, even if it is just for short periods of time.  He is a “savior” by shocking people to life temporarily with his attacks and with his vulgarity, much the way heroin is a “savior” that shocks drug addicts temporarily to life.  So on a certain level, Trump is definitely like an addiction for the people who voted for him.  He pulls them out of their experiential vacuum, their numb lives, with his abrasive attitudes and behavior.  He gives them a stimulation that allows them to feel something strong in their lives.

            The problem with Trump’s election is not just related to Trump himself.  It relates to a good chunk of the American population that connect with him.  And they will continue to be here after Trump’s term or terms in office.  If they continue to exert the influence they did in this election, we could have another disruptive person as president after Trump is gone.  Wouldn’t that be something to look forward to?

(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow

The Changing Panorama Of Human Artifacts

            The evolution of using things in the external world to obtain food goes back a long way among animals.  Many non-human animals use pre-existing objects in their living environment.  These consist primarily of twigs and rocks.  Twigs can be slightly modified for tool purposes as when a chimpanzee uses a twig to fish out termites from a termite nest. This modification of a twig would constitute a very minimal imprint being made on an object by an animal.   There is not a significant imprint made on the object in its fabrication as a tool.  Furthermore, the products on which these primitive tools are used are forms of food, not another object like a craft product.  The latter would consist of a meaningful made imprint that is worthy of being preserved in and of itself. 

            With the appearance of humans on the planet, we get the first presence of things on which a complex animal both makes and preserves significant imprints.  Stones were struck against other stones to make tools with edges, and these tools included hammers, hand axes, spear parts and blades.  Capuchin monkeys in Brazil strike stones against other stones to produce stone flakes, but then they do nothing with them.  However, the broken stones made by early humans were used as tools for basic survival functions like hunting and preparing food.  They were not for the most part used at that point in human development to create craft products with meaningful made and preserved imprints.

            One major exception of a prehistoric creative product was the cave paintings.  These paintings were made with a combination of rocks, shells, twigs, feathers, brushes of animal hairs and hollow bones to achieve different effects on the walls.  Certainly, this represented an early attempt to make and preserve a product imprint from at least some implements that were made and preserved to be useful in the production of the painting.

            For the purposes of this article, the next span of history that we will talk about covers a period of time that starts when prehistoric humans started to make cave paintings and ends up at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  It’s a long time period, but it represents an ongoing pattern of dealing with human artifacts.  This was a time when people increasingly refined techniques to make and preserve imprints on tools so that these tools could be used to help make and preserve imprints on products.  Because there was no mass production by machines, each tool and each product of the tools had an element of refined craftsmanship.  The person who made the tools was making and preserving his own imprints on the world.  Many times, the person who made the tools was the person who made the products, but eventually, tools and products became separate specializations.  And because the development of the artisan mentality meant that most people had to acquire tools and products from other artisans, market economies were created to allow for the exchange of goods, to allow for people to receive each other’s tool and product imprints.

            With the start of the Industrial Revolution and mass production, a whole different pattern of humans dealing with their artifacts emerged.  Individual innovators designed the machines that were used in the factories.  These inventors were the only people actually involved in making new original imprints with regard to human artifacts.  The people who actually made tools and consumer products were the people who operated the machines, worked on assembly lines, assembling parts to create finished products.  Each new factory product created was a new affirmation of the inventor’s design, a new presentation of the imprint the inventor wanted to make with his machine.  With the creation of the factory system, all the focus turned to the presentation of the established imprints of the mechanical artifact makers.  The imprints of the relatively few innovators distinct from the work of the vast number of factory workers.  Something fundamental had been lost by the factory workers – the opportunity to make and preserve their own imprints through individually crafted artifacts.  The focus in the factories shifted to how much exchange value or money the factory workers could make in order to buy other different consumer artifacts, other already preserved imprints.  Making and preserving new individual imprints among the workers got lost in the factory process.  Only making and preserving already established imprints and receiving other different established imprints remained.

            The workers who participated in this system gave up something very important: an important aspect of their self-worth.  But perhaps even more is going to be lost as the use of 3-D printers starts to grow.  These machines have the capacity to make extremely complex artifacts with only the minimal intervention of a worker who sets the process going.  On the one hand, it is true that in some situations a person can design his own artifact, such as a child designing his own toy.  And that, of course, sounds very creative and very positive.  But the designer is totally separated from the process of constructing the artifact in the external world.  He is totally separated from the process of physically making the imprint in the external world.  There is no focus on his own craftsmanship.  And a lot of people are just going to make a partial imprint from their minds or none at all (if it is a standardized artifact design) and then focus on the imprint they will receive when the 3D printer is done with its operation.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a toy or a gun or a car or even a body organ.  Increasingly, we are going to be moving into an age of very passive consumerism, where our main connection to artifacts is going to be based on receiving them.  Just a minimal participation in the process of constructing them if at all.

            Whereas the process of constructing artifacts was an integral part of preindustrial human participation in the field of experience in the external world, a process that gave a person grounding in the external world, a process that allowed him to feel fully alive and to prepare for death through the imprints he made and preserved, today the average person is left in an experiential vacuum with regard to the artifacts he uses.  His primary connection to artifacts is to take already constructed ones and to use them.  For the most part, he no longer directly makes his tools with his hands, and he no longer directly makes his products with tools.  The exceptions are a relatively few usually professional artisans – people who seem eccentric and anachronistic in relation to the trends of modern life.  Increasingly disappearing is the struggle to put some order to one’s world through the use of basic tools and the creation of other more basic artifacts.  Increasingly disappearing is the possibility of finding the sense of purpose that comes with engaging in this struggle.  We have traveled a long way in our evolution from pre-industrial humans.  The question is if this long way has always been and will always continue to be a uniformly good way.

(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow

Waiting On A Mechanical Cloud

            As most people know, Nissan is a Japanese company that produces some of the best automobiles in their particular price range.  Not content to rest on its laurels as a manufacturer of cars, Nissan is venturing into other areas of human mobility with the idea of improving the life of the average person.  One truly astounding device is the Pro PILOT Chair, a self-driving chair that is designed to take all of the discomfort out of waiting in line.  The chair has wheels to move on as well as a camera and sensors that are used to keep the chair at a fixed distance from the chair in front of it.  The chairs wait in a chair line.  When a person’s chair has moved to the front of the line, and it is time for the person to take his turn, he gets out of the chair, and the chair, sensing the loss of the passenger, moves to the back of the line.  This system of chairs is going to be tested at restaurants in Japan in the near future.

            No more spending time waiting long periods while standing on one’s feet.  Think of all the energy that a person can conserve.  And no more having to contend with people pushing you as they try to move forward or people trying to cut into line ahead of you.  Waiting in line becomes a totally orderly frictionless experience.

            Is there anything wrong with feeling more comfortable?  Perhaps, there is.  Standing creates a different mental state from sitting.  It is precisely the low-key discomfort of standing that keeps a person in a state of alertness with an attitude of  “I want to engage a situation and take control of it.”  One has the role of a dormant agent, waiting to spring into action.  It is a role similar to that of a hunter in prehistoric times or in certain preliterate societies.  One follows an animal from a distance and waits for the right moment to attack it.  The ability to wait as a dormant agent becomes a very important component of being successful at obtaining one’s next meal when one is a hunter.

            But one might say, the waiting involved in going on a hunt is part of an exciting adventure filled with meaningful risk.  Man meeting the challenge of his survival.  There is no such adventure, no such challenge in waiting in line at a very busy restaurant.  One is simply waiting in line for the passive consumer experience of a restaurant meal.  If there is meat or poultry involved, the slaughter has already taken place.  But just as one has hopes that the restaurant meal will be a pleasant passive consumer experience, why shouldn’t one expect the waiting component that comes before a meal to be a pleasant passive consumer experience?

            First, although there is no adventure while waiting in line that is analogous to the challenge of the elements in a hunt, there is a potential adventure in talking to some of the other people that are close to one in the line.  People are sometimes more open to one another when they share discomfort.  It is similar to conversations that start up in London about the cold rainy weather that occurs there.  People in line can start to talk about how frustrating it is to wait so long, and then, before you know it, the conversation moves into other areas of life.  Sometimes new friends or acquaintances can be made this way.

            Second, in general, most waiting is a frustration that creates an organic friction inside the person waiting.  And, in general, without organic friction, a person cannot gain the traction to carry on the narrative of his life  Overly frictionless environments make a person numb, incapable of having rich vibrant experiences, of making, receiving and preserving organic imprints, of creating a surrogate immortality as a preparation for death.  Waiting in a smart chair that keeps a precise distance from the chairs in front of and behind it, is simply one more kind of experience that people in modern technological society can have to put them in an increasingly encompassing experiential vacuum.  It is one more kind of experience that can make a person more numb and therefore more passive and therefore more incapable of engaging the world.

            As we continue to make our living environment increasingly frictionless through the application of increasingly advanced forms of modern technology, we become increasingly intolerant of smaller and smaller amounts of friction.  We become more incapable of tolerating any kind of discomfort, and when we want something, we require immediate gratification.  Waiting in line might be one of the last types of life situations that we encounter on a regular basis that produces low but sustained levels of uncomfortable organic friction.

 There is another kind of waiting that people encounter regularly and that is the waiting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.  This kind of waiting occurs in a technological tension-pocket, an abrasive overstimulating situation filled with abrasive static friction that is the result of the juxtaposition of many freely moving, noisy, fumes-emitting machines.  Other cars surround a driver.  One has to be very careful not to hit another car. The noise of other drivers honking can become intolerable. The fumes of so many cars moving slowly and/or stopping in such close quarters can give a person a headache or sinus problems. In general, it is a situation that creates a lot of stress and even physical discomfort in a driver who experiences it.

            But standing in line at a very busy restaurant is usually a much more civilized matter.  The potential restaurant patron is not naturally separated and isolated from other people, the way that a driver is in a car.  He becomes a part of a flowing continual physical corporal movement as he gradually moves up closer and closer to the goal of being seated for his meal.   He can strike up conversations if he wants to.  Usually, other people don’t push or cut into the line.  In addition, the patron has something concrete and enjoyable to which he can look forward.  The waiting can be used to elaborate images of himself enjoying his favorite dishes at the restaurant.  He endows these dishes with the flowing blendable continual stimuli of his fantasies.  And then when the time comes to actually partake of the meal, the elaborated fantasies increase the appreciation of the meal.  But it is the low-level discomfort factor that increases the appreciation derived from the standing in line.  Waiting in a motorized chair in a line of orderly motorized chairs is not going to stimulate that same sustained low-key friction discomfort that leads to the greater appreciation.

            As we continue to develop technology that helps us to deal with what for many people has increasingly become the intolerable experience of waiting, the art of civilized anticipation of the fulfillment of our desires is going to disappear.  People will lose their capacity for elaborated fantasies of the future.  Living for the moment or living in numbness results not only in an incapacity to tolerate any kind of frustration, but also, as a result of this lack of tolerance, in a weakened sense of self with flattened affect.  The kind of thing that leaves a person predisposed to becoming a selfless robot.

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow