Problem perception before (green) and after (red) people are conditioned to learned helplessness.
One
of my most popular articles was a review
of Malcolm Gladwell's article on SUVs, which concluded that
we are afraid of, and worried by, the wrong things, that, for example,
we are needlessly fearful of terrorist attacks and not nearly fearful
enough about drunk driving.
The consequence of this is dysfunctional behaviour: For example, we buy SUVs, rely
on their illusory invulnerability and drive them overconfidently to the
point that we actually run a greater risk of death or serious injury in
an SUV than we would in a convertible. Yet "the risks posed to life and
limb by forces outside our control are dwarfed by the factors we can
control", Gladwell concludes. "Our fixation with helplessness distorts
our perceptions of risk."
In that article, I pushed Gladwell's argument further, and said:
This delusion of
danger, and the illusion that something can or
has to be done, that someone -- British cows, Canadian farmers, Firestone, Saddam Hussein -- must be brought to account in order
to give us back control, is literally making us all crazy. It causes us
to believe we cannot let children out of our sight even for a moment.
It causes us to wildly change our diets, to avoid visiting whole
countries, to fingerprint whole nations of visitors, to suspend civil
liberties, to put barbed wire around our communities, to drink only
bottled water, to introduce five levels of increasingly
hysterical 'threat' to everyone's safety.
It is irrational,
neurotic, panic-stricken behaviour, a wild
over-reaction to a tiny uncontrollable risk while we recklessly
disregard risks we could control
and which kill and destroy lives in large numbers everyday -- air and
water pollution, tainted food from corrupt and underregulated meat
packers, drugs in sport and airplane cockpits, drunk drivers, kids with
guns, unsupervised swimming pools, corporate frauds, a prison system that incarcerates the mentally
ill and encourages criminal recidivism -- and on and on and on.
Unfortunately, it is also in the best interest of the media and
governments to focus on the uncontrollable
risks, and to pander to public fear and fascination with them. They're
more sensational, more visceral. And since there's really nothing that
can be done about them, you can do anything,
or nothing,
in response to them, and not be held accountable, or responsible. The
risks we could
control, on the other hand, are mundane, day-to-day, hard and expensive
but not impossible to remedy; they would if remedied save thousands of
lives, and are the responsibility of all of us. Viewers, voters, and
consumers don't like to think about such things. Messy. Complicated.
Nagging. Costly. And the media, and politicians, are glad to oblige us.
The
concept of learned helplessness originated with Martin Seligman, whose
research forty years ago (involving the psychological torture of dogs)
revealed that we can be conditioned
to fear things and to believe we are helpless to deal with them. What
he called the "three Ps", illustrated in the diagram above, determine
the extent of this resultant psychosis -- we can be conditioned to
blame ourselves instead of others for a problem, to see a transient
threat as a permanent one, and to see a local, isolated threat as a
pervasive one.
In fabricating an excuse to strip Americans of
their civil liberties, for example, Bush, with media compliance,
inflated the threat of terrorist attacks in the minds of Americans from
a symbolic attack on two American monuments to a ubiquitous, permanent
and pervasive threat to every American by a massive, globally
coordinated and maniacal army supported by conveniently-selected Arab
states. And by telling us to 'be extremely vigilant', to treat those
who opposed his draconian measures as traitors, to be suspicious of any
activity by those with swarthy complexions, and to equip ourselves
with duct tape, Bush implied that if we were the next victims of this hyperinflated enemy, it would be to some extent our own fault.
Thus, a transient, isolated publicity stunt by a small group of rich
psychopaths, caused principally by a clash of cultural ideals and
bolstered by regional poverty and suffering, was turned for cynical
political reasons into a permanent, pervasive war that ("if you're not
with us, you're with the terrorists") we would be largely to blame for
if we didn't blindly support our government.
Once inculcated
with learned helplessness, its effects on a person can be quite
perverse. When something bad happens (e.g. he/she loses his/her job to
offshoring) that person will tend to blame him/herself, to be
overwhelmed by the seeming hopelessness of resolving the problem
("there are no other jobs") and to see its effect as permanent ("now
I'll be unemployed for life"). Paradoxically, when something good
happens (e.g. they get a promotion), this same person will not tend to
credit him/herself ("I was just lucky"), and will see its effects as
isolated and temporary ("I'll never get another promotion, and I'll
probably screw this one up and get fired"). To psychologists, these are
irrational symptoms of a pessimistic, depression-prone personality.
Those vulnerable to learned helplessness conditioning are also, they
would seem to be saying, vulnerable to depression.
Depression is one of five bad news coping mechanisms I referred to in a previous
article. The other four are denial ("I can't believe I lost my job,
there must be some mistake"), anger/selfishness ("I got shafted, the
boss is an idiot"), bargaining/pragmatism ("maybe I can get it back")
and resignation/acceptance ("oh, well, time to try something else").
Those who write about these coping mechanisms tend to view the fifth as
being the 'mature' mechanism, but that's subjective -- maybe the boss is an idiot, or maybe you can get the job back.
Once
you've reacted to a situation, the mechanism you use for resolving the
situation tends to reflect the same mentality (afflicted with learned
helplessness, or not) that manifested itself in the reaction, as the
figure below illustrates. Those suffering from learned helplessness
tend to believe there is nothing much they can do, that the problem is
insoluble or intractable, and that it's too late to act.
Problem resolution of people who are (red) and are not (green) conditioned to learned helplessness
Seligman
has now moved on from unpleasant experiments on dogs to a self-help
movement called Authentic Happiness, which is based on his concept of
learned optimism, the flip-side of learned helplessness. I don't think
much of it, but then I'm not taken with any self-help or psychological
'solutions'. I believe things happen the way they do for a reason, and
rather than trying to 'cure' depression maybe we need to understand why
it is so endemic to our modern world. Is depression like the 'shutting
down' coping reaction of animals cornered by predators? And is the
power elite actually cynically encouraging this sense of 'learned
helplessness' because it lowers opposition to the status quo, and
stifles dissent, even though this elite actually has a lot less power
than any of us believe?
It is quite conceivable to me that most people (who are not blog readers, or
readers of much of anything of quality) reasonably believe nothing they do makes much real
difference, and hence they would not find any news they read actionable
anyway. They live day to day, moment to moment, and their decisions are
mundane (McDonalds or Burger King). I think they are relatively immune
to media spin, but very vulnerable to influence
from their
immediate communities -- neighbours, family members, co-workers,
churchmembers etc. They move in crowds, physically, emotionally,
intellectually. Belatedly, they were the mass that finally ended the
Vietnam War and brought down Nixon, and they are the mass that
re-elected both Clinton and Bush because change frightens them more
than the status quo.
But is their sense of impotence and their passivity in the face of all the challenges facing the world today:
- a conditioned learned helplessness perpetrated by the power elite to stifle dissent,
- a conditioned learned helplessness caused by the media pandering to popular ignorance and laziness,
- a
legitimate 'acedia' -- a lovely old word that Gene McCarthy used in the
Vietnam War protests to describe those who gave up too soon trying to
end that war, the 'freeing oneself of care because the caring is just
too painful', or
- a legitimate awareness of the reality of the modern human condition (perhaps, as I suggested in this article,
because they think all the real power needed to precipitate change lies
elsewhere and are not yet ready for revolution, or perhaps because they
think no one is any longer in control, so activism beyond simple personal responsible behaviour is futile)?
Let's
take a look at the environmental movement, for example. I have
described what I call 'light green' environmentalists, who are
optimistic that technology and social awareness will let us resolve the
current environmental crises, and 'dark green' environmentalists, who
are pessimistic sometimes to the point they actually look forward to
the end of civilization. The former see the latter as depressed or
angry, while the latter see the former as bargaining or in denial. Like
liberals and conservatives, they see the same dilemma through
irreconcilably different frames, but their core values are the same:
They realize, instinctively, emotionally and intellectually, that the
only way for the human species to go on is as an integral part of all
life on Earth, connected, in balance, living sustainably. They just
have different visions of how to get there, and a different sense, not
of how much we can do, but of what we should do.
Lots of theories here. What do I believe?
Well, I keep thinking about Einstein's remark, shortly before he died,
that it was his experience that the more people knew, the more
pessimistic they became. And since I believe most people, for a variety
of reasons, know very little about the state of the world and what can
be done about it, I'm inclined to believe that many people are
pessimistic, not due to learned helplessness, but because they 'know'
instinctively that the world is facing some massive challenges, that
short of a revolution (which few are prepared to precipitate, at least
not yet) there is genuinely little they can do to help address these
challenges. I think the influence of media 'spin' on this perception is
minor.
And I believe that many people are instinctively coming
to realize that no one, no elite, is in control of this world (if any
ever was), and that therefore even a revolution would be futile (as
indeed most political revolutions in history have been).
I think we have a lot to learn about minor
things (like the foolishness of feeling safe in an SUV, and the
foolishness of feeling insecure about our child's safety unless we know
exactly where they are every instant), and in these things we are prone
to misjudgements both of learned helplessness and of learned
(over)optimism. But when it comes to the bigger issues affecting the
future of our world, I believe our instincts are pretty good. Perhaps
the sense that it's too late to solve these larger issues, that they
are perhaps insoluble, and that there's nothing we can do individually
or through some kind of fantasy 'collective intelligence' to save
civilization, is not learned
helplessness, but rather powerful intuition and collective wisdom. And
perhaps those of us with the best instincts (mostly, in my experience,
women, poets, scientists and artists) have also realized that this
resignation does not need to depress us, or debilitate us. On the
contrary, it liberates us from the responsibility to 'save the world'
and refocuses us, our sense of purpose, on making the world better
here, now, for those we live with and love, in the communities that
define us. Those enlightened people -- the women, poets, scientists and
artists -- have always been focused on opening possibilities here and
now, in the moment, in the communities of which they have always known
they are a part.
They -- and not the self-help gurus and others
who would 'cure' us of our sense of helplessness and depression, not
the politicians and revolutionaries and religious and political and
technological salvationists and 'leaders', not the media analysts and
apologists -- are our true models, the ones who quietly, always, have
been showing us the way.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
