Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays. In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.
BLOG Links and Tweets of
the Week -- November 7, 2009
What's
wrong with this
picture? The Standard &
Poor's 500 Public US Companies' P/E ratio has
historically traded at around 17, which assumes healthy growth in
profits for big corporations
indefinitely into the future. What, then, does a P/E ratio of
150 mean? It means that trillions of dollars of taxpayer money (which
future generations will have to repay), given to financial institutions
to bail them out, is being dumped into the stock market because it has
nowhere else to go (bonds paying 0.5% interest, nope, real estate, nope
nope nope, stock market it is then).
PREPARING
FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE
Lessons
From the Edge: Sharon Astyk
urges those of us who know, now, how urgent and seemingly impossible
the task of saving our civilization from collapse is, to remember we
have something most people don't:
Sometimes
when I deal with people who don’t think climate change is
real, or that serious, or who don’t think that peak oil will
be a big deal, I forget that I have something they don’t have
– dozens of backroom conversations with people who care
desperately about the mending of the world, who care so much that they
are willing to put their family lives, their time and energy and even
physical wellbeing on the line to spread the word - even though they
know they are likely to fail to protect what they care most
about. Not “we’re
doomed” but “we’re on a precipice, and
we’re not sure which way we’re going to begin to
slide.”
Listening
to the Land: Derrick Jensen,
in A
Language Older Than
Words, advised us "Stand
still and listen to the land, and in time, you will know exactly what
to do". In his latest article in Orion, he explains what he means by
this, and relates
this capacity for attention to the survival, for much longer than our
modern, teetering civilization, of most aboriginal cultures.
Unfortunately, Derrick is a litttle overly-inclined to believe in the
almost inherent sustainability of many aboriginal cultures. The sad
truth is that overfishing and overhunting, and even catastrophic
agriculture -- the same kind of disconnected degradation of our land
that characterizes our modern civilization, also, much of the time,
characterized theirs. There are, alas, no
noble savages, and while we have
a great deal to learn from aboriginal cultures, if we want
a model to replace our modern civilization, we will have to
look elsewhere, beyond our smart and fierce species.
Phony
Corporate Fronts 'Negotiate' Environmental Settlements for First
Nations: A disturbing expose
by Offsetting Resistance reveals that some
of the groups
that sign up First Nations people to negotiate on their behalf
capitulate to industry and government in secret closed-door meetings,
and some are fronts for major polluters.
What's worse, the First Nations are not even permitted to attend to see
what is being negotiated away on their behalf. It appears that this has
been done extensively to get cheap and unlimited oil industry access to
lands for the horrific Alberta Tar Sands development, by dubious
quasi-environmental groups like Pew Charitable Trusts (controlled by
the family that also controls Sunoco), the 'Canadian Boreal Initiative'
(a program of Ducks Unlimited), and the 'North American Tar Sands
Coalition' (with the conflicted cast of characters depicted in the
graphic above). Thanks to Paul Heft
for the link.
Joni
Mitchell turns 66 today. Her song Amelia
is a classic. "Maybe I've never really loved. I guess that is
that is the truth. I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy
altitudes."
THOUGHTS
FOR THE WEEK
You
want to get depressed about the future of our planet, just look at the
most popular topics on Twitter. You want to get even more depressed,
look at the most popular videos on YouTube. A billion Neros fiddling.
From
David Whyte's poem 'Sweet Darkness':
Sometimes
it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
From Margaret Atwood's poem 'Up':
Now
here's a good one:
You're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?
There's
an interesting article
by Elizabeth Kolbert in this week's New Yorker on vegetarianism,
and specifically on the disconnect between our adoration of pets and
our tolerance for the horrific, lifelong suffering of the animals we
eat. It's really about human nature, Kolbert argues, and specifically
that we just don't want to know about atrocities and suffering we don't
feel we have any control over.
This was the subject of JM Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello,
that I reviewed six years ago. Here's an excerpt from the book:
Seven
o'clock, the sun just rising, and John [animal welfare activist
Elizabeth Costello's son] and
his mother are on the way to the airport.
'I'm sorry about my wife', he says. 'She has been under a lot of
strain. I don't think she is in a position to sympathize. Perhaps one
could say the same for me. It's been such a short visit, and I haven't
had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about this
animal
business.'
She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. 'A better explanation',
she says, is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I
think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken
into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.'
'I don't follow. What is it you can't say?'
'It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly
easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is
it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime
of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet
every day I see the evidence. The very people I suspect produce the
evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses
that they have bought for money. It's as if I were to visit friends,and
to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and
they were to say "Yes it's nice isn't it? Human skin it's made of, we
find that's best, the skins of young virgins." And then I go to the
bathroom and the soap wrapper says "100% human stearate". Am I
dreaming, I say to myself. What kind of house is this? Yet I'm not
dreaming. I look into your eyes, into your wife's, into the children's,
and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you
are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else
comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?'
She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want,
he thinks? Does
she want me to answer her question for her?
In my review of the book, I asked:
Is
there a point in rubbing our faces in it, in forcing people to face up
to the horror of concentration camps, slaughterhouses, factory farms,
chemical weaponry, mental illness, sexual assault and torture,
bullying, spousal and child abuse, animal testing laboratories,
political interrogations, what happens behind prison walls, the agony
of those in continuous pain not allowed to die and without access to
relief, the children whose entire lives are consumed in deprivation and
brutality, the suffering of crack babies?
Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals,
the book that prompted Kolbert's article, draws obvious
parallels between the way we treat farmed animals and the way prisoners
were treated in the second world war by the Axis powers. Kolbert
explains:
Foer’s
position is that all such arguments [those justifying 'humane' eating
of animals put forth by Michael Pollan, Temple Grandin et al.] are,
finally, bogus. We eat meat because we like to, and we devise
justifications afterward. “Almost always, when I told someone
I was writing a book about ‘eating animals,’ they
assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a
case for vegetarianism,” he says. “It’s a
telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry
into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know
that to be the case.”
What we know about eating animals is that we
don’t want to know.
Although he never explicitly equates “concentrated animal
feeding operations” with the Final Solution, the German model
of at once seeing and not seeing clearly informs Foer’s
thinking. The book is framed by tales of his grandmother, a Holocaust
survivor.
Reading the article, I thought about the program of practices I have
designed for myself once I retire in a couple of months, whose purpose
in part is to reconnect me with my instincts, my emotions, my senses
and all-life-on-Earth. When I discuss this with people who don't know
me well, they tend to ask me either "How and why do you think you
became disconnected?"
or "Why would you want to subject yourself to
that anguish?". These are both questions born, I think, out of
subconscious grief
-- the first is a denial that the life most of us live is in any way
emotionally suppressed, tacitly cruel or unnatural, while the second is
dismay that we
could ever hope to handle that much terrible reality.
It intrigues me that the people who sign up for courses and workshops
on emotional reconnection (judging by the research I have done, and on
the Joanna Macy workshop videos I've watched) seem to be overwhelmingly
female and over 30. Why is that adult women are more willing than
males, or young people, to "let their hearts be broken"?
This is important, because one of the tenets of social democracy, and
activism, is that if a majority of people feel strongly about some
facet of the status quo, that this will inevitably produce change. The
ending of slavery, women's rights, and other instances are offered as
justifications for political awareness, discourse and activism being
necessary and sufficient preconditions for bringing about important
change.
But are they? As Foer says, the majority already know that factory
farming is an ugly business. But they don't want to know. They quietly
ignore it, turn away from it, satisfy themselves somehow that it's not
that bad or that nothing can change it anyway -- it's an inevitable
part of civilization. It's "natural". The rationalizations of Pollan
and Grandin are music to their ears.
The same is true for what we're doing to the Earth, and to the
struggling nations of the Earth. We know it's awful, unsustainable,
just not right. But we don't want to know. We rationalize that it's not
really that bad (hence the popularity of the wing-nut Lomborgian
climate change deniers, and corporatists who assert that struggling
nations benefit from globalization and that "a rising tide lifts all
boats"). We tell ourselves we can't do anything anyway, we do what we
can, it's up to the experts and politicians.
The problem is, these rationalizations are just untrue, and like the
nonsense of technophiles in groups like WorldChanging, the religious
loonies who believe in the Rapture, and the "humanist" cults that
preach about a coming "global human consciousness raising" it is
magical thinking, stuff that we tell ourselves because we really, really don't
want to know the truth.
Regular readers are probably tired of me reciting Pollard's Law of
human behaviour, but until it has been effectively refuted I'll keep
saying it: We
do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun.
We have no time or energy left to do what's merely right. It is not in
our nature.
Let's look at slavery. Of course the social movements against slavery
were important. But I would argue they were not enough. The US civil
war was not fought over slavery, it was fought over the right of one
region to declare independence (this is the cause of many wars, which
are almost always about power, money, control, and land). Slavery of
both blacks and whites (called "indentured servitude") was legal for
many years throughout the US because it was the only way to make
passage of workers economically feasible. They did what they had to.
Later as travel costs fell, most people could afford their own passage
to the "new world", and slavery was then only essential to agriculture,
particularly labour-intensive tobacco, cotton and sugar beet farming.
Technology (like the cotton gin) increased manufacturing productivity
and hence actually increased
the need for more slaves on the farms to feed the new post-harvest
automation. Slave owners acknowledged that slavery was (in the
words of Robert E Lee) "a moral evil" but rationalized that the slaves
were "better off here than in Africa". You know, like how Aghanis and
Iraqis are better off now than they were under the Taliban and Saddam.
After the civil war, slavery was abolished, but, after the brief but
disastrous Reconstruction and a severe economic depression, white
supremacy was restored in the former slave states in the Compromise of
1877 as Union forces finally withdrew and left the former slave states
to sort things out for themselves. Slavery was replaced by
sharecropping, blacks were re-disenfranchised, and for most of
the following century suffered under brutal, overtly
racist, repressive white-controlled governments. Slavery was
allowed for prisoners, judicial and police systems treated blacks no
differently than they had during the slave era, and segregation of all
institutions meant that life for most African-Americans was only
marginally better than it had been.
What changed, finally? The decline in the importance of agriculture
overall in the US. Access to cheap foreign labour. The Industrial
Revolution. As a result, social slavery was no longer necessary.
Economic slavery was just as useful, without the blatant "moral evil"
that characterized social slavery. Slavery ended ultimately not
because of social activism (though that was absolutely necessary), but because it was easier
to automate harvesting, import foreign workers (or offshore the whole
process to countries unconcerned with "moral evils"), or use the land
for something more profitable and less labour-intensive.
Has all this social activism brought an end to racism? Not on your
life. Wait until the economic debt crisis hits in the next decade or so
and you'll see that nothing's changed. Has it really brought an end to
slavery? Talk to the Mexican workers in the American fields, or the
children working in the blood diamond mines in Africa, or chained to
machines in the factories in China, and you'll get your answer. But we
don't want to know.
I could make an analogous argument for what has happened with women's
rights, but you get the idea. It was easy and profitable to get women
into the workforce, for low wages, caught in the Two
Income Trap, buying all those
things a two-worker family needs that a one-worker family didn't. And
giving women the right to vote didn't cost anyone anything, nor did it
produce any significant power shifts. It was easy.
Did women have to fight hard for it anyway, and should we salute them
for doing so? Of course. Do women in most of the world still face
horrific prejudice and oppression? Damned right. Will they too, with
enough decades and centuries of struggle, achieve some reasonable
equality in their societies? As long as it's easy, and doesn't cost
anyone anything, sure.
Now apply this to factory farming. Ending it is not easy.
It cannot be made easy. Like combatting the causes of climate change,
or coping with the End of Oil and the End of Water, it is a hugely
complex problem. The necessary change would be staggeringly expensive,
and massively unpopular. Do we need activists to do the "holding
actions" to mitigate some of the damage and to increase public
awareness and affect public opinion on the need for change in these
areas? Absolutely. Will that work, in and of itself, bring about
sufficient change in these hugely difficult areas? Not a chance.
We will change when there is absolutely no choice (we do what we must)
or when it is dead easy to change. Give us compact fluorescent
lightbulbs that cost the same per kilowatt-hour as incandescents and
reduce energy consumption by 2/3, and it's easy -- you can then make
incandescents illegal and no one will care. Same thing happened with
getting rid of the CFCs in refrigerants. No problem.
But reducing CO2
emissions to zero in two decades (necessary to get us down to 350ppm
and avert climate catastrophe) will never be easy. Reducing oil and
petrochemical consumption by 90% in three decades (necessary to avert
The Long Emergency) is unfathomably difficult, if not impossible.
Drastically reducing debts, waste, and consumption (necessary to avert
a ghastly depression that will make the Great Depression look mild) is
unimaginable, even with magical thinking -- the cure might be as bad as
the disease. And likewise an end to factory farming would require the
nationalization and breakup of industrial agriculture, an end to the
$150B annual agriculture subsidies to some mighty powerful oligopoly
lobbies, and a total, mostly involuntary, change to the way we eat,
that would make food much more expensive and its preparation much more
time-consuming. This is the antithesis
of easy.
These are wicked problems because it will never be easy to solve them.
So no politician is going to impose change on the voters, because it
would be political suicide. These problems will be solved politically
or socially only when there is no other choice. And by then, as every
previous civilization has discovered, it will be too late.
Is there a technology fix? The magical thinkers are hard at work.
They're planning on blasting $30B of tiny reflective metal into the
stratosphere to deflect the sun's rays, to combat global warming. It's
called geoengineering.
They have no idea what they're doing, but when things get desperate
enough they'll do it anyway. After all, it's easy. Oh, and they're also
going to put all the carbon dioxide back into the Earth in a way that
it won't leak out again. That's called carbon
sequestration, and the
technology doesn't exist (the engineers I've spoken to say it never
will), but, hey, when you're magical thinking, go for it. Obama's
giving them millions to invent it. Just make it easy for us, please.
Whatever the problems, we just don't want to know.
And the magical thinkers are going to give us high-efficiency wind and
solar and geothermal and biomass and "clean coal" and "safe nuclear" to
get us off our addiction to oil. No matter that even all of these
together barely scratch the surface of what we would need just to keep
consuming at current levels (China's energy use is growing 20%/year and
they're building a new coal-fired power plant every four days). Hey,
what happened to cold fusion? In the meantime, we'll stave off the
problem for 4-5 years by turning an area of Alberta the size of Florida
into a lunar landscape peppered with thousands of massive toxic tailing
ponds. The kids will forgive us, right? We don't want to know.
The magical thinkers haven't even put their minds to dealing with the
coming economic collapse, or the obscenity of factory farming, because
they're not even acknowledged as problems, let alone wicked ones. We
don't want to know.
Well, I
want to know. And apparently
a few others, mostly adult women, want to know too. Even if it means
letting my heart be broken. Even if it means looking at a photo like
the one above, which is offensive. I've been inside a slaughterhouse.
I'm a vegetarian, but still not a vegan, so I'm complicit in what goes
on in factory farms and slaughterhouses. I drive a car and fly too
often, so I'm complicit in the Alberta Tar Sands holocaust. I know
better, or at least I should. What's the matter with me, with us?
What's the matter is that we're human. These things that don't change
don't hit close enough. They're not personal enough. Slaughterhouses
and factory farms and Tar Sands developments are private property, and
they don't want you to know what goes on there. And what would you do,
anyway?
Well, perhaps you'd do whatever it took to shut them down. And perhaps,
if you got together with enough other people with the same intention,
you might come up with some ingenious ways to shut them down. Maybe
even as ingenious as the ideas that got these "innovations" started in
the first place.
Do we really want to know the truth? I don't know. We're a curious
species, we humans. If something can reasonably be done to make
something better, or less awful, a lot of us seem to want to know what
the problem is, and how we might do that.
All I know is that, after a lifetime of turning away, of not wanting to
know, I've now reached the point where I can't help knowing, and I
can't turn away, and I have to do something more than the very worthy
and necessary but insufficient things that activists do so valiantly
and often at great personal risk and sacrifice.
I have to stop these things. How? Don't know yet. Work with me, and
we'll figure it out.
Last words to Ms Kolbert, a much better writer than I:
“Eating
Animals” closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a
holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is
Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what
we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without.
Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable
pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask
this of us.
But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society
imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human
species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy
lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you
may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in
them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on
other organisms without being sickened.
And if we're sickened, then what?
----------
(For those who
tried my 'Words to the Wise' puzzle yesterday, here are the answers: 1.
stripper, 2. stag, 3. feud, 4. Noah, 5. tithes, 6. insole, 7. antler,
8. EKG, 9. rioted, 10. Emir, 11. URLs, 12. Mac, 13. italic, 14.
baskets, 15. dognap, 16. ethers, 17. den, 18. diet, 19. y'all, 20.
coasts, 21. starboard, 22. tenure, 23. ice rink, 24. pooltable, 25.
triplets, 26. ham radio, 27. tag-team, 28. Magi)
The grid above is not
connected to the clues below. If you want to try one of my complete
puzzles, you'll find this grid, and the clues to it, and a link to the
answers, here.
For
many years I've been a fan of crossword puzzles, and occasionally I'll
stumble across a clue that is devilishly clever. I keep scribbling them
down, and today, for a change of pace, I'm going to inflict them on
you. They aren't the notorious British-style 'cryptic' crossworld
clues, but they're deliberately ambiguous, and witty. So here they are.
An underscore indicates a letter, and to make it a bit fairer I've
entered some letters, including the first one, for each clue. Answers tomorrow.
1. One whose business
is taking off: S
_ _ I
_ _ E
_
2. Six-pointer, perhaps: S
_ A
_ (hint: it's not
"star")
3. Row between houses: F
_ _ _
4. Master of double-take: N
_ _ _
5. Gives religiously: T
_ _ _ ES
6. Oxford pad:
I
_ _ _ _ E
7. Buck topper:
A
_ _ _ E
_
8. Ticker tape letters: E
_ _
9. Joined the mob, maybe: R
_ _ _ ED
10. Title from which "admiral" comes: E
_ _ _
11. They may be bookmarked: U
_ _ _
12. Jobs output: M
_ _
13. Leaning to the right: I
_ A
_ _ _
14. Jazz scores: B
_ _ _ E
_ S
15. Grab some chow: D
_ _ _ A
_
16. Bygone numbers: E
_ _ _ RS
17. Remote location: D
_ _
18. Purposely try to lose: D
_ _ _
19. Contracted group: Y
_ _ _
20. Ocean liners: C
_ _ _ _ S
21. It's never left at sea: S
_ _ R
_ _ _ R
_
22. Professor plum: T
_ _ _ _ E
23. Place to see a camel: I
_ _ R
_ _ _
24. It has six holes: P
_ _ _ _ A
_ _ E
25. Uncommon delivery: T
_ I
_ _ E
_ _
26. It's used with some frequency: H
_ _ R
_ _ I
_
27. Ring duo: T
_ _ T
_ A
_
28. Star followers: M
_ _ _
(Acknowledgements:
Quite a few of these come from classic NYT puzzle constructors David
Kahn, Bob Tausig, Bob Klahn and Pat Berry.)
OK, just to get you started, the answer to #1 is "stripper".
All
my life, I've had a
temper, and three years ago, when the stress of anger precipitated a
debilitating attack of ulcerative colitis that left me wishing I was
dead, I learned the high cost of not knowing how to cope with it. Now I
know, and it's easier, but it's not easy.
Anger is a natural reaction, and it's been selected for in our
evolution because it's useful: it drives us to instinctively and
autonomously attack, or flee, with all the energy our adrenaline can
bring to bear. When the anger is prompted by an attack on us, or on a
loved one, even by a larger and more lethal creature, this 'violent
defence' strategy has proved to be more successful for our
species' survival than rolling over or 'playing possum'.
When the cause of our anger is chronic, our instinctive and autonomous
response is to flee, to put physical distance between us and the cause
of our stress. This is nature's way of coping with overpopulation --
when the stresses of proximity get to a certain threshold, we naturally
spread out. That's why nature creates buffer zones between 'tribes' and
'flocks' of wild animals, so there is some flexibility in the area
occupied by each. When there is stress in the tribe but there is no
room left to expand, nature assesses that we need to thin our numbers,
and some other autonomous processes kick in: fertility drops, and if
that isn't enough, suicide rises, or disease exploits the excess
density, or in the worst case scenario, when all else fails,
aggressiveness increases, internecine 'war' breaks out, death rate
rises, and parents eat their young. Nature, the self-regulator of
all-life-on-Earth, always bats last, and will do whatever it takes to
restore the balance of each species to levels that are optimal for all
creatures in the ecosystem.
A few species, including our own, will, under certain circumstances,
wage war on neighbouring tribes instead of resolving their
overpopulation (relative to available resources) problems internally.
This stress response requires a high level of social communication,
coordination and cooperation, and hence generally only occurs among the
most
'intelligent' species. It may well be an unintended consequence of the
evolution of large brains (there's some evidence that symbolic
language, and agriculture, and civilization are likewise unintended
consequences of the development of intelligence --
like corvids,
we developed large brains because we needed them to survive in
environments where we were competing with stronger, fiercer species).
But although the capacity to wage war on neighbours was probably an
unintended consequence of our growing brains, it was an evolutionary
success, it 'worked' for the warring tribes, so it is still with us.
The problem with this evolutionary success is that it is very
destabilizing over long periods of time. War, and the anger that
provokes it and which it in turn provokes, can seethe and erupt again,
as opposing factions remember and plot revenge. While constant
competition and conquest may 'succeed' in the short term in
evolutionary terms, in the long term they can lead to chronic violence
and stress that is debilitating to the health of all, and can, if too
'successful', lead to reduction in ecological diversity and hence an
unsustainable weakening of the entire ecosystem's resilience and
evolutionary adapatability. Our modern civilization is the model of
such catastrophic and fragile 'success'.
But back to anger on the personal level. Anger is often part of a
complex set of
emotions that includes fear and grief. Despite what some religions may
say, we can't learn to not
be
angry -- anger is a successful evolutionary trait that has been part of
us for millions of years. It is part of who we are. It's perfectly
healthy, natural, and an inevitable part of living. It is often useful.
We can learn to process or
channel it in more constructive ways, and to realize and acknowledge
and understand it, but we can't (and shouldn't) stop it from happening,
and if we deny or sublimate it, we can make ourselves ill.
Here's the process that I have tried very hard to follow, since my
illness, each time I get angry:
I respond naturally,
immediately and 'violently' in a way
that won't harm anyone or immediately escalate the situation: It is
completely natural to respond instanty and viscerally to a situation
that provokes anger. I don't attack the perpetrator, but neither do I
sublimate the anger. I find an immediate 'violent' physical outlet --
vigorous exercise, a punching bag, yelling out loud, crying. My body is
telling me to discharge the anger in a physically 'violent' way, and I
listen to it and do what it advises. I'm not going to get ill again by
locking the anger up inside.
I tap the energy of
the anger to motivate myself to act.
Even after the physical discharge of step 1 above, there is still
energy. I am at heart lazy, cowardly and inclined to procrastinate. If
I don't 'save' some of that energy to do something to address the cause
of the anger, I will end up doing nothing. That is likely to result in
a recurrence of the problem, either towards me or some other victim.
I sleep on it. I've
learned that much of our 'intelligence'
is subconscious, and that (once I'm exhausted from step 1) it is
helpful to sleep and let my subsconscious process what has happened. I
usually awake with a better understanding of what has happened and what
to do about it.
I try to understand
what motivated the offense. I've always
believed that people do things for reasons that are often not obvious,
and that you can't change behaviour until/unless you know what that
reason is. Perhaps it's ignorance, or stupidity, or the influence of
alcohol. Often it's been provoked by some feeing of anger, fear, pain
or grief (anger is often a mask for pain and grief, I've learned)
within the perpetrator, that may have nothing to do with me.
I try to protect
myself against recurrence and escalation
of what caused the anger in me. That usually means staying away, for a
short term, from the person(s) whose actions prompted my anger,
"shunning" them. Giving myself time and space to deal with the anger,
rather than exposing myself to more of it too soon.
I usually talk with
others to develop a strategy to get
real behaviour change from the perpetrator. That involves getting the
perpetrator to do three things, while letting them save face (if you
rub their
face in it, you'll just perpetrate, redirect or escalate the problem):
(a) get them to appreciate, at least tacitly, that what they did caused
you justifiable
anger, (b) get them to take steps to mitigate the harm that they caused
you, (c) get them to take steps to prevent recurrence of whatever
caused your anger. It's almost always best to involve others
in
this -- they are more objective, bring different ideas and
perspectives, and can sometimes be a "go-between" to achieve each of
these three things.
I work very hard to
avoid prolonging or escalating the
problem. This is really hard to do -- we have a propensity to want to
get back at whoever caused us anger, to turn the tables on them, to
victimize them.
Revenge is sweet, but it is usually unhelpful, and
often dangerous. I also avoid the temptation to get people to 'gang up'
on the perpetrator (also a natural temptation). Choosing sides is a
recipe for escalation, which is usually (alas not always) a bad idea.
Fortunately for me, I hate violence, lawyers and conflict, so this step
is easier for me than for some.
I consider whether it
makes sense, as at least part of the
solution to the problem, to put physical distance between me and the
perpetrator. Our autonomic anger/stress response is 'fight or flight'
and sometimes flight is the wiser response. I know some people are just
(to me anyway) naturally vexatious, and I try to avoid events where
they'll be present. If the cause of anger is in your home or
neighbourhood, it may sometimes be wise to move somewhere
else.
When I have done
everything that (in consultation with
others) can reasonably been done to address the situation (the eight
steps above), I then work to 'let go' of any remaining anger. This is
the hardest step for me. I can't get the hang of meditation, and I heal
slowly. But at least I'm conscious of what remains and when I tell
myself I have done everything that can be done, and that to some extent
I've rectified the situation and reduced the likelihood of recurrence,
I am able to 'let go' of whatever anger and stress remains. My
'rational' side can usually then talk my 'emotional' side out of its
remaining tumult.
Every once in awhile,
I
reflect on any unresolved anger in
my heart and in my life. The practice I summarize above is new to me,
and some of the things that caused me great anger previously in my life
are still 'with me'. I carry them in the calcium in my bones, and in my
exhausted and hyperactive immune system. I keep asking myself whether,
in five years, these past events that still arouse feelings of anger in
me
will be, in retrospect, of any importance, or whether I'll even
remember them. That sometimes gives me the perspective to let go of the
lingering anger I feel.
I should note that this approach doesn't always work, even for me, even
with practice. But I've found it useful.
Here's how I've 'worked through' some of the situations that have made
me the angriest over the last few years:
Three years ago, the
situation that gave rise to my colitis began when a former employer
sent me a notice saying that they had 'recalculated' taxes owing on a
convoluted tax deferral scheme they had put in place for senior
management, and as a result I would have to write a cheque to the tax
department, within a month, for a six-figure amount. They refused to
acknowledge that it was their error, or provide any bridge financing to
those like me who didn't happen to have that kind of cash sitting
around. I just lost it. In retrospect, yes, they were incompetent and
insensitive, but my recommendations to mitigate their error (step 6)
were ignored. Under the circumstances, I should have realized that when
you're dealing with giant corporations, you had better beware because
they are utterly inflexible and often incompetent, and they protect
their own. Instead of letting my stress over this ruin my health, or
even thinking about suing them, I should have taken sensible steps to
minimize the damage to me, and chalked it up as a learning experience.
I screwed up at steps 7 and 9. But I've learned a lot in the process,
including how to deal with stress, and this latent disease, much better.
About ten years ago, a
neighbour (farmer) commenced an ill-conceived construction project
without any consultation with any of us, and it remains to this day an
ugly and divisive eyesore. This individual is basically unhappy and
disagreeable, and has a history of bullying and abusive behaviour. He
did not repond to reason from any of us, so we simply started excluding
him from all neighbourhood activities and communications. Now that I'm
retiring and moving away, I'll be able to put it behind me, but until
then I still get angry every time I see it. I will have to use step 8
because I just can't do step 9.
At about the same
time, a contractor who did incompetent work sent me a bill for twice
the amount of the contract, and when I refused to pay (unless he
corrected the mistakes in his work) he put a lien on the property. At
the preliminary hearing, the judge refused to hear the case and told us
to sort it out out-of-court. The lien is still there, and the work that
was done has left the room in question uninhabitable for ten years. Our
lawyers say it's impossible to get a lien removed without a settlement.
The contractor is an extremely unhappy, unsuccessful and proud
individual, and he will fight this to the end of his days, even though
total legal bills to date have been twice the amount in question. My
error was in realizing that with people like this, step 6 will never
work. What I should have done is pay the amount in question into an
escrow account, which would have allowed me to lift the lien
immediately and get the work done properly by somebody else, and put
the onus on him to argue that he should get the escrow account. In that
way I would have shelved the problem and left it to lawyers to deal
with (a form of steps 7 & 8), and then, step 9 would have been
easy.
When I was younger, I
got angry often and easily, and almost always felt badly and ashamed
afterwards. Now, as I've evolved this process, I catch myself as soon
as the impulse for anger arises, and start to work on the ten steps
above. As a result I tend to get less angry, get angry less
often, get less stressed by the anger I do feel, and handle it
much more effectively. And some of the anger I held for many years I
have let go, because I had done everything that could be done so
staying angry was purposeless and unhealthy.
I want to acknowledge that this process can, I think, work well for
dealing with anger that results from one-time incidents
that are not
deeply personal in nature.
For recurring or personal incidents (such as those that trauma
survivors must deal with) it is probably completely inadequate. There
are some good books on coping with trauma, and the anger inherent in
trauma, such as Bass & Davis' The Courage to Heal,
and I wouldn't presume to prescribe any process for anger that is
trauma-based.
I'm using the above process, however, to cope effectively with the
anger that is part of my unbearable
grief for Gaia. And it's
working. It's led to the constructive
projects I outlined in my recent
article on my post-retirement plans.
What about you, dear readers? How do you deal with anger? Any secrets
you've found that help you cope with and resolve anger in
useful and productive ways?
BLOG Links and Tweets of
the Week: October 31, 2009 (Scary Hallowe'en Edition)
PREPARING
FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE
Here
Comes the End of Debt:
Stoneleigh from Automatic Earth, in an interview with The Oil Drum
Europe, argues that we're in for an unprecedented and prolonged
deflationary period, and that while wages will plunge, so will prices
of everything, even oil and gold as demand falls faster than supply:
Credit
bubbles [see chart above] are inherently self-limiting, proceeding
until the debt they generate can no longer be supported. We have
already passed that point and we are now two years into a contraction
phase that is about to accelerate. As the aftermath of a credit bubble
is typically proportional to the scale of the excesses that preceded
it, we
should be in for the largest economic contraction for at least several
hundred years, and it will be global.
Real estate, which is a major focus of the mania, should do
particularly badly in the coming years (in fact the coming decades or
longer)...
As demand falls, and with it prices, investment in the energy sector is
likely to dry up. Many projects will be uneconomic at much lower
prices, meaning that the projects which might have cushioned the
downslope of Hubbert’s curve (and the much steeper net energy
curve), are unlikely to be developed. In this way a demand collapse
sets the stage for a supply collapse that could place a hard ceiling on
any prospect of economic recovery. That is a recipe for extremely high
energy prices in the future…
The scale of the problem has been temporarily concealed by a market
rally and the shovelling of tens of trillions of dollars of
taxpayer’s money into a giant black hole of credit
destruction. This has done nothing to reignite lending, but the
temporary (and entirely irrational) resurgence of confidence has
restored a measure of liquidity. As that confidence evaporates with the
end of the rally, that liquidity will also disappear.
Deflation is ultimately psychological. Without trust we will see
hoarding of the cash which will be very scarce in the absence of the
credit that currently comprises the vast majority of the effective
money supply. The combination of scarce cash and a very low velocity of
money will be toxic.
Money is the lubricant in the economic engine and without enough of it
that engine will seize up as it did in the 1930s, when farmers dumped
milk they couldn’t sell into ditches while others were
starving for want of the money to buy food. There was plenty of
everything except money, and without money, one cannot connect buyers
and sellers…
The
Copenhagen targets are basically completely
illusory. There's no way to hit those targets and it would be
very silly to think that we can...
The world does not have the scale, time frame or economics to
devote to the complete eradication of carbon emissions from sources of
fuel within the next four decades...
Nuclear doesn't have the flexibility to be a suitable option...
Globally [renewables] will be too small to make a real dent in the
targets...
Just wait for one catastrophe and that will be the end of nuclear. And
who really thinks biofuels will really work in the long run? You can't
have food as an energy source.
Civil
Liberties Watch: The Civil
Liberties Defense Center (boy those Americans spell funny!) fights to overturn laws that
outrageously restrict personal freedoms,
such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (making it illegal to
protest animal cruelty), aggressive use of tasers by police, and an
Oregon law that made it illegal to protest old-growth forest
destruction (they just succeeded in getting that ruled unconstitutional
-- yay)! Thanks to Tree
for the link.
Why do you love
animals called pets, and eat animals called dinner?
Be nice to America, or
we'll bring democracy to your country.
(perfect one for a
bicycle or car, for different reasons) This Too Shall Pass
From Lydia Davis (in last week's New Yorker):
HEAD, HEART
Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth
will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I've met f2f]
The thoughts expressed herein are strictly those of the blogger.
I'm listening to:
WHAT
THE BLOGOSPHERE WANTS MORE OF
Blog readers
want to
see
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There's
an interesting 
All
my life, I've had a
temper, and three years ago, when the stress of anger precipitated a
debilitating attack of ulcerative colitis that left me wishing I was
dead, I learned the high cost of not knowing how to cope with it. Now I
know, and it's easier, but it's not easy.
My book is available to US buyers
from the 
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY
