The Different Purposes of Our Daily Purposes

             A purpose is the place where we are going when we try to finish our little daily tasks, our larger life schemes, and our still larger personal evolution.  It is the end point that occurs at different levels of planning, both conscious and unconscious.  Without purpose, our actions and our development would just wander and meander aimlessly.  It gives our lives focus and form and it gives our senses of self both focus and form.  Without an overriding purpose, even if it is to just have as much fun as possible, our senses of self would just fall apart.

            And yet it is definitely harder to achieve a purpose in modern technological society.  Inhabiting a living environment that is an overly frictionless, overly mediated experiential vacuum, one is without the grounding that one needs in order to generate the traction, the organic friction that he needs to move towards his goals.  Traction gives life vibrancy and helps to prevent people from sinking into numbness.  When a person is too immersed in numbness, it simply becomes extremely difficult if not practically impossible to carry out his purposes.

            But what happens to a person when he is unable to carry out his purposes.  For one thing, he loses his connection to linear time.  Particularly when a person is floating in an experiential vacuum, the person not only is lost in a spatial vacuum, but in a temporal vacuum as well.  In other words, the person is unable to create at a very basic level, a meaningful life narrative, which is the vehicle by which a person can go from point a to point b to point c and thus achieve many different life purposes.

            These points on the line of a narrative, these end points for purposes, are also basically the end points for the organic imprints in a person’s life.  Some of the imprints are made by the person himself.  Some of these imprints are made by the people around him and relate to these other people’s purposes.  These imprints are basically impresses made by someone on the experiential surface of the world.  And depending on how and why they are made, these imprints can either be evanescent and disappear, or they can be preserved and become permanent.  To the extent that some imprints can become permanent, they reflect deep lasting imprints, and they can become elements of an ultimate long-term purpose, that of preparing for death through the creation of a personal surrogate immortality.

            Imprints that are evanescent and that disappear are, in their own way, every bit as important as preserved imprints.  Because they are short-lived, a person can pack a lot more of them into his life than preserved imprints.  And it is the variety of these short-lived imprints that can contribute to the vibrancy of a person’s life, to the intensity of what a person can feel at any given moment.  To the extent that these little imprints make life vibrant, they become one flowing blendable continual experience that acts as the foundation for a very different kind of purpose.  In other words, not all purposes have to be defined discrete focused entities.

            There are people who live to find vibrant joy in the moment.  But the notion of the moment is not a precise temporal measure.  It is like one of all the undefinable infinite points on a spatial line.  And just like all the spatial points blur together to form a flowing blendable continual line, so all the moments in a period of time flow together for a person who lives for the moment to form an ongoing flowing immediate experience.  A vibrant immediate experience.  This is a purpose with multiple temporal end points and, therefore, no real temporal end point.  It is very different from that which we traditionally think of as a purpose.  It is a purpose without goals as we normally would think of them.

            All this brings a whole new way of looking at the notion of purpose.  It means that a purpose is not automatically something that a person has to consciously plan for in order to achieve it.  In order to have maximum joy, a person has to be able to turn off his capacity for cognitive reflection and planning.  Cognitive reflection and planning tend to keep a person apart from some aspects of the flow of his life narrative.  Vibrant joy is something that one tends to live within a preconscious flow of experience.  One is so close to that which one is experiencing that one is incapable of properly manipulating it.  For a person whose main purpose in life is having immediate joy, we can say that at certain points in his life, such a person may be thinking that he only wants to live for pleasure and joy, and then he goes back to his preconscious mode of thinking.

            In living for joy and pleasure, a person is interested in making and receiving a bundle of imprints on himself and less interested in preserving any of them.  The only preparation for death is the intensity of sensory immediacy the person has experienced.  Somehow, living vibrantly is a kind of ongoing imprint that a person feels he is living on the surface of his field of experience.  This, of course, is very different from leaving a series of discrete imprints as a formal preparation for death.  The latter deals with a formal purpose in the way that most of us are accustomed to deal with it.  But there are people who don’t focus on bracing themselves for what happens to them after they leave their earthly confines. 

            There is a risk in this.  Perhaps, at the end, when such a person realizes that he has little or no surrogate immortality, death can suddenly appear very frightening.

            However, I am coming to realize that purpose is a multi-dimensional notion and that there are different shapes and shades to it.  Not all purposes are formal.  Not all purposes are fully defined.  Not all purposes are based on focused planning.  There are truly a variety of purposes in purposes.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

  

How Symbols Interpret The World For Humans

             A symbol is something that represents something else.  A symbol can be a mark, a sign, a number, an icon, an actual material thing, a plant, an animal or a human being.  Various animals can be used as totemic symbols by preliterate tribes.  Small objects like stars of David or crosses are used as religious symbols by major world religions.  Queen Elizabeth is considered a royal symbol by the United Kingdom.

            But why is it that human beings use symbols to represent different phenomena.  It is my contention that public symbols have been used primarily for two distinct purposes: one for pre-industrial societies and one for modern technological societies.  And the way that these symbols have been used in these two different situations is reflective of how these two kinds of societies have been structured.  For now, I am putting aside more personal uses of symbols in dreams and the arts.

            A symbol in pre-industrial society was meant to organically connect people to the material external world and to the unbounded infinite spiritual world.  It was meant to ground people to help to prevent them from floating in an experiential vacuum of meaninglessness. If an animal is my totem, then I am especially connected to that animal in nature.  I can absorb that animal’s positive traits, and by connecting with it, I become connected to the whole ecosystem of flora and fauna that is my natural living environment.

            Stars of David and crosses are religious symbols that not only connect people to their respective conceptions of God, but also to their respective communities of believers.  By wearing these symbols, a person becomes one with the spirit world, rather than floating randomly within it.  One’s spiritual existence is able to expand out.

            To the extent Queen Elizabeth is a symbol of Britain, she ties each and every Brit to a large community of people.  She helps to expand the number of traits, of historical events, of common experiences to what each British individual can feel connected.  Being British becomes so much more than an individual’s pared-down basic defined discrete sense of self.  Queen Elizabeth as a symbol becomes the foundation for a larger grounded identity.  Traditional symbols, in general, give a person a form of psychological grounding.  That is what they are created for.  A grounding in nature – the physical terrain of where they live and its ecosystem of flora and fauna – and a grounding in the community and nation that they are a part of.

            Finally, let’s not forget flags.  Flags are a very important symbol that connect people to their country, to their state or province, to their municipality, to their organization or club or fraternity or sorority, and to their sporting team.  When one flies ones flag, or salutes a flag, one is symbolically expressing one’s connection to a larger community and creating psychological grounding.

            Symbols primarily serve a very different purpose for many people in modern technological society.  Rather than provide a fuzzy grounding where evocative flowing blendable continual stimuli emanate from them, symbols today contract meaning into defined discrete essences.  They are not meant to be suggestive of something larger than themselves, but rather something narrower.  In symbolic logic, symbols are used to pare down statements about truth, so that they can be more precise about truth than any normal verbal statement that could be made using ordinary language.  Symbols in this case are used to create and facilitate a language for science and math.  It’s not that there weren’t symbols before in math.  But math in traditional society wasn’t used to capture reality in the way it has been used in modern technological society, where mathematical symbols have become very important in science and engineering.

            In photographic terms, symbols are used in traditional societies to facilitate a wide angle view of the world, whereas, in modern societies, symbols are increasingly used to facilitate a telephoto view of the world.  On a psychological level, traditional symbols tend to deal with human connections with other people and with the external world.  They build on flowing blendable continual stimulation to help satisfy that most fundamental of human needs: grounding in one’s living environment.  Modern symbols help to pare down entities to their bare essence, independent and apart from all the other entities that surround it.  By working to create mostly defined discrete figures, modern symbols model for humans today, who are looking for strong self-definition as a strong defense against sensory distortion: the abrasive overstimulation from overcrowding in urban areas, noise pollution, air pollution, light pollution, clusters of high rises, speeding cars, traffic jams and construction sites, as well as the numbing understimulation from minimalist modern architecture, smooth featureless asphalt and concrete-covered walking and driving surfaces, cookie-cutter housing projects, frictionless machine processes from blenders to electric toothbrushes, and smooth-riding car interiors for passengers.  Finally, there is the numbness-creating screen technology and the Internet of Things.  All this sensory distortion pushes people to withdraw into themselves in order to defend themselves against living environments with patterns of stimulation for which as mammals, they weren’t built.  The belief is that people can control their internal living environments in ways that they can’t control their external living environments.  And modern symbols in symbolic logic and with the hard sciences and engineering mirror this desire to gain control over one’s internal living environment: a well-defined sense of self as a defense against sensory distortion.

            In general, we can say that symbols are important in creating solutions to concrescences of the most important existential needs that people may have in particular cultural and historical periods.  To the extent that so many people today do not directly benefit from symbols of logic and math and science and engineering, because they, when they are students, aren’t taught very much about them and, therefore, don’t understand them, such people are bereft of the benefits of the main new meaningful symbols that are available and accessible today.  This is particularly true among people who have given up on the connecting symbols of religion and royalty and larger strong group identities in general.  Such people are experiencing all the dangerous downsides of the resulting numbness and experiential vacuums.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow 

Trying To Maintain Some Natural Life In Modern Technological Society

 

            Frequently in this column, I have talked about a dichotomy between traditional societies and modern societies.  Traditional societies is a grab-bag term, an all-encompassing term which I use to describe everything from preliterate tribes to more complex pre-industrial towns, cities, states and civilizations.  All of these groupings, compared to what happened after the industrial revolution, live in environments that involve some direct contact with nature or significant stylistic imitation of nature in the creation of most habitations, most artifacts and most clothing (obviously not the case with pyramids and some other monumental structures).  The history of processes in these places has been mostly organic evolutionary accretions, periods of flowing blendable continual stimuli, punctuated by the periodic disruptive defined discrete stimuli of revolutionary activities and wars.  Sort of like the disruptive climactic events that occur in nature.  The incipient just-forming figures that try to break away from the undifferentiating grounding that surrounds people in nature.

            In modern technological society, the norm is ongoing frictionless mediated revolution, because of what modern machines, computers and robots can do.  Because the sharp angular changes of reality from modern revolutionary actions are so common, it is almost as if they are no longer revolutions anymore.  They are so common, that they are predictably patterned, even though they can still be disruptive.  Frictionless or relatively frictionless in execution, although disruptive and even stressful in effect.

            This all serves strangely enough as a backdrop for a situation I presently am involved in.  I am in a group of entrepreneurs that had met once a week for many, many years in an office and that has been meeting once a week on zoom for a few months since Covid 19 came around.  Like most of the groups that I know or have heard of, my group now meets exclusively on Zoom due to the Corona virus.  It is a group of business entrepreneurs that started out meeting as a stream of casual encounters between a very successful car dealership owner and his friends.  Gradually, over time, the grouping involved into an informal group that had meetings once a week.  Now the dealership owner is dead but the group continues to exist.  The centerpiece of the meetings is either a startup business owner asking for advice on business problems or else a free-wheeling discussion about general business ideas.  Before Covid 19, there was time to network both before and after the talk or the discussion.  Now that has been replaced by chat in the Zoom room.  Not the same as live networking, but it is something that is occurring now as a necessity.

            A change like that doesn’t bother me so much, because I know that it’s the only way of creating connections in such a group for now.  What bothers me is that there are formal sub-committees to make formal changes to the format of the group, changes that will invite larger numbers of people to come to specific meetings, up from the 30 to 40 people we get now on average for different sessions.  One can be sure that many of these special invitees to Zoom meetings will want to join the group, thus making it bigger and more impersonal.

            There are other changes to the intimate social traditions that have held this informal organic throwback group together and made it relatively unique in modern technological society.  It used to be people were called out by the moderator of the meetings for making private conversations and thus disturbing the principal speaker or the main conversation.  Now people are making Zoom chat conversations left and right and thus, if not directly disturbing the people who are speaking, at least distracting listeners who would otherwise focus better on the speakers.

            A proposed change within the group is to have certain Saturdays in the month (for example, the first and the third) for one kind of program and other Saturdays for another.  The problem with this is that it will convert the group into certain specialized segments of audience, thus leading to the fragmentation of the group.  The whole point of the group is to bring different occupations, different interests, and different viewpoints together to have lively exchanges in discussions.  And to learn about different subjects and strategies that are not a part of one’s normal everyday life.  If subject slotting starts to occur, the larger group will break up into smaller groups of like-minded attendees.  Slotted programs could lead to the breakup of the informal organic group as we know it.

            Another proposed change is to have speakers come from outside the group, not with problems that they want the group to solve, but with neat packaged subject matter that they want to present to the group.  But there are plenty of other groups that do this kind of thing.  The unique aspect of this group is the process of the interaction of the members.  It is not meant to be a passive group of simply avid learners.  It’s meant to be a group of active helpers of both one another and of entrepreneurs from outside who have problems they want advice on.

            The group is a throwback to more traditional flowing blendable continual organic groups and is not meant to be an efficient neatly organized defined discrete specialized machine-like group like so many other modern groups are.  This group is not meant to be built on ongoing frictionless mediated mini-revolutions.  It is meant to evolve, yes, but constantly keeping its organic grounding.  The group is a throwback to more traditional times before television and radio, when an evening of entertainment consisted of informal gatherings in a bar or on a person’s back porch.  Yes I know this group has a little more structure than that, but not much.  Yet the desire to mechanize is ever present in modern society as a whole and in my group in particular.  A more spontaneous organic flowing blendable continual group like this one is totally vulnerable to the cravings of people who just can’t tolerate the presence of a group like this that has so much natural life in it.

(c) 2020 Laurence Mesirow

Is Polarization The Only Way We Have To Feel Alive Today?

                             In many ways, American society seems more contentious and more divided than it has been in a long time.  In politics, the long-simmering conflict between Democrats and Republicans that started under President Reagan is coming to an explosive head.  For decades, Republicans have moved further and further to the right, and as a reaction, some Democrats, particularly those under Bernie Sanders, have been moving more and more to the left.  On another level, since Trump came into office, racist white nationalists and militia men have become more salient and more powerful, while recently, particularly as a result of George Floyd’s death, Black Lives Matter has surged in strength and influence.  Actually, George Floyd’s death has brought to the fore the most immediate oppositional group for Black Lives Matter: predatory police.  Other head-butting groups include those who want to wear masks for Covid 19, and those who refuse to do so; those who believe in vaccination and the anti-vaxxers, those who believe in income redistribution through a universal base salary paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy and those who want to lower taxes.  And then there is a traditional polarization that has been around forever: pro-choice vs. pro-life. There are no points of convergence in all these pairs of opposing philosophies.

            Furthermore, it is not as if all these movements and groups have well-thought-out strategies with regard to how to implement their ideas and how to demonstrate endgames that would include their vision.  But then again, on one level, it doesn’t really matter.  It may not be a full completion of the goals that is really desired.  In modern technological society where people live frictionless mediated lives, real success in one’s ideological goals would take away the intense revitalizing friction that comes from an intense struggle.  And what could provide a greater struggle than butting heads with one’s ideological opposite.

            What would define success for white nationalists: continued white dominance, or maybe even expulsion of racial minorities and Jews?  What would define success for Black Lives Matter?  For sure, defunding police departments and perhaps abolishing them.  But after that, then what?  Tearing down statues of everyone with a perceived slave or colonial connection?  That’s already happening.  What about greater investment in black communities?  What about reparations?

            When it comes to reparations, the only way to do such a blanket give-away would be to raise taxes on the wealthy, which, of course, goes entirely against the philosophy of people who see taxes as a wrongful intervention into people’s lives.

            What is both of interest and concern is not so much that these and other positions may be oppositional, but that there seems to be no will on anyone’s part to try to redefine problems so that there can be some convergence.  And anyway, in many cases, the objectives of these different groups are vague.  In part, this is because the different groups are broken up into sub-groups who don’t agree among themselves.

            In the American Congress, with the exception of a bill for significant tax cuts, the Republicans have spent the last few years by being opposed to what the Democrats propose.  But this state of ongoing opposition particularly acts as a spur to pulling the Republicans out of their numbness and keeping them alive.  At the same time, it makes it practically impossible for the two parties to come together, compromise, and pass meaningful legislation.  Yes, the two parties have come together to pass emergency financial relief bills connected to Covid 19, but that’s about it.  In the meantime, the ongoing conflict between the two parties has paralyzed the Congress and prevented it from developing legislative strategies for dealing with long-time situations.

            And the non-governmental movements are generating conflicts in different spaces.  White nationalists versus Black Lives Matter versus the police.  Our country is becoming increasingly polarized in so many ways.  More and more people are taking uncompromising postures with little room to come together with the opposition.

            And yet undergirding the external philosophical difference that are creating these polarizations, there is the numbness generated by the frictionless mediated technological society.  And these uncompromising philosophical differences are a very good way to come out of the experiential vacuum and stay alive, particularly if there’s no hope of resolving the philosophical differences with compromise.  Coming to an agreement and compromising would mean having to return to the experiential vacuum and becoming numb.  Particularly most modern white Americans, who have been unthinkingly, numbingly indifferent to the problems experienced by black Americans, are suddenly “shocked” by what they see and are experiencing themselves feeling wonderfully alive in feeling “shocked”.  Suddenly, they have a mission, a mission that may be very noble indeed, but because it is so vague and expansive and because it stimulates an opposition that will help them to feel very much alive, has the potential for lasting a long, long time without resolving itself with a meaningful endgame.

            And all these movements have strong internal divisions which will also help to stimulate people to life.  I want to emphasize that I am not trying to reduce all the motivation behind moral positions today to pulling out of numbness and feeling alive.  On one hand, people can participate in the moral positions that they espouse and be totally sincere about their beliefs.  On the other hand, the uncompromising polarization created by the way these beliefs are expressed show that certain strong psychological needs are also being expressed, will continue to be expressed for the foreseeable future, and will continue to shape the way these beliefs are actualized in the external world.  With no regard for whether or not they tear the United States apart.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

Abolishing Police Departments, Abolishing Communities

             If ever there was a blatant case of throwing the baby out with the bath water, it’s in the movement in the U.S. to defund or even abolish police departments.  There is no question that  blacks in U.S. have suffered enormously at the hands of many American policemen.  Many blacks have been hassled or harassed by policemen.  Many blacks have been physically roughed up by policemen.  Many blacks have been put in jail for crimes they didn’t commit or else put in jail for longer sentences than whites in similar situations would get.  Many blacks have, as has been discussed a lot lately, been killed by policemen.  Police departments are experienced by African-Americans as one enormous excruciating tension-pocket.  One enormous dangerous bundle of overstimulation.  The George Floyd murder is just an extreme instance of a very painful kind of overstimulation, not only for George Floyd, but for all the people in his life, all the people in Minneapolis and the U.S. who have lived up to now in a state of numbing indifference with regard to the plight of black Americans (and most Americans fall into this numbing indifference category).  This awful sadistic murder has been like a sudden trigger to awareness and a springboard to action.  All of a sudden, a large number of white Americans want to protect African-Americans from police violence.  They want to punish all the policemen involved in the George Floyd murder and make sure a similar situation doesn’t happen again in the future.

            Which is why people have come up with the brilliant (lol) idea of defunding or even abolishing police departments.  Suddenly everybody has become fully aware of what is going on with African Americans.  And they want to solve the problem quickly and simply.  And the quickest simplest way of getting rid of the problem is to get rid of the source of the problem.

            Now, I know it will be said there have been many attempts to fix police departments and the problems involved.  But from my understanding, there is one aspect of the police department that hasn’t changed much and that’s the warrior model for what a policeman should be.  A warrior is not going to be thinking of how he can integrate his adversary back into society.  He is not going to be thinking of how to reform a young black lawbreaker.  The lawbreaker is simply perceived as a dangerous free-floating out-of-control figure that has to be neutralized and, in some cases, eliminated.

            Now rather than eliminate the police department entirely, there are some city governments in the U.S. that are considering another model for police identity.  This is the guardian model: the policeman as protector, even friend, who restores grounding in the community.  In Camden, NJ, the police department was literally recreated.  It was temporarily dissolved, but it wasn’t replaced with social service agencies like some seem to want in Minneapolis.  Instead, it was replaced with a police department built on the guardian model.  Crime dropped 42%.  So obviously, there was something to be said for a policeman that restored some grounding to people with troubled lives, people who were struggling in poverty.

            And yet the people in Camden still had a police department.  Social service agencies can handle some kinds of problems that police departments handle, but not hardened gangs, not terrorists.  I know Minneapolis has had major problems reforming its police department.  It should develop a solution similar to that of Camden.  If Minneapolis gets rid of its police department, it will create a void, an experiential vacuum.  People who already have a minimal conscience will suddenly feel less constrained and will get more involved in illegal activity.  Community organizations aren’t capable of effectively shutting down such activity.

            So many protesters today, overwhelmed, overstimulated by the tension-pockets of police corruption and police oppression, want to carry our cities to the opposite kind of problem: an understimulating experiential vacuum of no police.  This kind of bouncing back and forth between overstimulation and understimulation, between tension-pocket and vacuum is something I discussed a lot in my earlier articles, before I decided to focus more time on the effects of experiential vacuums.  But here, this bouncing back and forth is extremely important.  It is what happens when one lives in modern technological living environments with very little organic stimulation and one is looking for quick solutions to problems that manifest themselves as experiential distortion of too much or too little stimulation.

            The relative lack of organic stimulation is key.  It is the foundation for extreme  decisions, not only with regard to keeping or not keeping the police, but also with regard to many other life situations as well.  When we lack organic stimulation, we lack grounding.   So metaphorically speaking, we float off into a vacuum, into a feeling of numbness, until we find a cluster of figures that we can knock against, in order to feel alive.  Which creates ongoing instability both in our own individual lives, but also in the larger social situations in which we are living.  Police departments, such as the one in Minneapolis, may be so in need of reform that they have to be literally reconstituted from the ground up.  Which will take a lot of work, a lot of money, and a lot of fresh thinking.  But that doesn’t mean that we should eliminate police departments entirely.  The results could lead to anarchy in the communities where they had existed.  And anarchy which could result in a lot of random conflicts would be the social equivalent of entropic disintegration in a vacuum.  Just as matter can crumble apart, so can a community.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow 

Another Cause Of The Aftermath Of The George Floyd Murder

 

The Corona virus has been temporarily replaced as the outstanding narrative in the United States by the sadistic murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  As a symbol of the horrors of centuries of white oppression, it has triggered a range of responses from peaceful demonstrations to violence to looting and property damage.  Governors and mayors all over the country have painstakingly tried to separate out the legal peaceful activities from the illegal violent and destructive ones – encouraging the first group of activities and taking a firm stand against the second group.

The looting and property damage can be broken down into two categories: looting in central business districts and white suburban malls, on the one hand, and looting in the poorer black neighborhoods on the other.  And it is here where an important question can be raised?  Some of the small businesses in the black neighborhoods are owned by Asian immigrants, and some are owned by blacks.  However, they all serve the essential needs of the black residents.  Why are these businesses being looted, damaged, even burnt to the ground, when there will be nothing to replace them for a long time?  And chain stores – grocery stores, drug stores and discount department stores – that should have been treasured for what they provided.  Also looted, damaged, and sometimes burnt to the ground.

Granted that some of the looters may have been opportunistic organized gangs that came from outside the communities.  But certainly not all.  So how can sane people be swept into such activities that lead to short-term gain, short-term kicks, but such long-term despair and suffering?  What are people going to do for food in areas of their cities that in the best of times were already considered to be food deserts?  How can the looters justify what they did?

The most common explanation is that they were lashing out against white oppression.  But, if so, why get involved in something that is going to hurt black people so much?  I think the answer lies in how we define the nature of the harm that has been done to black people by racism.  Much of the time when we talk about this situation, we use the term oppression to mean the way that white policemen treat black people.  This implies two things: white physical aggression, but more fundamentally, white direct acknowledgment of the existence of black people.  It implies maintaining a relationship, even if it means a negative relationship.  It implies that white people care, even if it is in a perverse negative way, about blacks.

In many ways, all this is valid, but in other ways, another kind of relationship has developed.  And that is a relationship of indifference.  The scars of racism after all these centuries still exist, but many white people, who wouldn’t openly espouse a racist philosophy to themselves, don’t want to deal with black people.  Because of modern technology, the model for the proper functioning of society today is that of a smooth-running, relatively frictionless machine.  These white people live in the numbness of androids.  Although this relatively frictionless machine has created psychological pathology for them, this is what they are used to.  For white people to have to really deal with the scars of racism, it would require them experiencing a level of stimulation that they would find at this point to be simply painfully overstimulating.  It would require dealing with the very human needs of people who have problems that go beyond the surface solution of trying to superficially integrate them into a smooth-running machine.  To ask many white people to really feel the problems of many African-Americans today is to ask them to feel analogous things that in many cases they can’t feel in their own lives.  If you talk about disinvestment in black schools, the white establishment can say that school budgets are based on local property taxes, the same rule that applies to everyone else.  If you talk about lack of access to loans from banks, bank officers can say that their loans are based on the reliability of their debtors to pay off their debts.  For businesses and homes, these loans can be based on the quality of the neighborhoods.

Because blacks are being shunned by this so-called system, in many ways, they also experience themselves as living in numbness, in an experiential vacuum.  This aspect of their relationship to American society can be, to a certain extent, as difficult as or even more difficult than dealing with the physical aggression of policemen.  At least, in the latter case, African-Americans have a defined discrete enemy to focus on.  How do they pin the blame when they are dealing with a whole nebulous system where people with power can say that they are just following the rules.

This is what black people were living with when the cruel murder of George Floyd gave them a focused symbol to act as a vehicle to help them explode out of their numbness and start their protests and rioting and violence and looting and burning.  Which leads to the answer to the question posed at the beginning.  African-Americans are burning down businesses in their own neighborhoods as an extreme method to pull themselves out of their numbness and, for a few moments, feel very alive.  It is like the depressed people that practice self-harm: everything from cutting one’s wrists to committing suicide.  Suicide can give a person a final rush of sensation to feel alive.

Combine this layer of numbness with the numbness of sheltering in place for the Corona virus, and the numbing loss of economic power as a result of the growing unemployment from the Corona virus, and you have the perfect formula for a perfect storm.  And this is what African-Americans have been experiencing these past few days.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

 

Is Using A Lot Of Apps All That Appropriate?

 

            There is something almost magical about all the different apps available on our smartphones to help us with almost every conceivable task and project that we may have.  Supposedly there are 2.56 million apps available for Android phones and 1.85 million apps available for I-phones.  That’s an awful lot of software programs to help us with the business of daily life.  A task or a project is not the same when there is an app to help with its execution.  It makes the task or project more frictionless to carry out.  It makes the task or project more controllable, more predictable in its execution.  And once one uses a particular app and has success with it, one is hooked.  It becomes one more way that one becomes inextricably tied to one’s smartphone.

            Apps are screen reality bridges to the external world.  But in the process of bridging, they create layers of mediated experience that keep us separated not only from the external world, but also from ourselves.  The price we pay for ease of process and for greater control is enormous.  We sink into deeper layers of numbness.  This leads not only to anesthetizing our will to do things (conative anesthesia), but also to numbing our senses of self and our respective consciousnesses.  And as our senses of self and our respective consciousnesses become more and more numb, we sink into the living death of our experiential vacuum.

            From another perspective, as our bonds with our smartphones become stronger and stronger with each different app we start using, it is like, psychologically, the smartphone becomes not only more and more indispensable, but more and more a part of us.  It is like we merge with the smartphones, and we become human-machine combinations or cyborgs.  In other words, we lose some of our humanity as we psychologically merge with our smartphones.  They may be physically just a small part of us in our new human-machine merger, but they exert an inordinate influence on us.

            Always having this little device mediate our interactions with the external world means that it becomes more and more difficult to make, preserve, and receive meaningful organic imprints.  It’s like each imprint is somehow cleansed by an app, before we and the people with whom we are interacting can experience it.  Our lives lose their vibrancy.  Our life narratives become devoid of meaning.  And distinct from screen reality, which is like a series of parallel worlds, a series of parallel fields of experience, apps mediate and interfere with our direct engagement with external world reality.  Such that, on some levels, we don’t always consciously separate out the influence of these apps from the external world realities they are affecting.

            For instance, the use of GPS or Waze to guide us to our destinations has become such an intrinsic part of our lives, that it has become hard for most of us to remember back to a time when we didn’t have them.  It’s hard for many of us to remember when we made our own imprints on our routes by using maps or asking people on the street for directions.

            One of the problems is that each of the apps when examined by itself can seem so useful and so sensible that it is hard to resist.  Why not use GPS or Waze when we are trying to go someplace?  The problem though is that most of us don’t just use one app.  We use many apps to deal with a whole buffet of life situations.  And just like taking many drugs during a particular period of one’s life can lead to dangerous drug interactions, so can the use of many different apps ultimately lead to the negative side effects of a growing numbness, and a gradual psychological merging with the smartphone to become a cyborg.

            In the past, I have used the metaphor of drug interaction to deal with the effects of a person constantly using many different kinds of screen reality in his daily life.  There we were dealing with a person living too much in different alternate forms of reality. There we were dealing with the living death of deep numbness as well.  Also, as a person lives in screen reality for so much time, perhaps it is like he psychological jumps over the barrier of experience and becomes an avatar of himself.  Again, he becomes a reduced entity from being a fully coherent defined human being.

            When just focusing on apps, we are talking about phenomena that appear primarily within the context of one form of screen reality – namely, the smartphone.  And we are talking about phenomena that don’t try to replace external world reality, but rather try to manipulate our processes within it.  Which, on a certain level, makes the influence of these apps all the more pervasive and insidious.  External world reality is even more submerged and blurred by many smartphone apps than it is by general screen reality.

            However, many people use both a lot of forms of screen reality as well as a lot of different apps within one form of screen reality.  So perhaps, we can say that in one kind of situation, they are reduced to being an avatar and in another kind of situation that are reduced to being a cyborg.  Either way, people are losing their humanity.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow