Why are we free yet unhappy?

Our material today was excerpted from Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm.

Warm up:
Today we're going to talk about freedom.

• Three words to describe freedom
• When was the last time you felt like you were free?
• Do you think you are free now? How about compared to your younger self?
• Do you think a child has more freedom?
• Do you feel like you have more freedom living in Taiwan rather than somewhere else?

Our Malady

In Our Malady, historian Timothy Snyder shares his personal experience of struggling to navigate America’s healthcare system during a serious illness, providing shocking insights into racial and income inequality that continue to plague Americans. Below are extensive exerpts from the interview, I don't expect we'll be able to discuss all of them, but hopefully most!

Congressional Inquiry into Health Insurance

Rep. Katie Porter: What I'd like to do now, Mr. Bradway, is I'd like for you to please explain to the American public why you and four other executives deserve to pay yourselves tens of million dollars each year. I've got an empty whiteboard ready to take down your justifications.
Amgen CEO Robert Bradway: I recognize that that's a considerable sum of money. I would, of course, point out that I don't have any direct input to my compensation: that's derived by the board, and it’s the board to a vote of the shareholders who overwhelmingly supported the compensation package for me and the other main executive officers–
Rep. Katie Porter: Reclaiming my time, sir. Do you not know why you're getting hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars a year? What is the justification? I'd like to show the American people.
Amgen CEO Robert Bradway: Our compensation is consistent with competitive positions at other companies-
Rep. Katie Porter: Mr. Bradway, reclaiming my time. “The other guy gets paid too much too” isn't a justification. I'd like to hear what you do to deserve $124 million in salary–you and your top five executives–over a three year period?
Amgen CEO Robert Bradway: Well, more than 90%- Speaker: Gentlelady’s time has expired. The gentleman may respond to her question.
Amgen CEO Robert Bradway: More than 90% of my compensation is based on performance measures that include how our shares perform relative to the market, and our compensation program is aligned with that of our owners, our share owners. So, a large part of my compensation reflects the fact that we've been creating value for our share owners by advancing innovative medicines like those that we have on the marketplace today.
Rep. Katie Porter: I wish you would focus on creating value for sick patients, Mr. Bradway, not just your shareholders. I yield back.

Pain
Tim Snyder: The bit of book that you're talking about, I'm starting from my own problems with pain, basically. By a problem with pain, I don't mean that I have a lot of physical pain. That's true. But, what I meant is my inability to talk about it.

In the story of my illness, a lot of things go wrong and a lot of them weren’t the fault of individual doctors or nurses. I think generally, they were the fault of a system which makes it impossible for doctors and nurses to work, and maybe we'll go into some of those details and some of that structure. But some of the problem was that repeatedly, I was unable to tell people that I hurt a lot.

Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

I want to talk about these two images, and what they might mean to you:

AOC

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of the U.S. House of Representatives, experienced sexist microagression from one of her colleagues (described in the article below). She was originally going to blow it off, because, like all women, she's experienced this so often that it hardly seems worth the effort to deal with it. However, when the man who attacked her decided to do a half-assed non-apology on the floor of the House, she decided to address it. This video captures her entire speech. 

Because her name is really long, everyone abbreviates it to AOC, and this is how she's most often referred to on social media.

 

Following the Rules

Rules and Rule Breaking
We're going to look at how nations and individuals think about rules both in moments of crisis and in everyday interactions. Cultural attitudes about rule following and rule breaking shape our lives in all kinds of ways, from the tidiness of our homes to our political preferences to our approach to stopping the spread of a pandemic.

Rules for:
Crossing the street
Dress codes
Littering/chewing gum
Wearing Shoes in Banks/Stores/Public places
Being on time for a meeting (In Brazil, when they want people to show up at the actual listed time, they say it's on 'British Time'.)
Cleaning up the stadium after a sports match

Two Types of people?
VEDANTAM: We are so familiar with these differences between groups that we have movies and television shows that are built around these themes. These differences also show up in our domestic lives and in workplaces.

GELFAND: You can think about how strict or permissive we are from many different perspectives - from national perspective, from organizations, even our own households. In the book, I talk about how we all have our own preference for the kind of Muppet we want to be. Some people are order Muppets.
...
They really like rules. They manage their impulses. And they really like a lot of order and structure. And then on the flip side, some people are chaos Muppets.
...
They tend to not really notice rules. They are more risk taking and impulsive. And they're more tolerant of ambiguity.

It causes a lot of conflict between people. Think about parents who are trying to raise kids, and they have different ideas in terms of how strict they should be or finances. Or even how you load the dishwasher, I found in my household, can get you a little flak. So I think it's important to really look at this as a aspect of culture that affects us all the time, from our nations to our households.

The Labor Theory of Property, or, What Exactly is Intellectual Property?

The excerpts below are all from this article: Terra Nullius

The Labor Theory of Property
In 1660, John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government, where he set out to resolve the seeming conflict between individual property rights (which he valorized) and the Bible (ditto), which set out the principle that God had created the Earth and its bounty for all of humanity. How could a Christian claim to own something personally when God had intended for everyone to share in His creation?

Locke’s answer was the “labor theory of property”: private property is the result of a human taking an unclaimed piece of the common property of humanity and mixing it with their labor (each human owns their body and thus the labor of that body), creating a property cocktail: one part unimproved nature, one part human sweat of the brow, mix well and serve in perpetuity.

'Aloha Poke'
More than a thousand years before John Locke was born, the people of the island of Kahiki coined the term “Aloha,” which is present in all the languages of the region today: it’s an untranslatable word that conveys a beautiful, complex blend of emotions and sentiments, so iconic that adherence to the “Aloha Spirit” has been Hawaiian state law since 1986.

In the 1970s (300 years after the publication of Two Treatises of Government) Hawaiian chefs expressed their aloha spirit in a dish called “poke,” a delicious mix of raw fish, served with seaweed, rice or greens, roasted and ground kukui nut meat, and other variations. In 2012, this dish spread to the mainland and mutated further, acquiring many new and delicious variants.

In 2016 (centuries after “aloha” and Locke, decades after “poke”) Zach Friedlander founded a restaurant called “Aloha Poke” in Chicago, and in the summer of 2018 Friedlander’s successor, Chris Birkinshaw, retained the law firm of Olson and Cepuritis Ltd to threaten Hawaiian chefs operating poke restaurants, insisting that they remove “aloha” from their business names. Eventually, the furor prompted Aloha Poke to issue a half-assed, self-pitying apology and to back off a little from its threats.

Friedlander defended the company’s actions and dismissed criticism as a “witch hunt” and “fake news”. [In their response] you can see the specter of John Locke haunting every word. Friedlander, his staff, and his investors put real work into making a midwestern chain of poke restaurants identified with the name “Aloha Poke.” These unimproved words had been around forever and no one else was building a national empire with them: by getting to the idea first and mixing their labor with it, they had transformed the bounty of nature into private property. This odious specter haunts much of the world today, and it has plenty of company, for this conception of property rights has sent millions to their graves.

The Eight Stages of Development

8 Stages of Development by Erik Erikson

Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development
Erikson maintained that personality develops in a predetermined order through eight stages of psychosocial development, from infancy to adulthood. During each stage, the person experiences a psychosocial crisis which could have a positive or negative outcome for personality development. These crises are of a psychosocial nature because they involve psychological needs of the individual (i.e., psycho) confronting society (i.e., social). According to the theory, successful completion of each stage results in a healthy personality and the acquisition of basic virtues. Basic virtues are characteristic strengths which the ego can use to resolve subsequent crises. Failure to successfully complete a stage can result in a reduced ability to complete further stages and therefore a more unhealthy personality and sense of self. The good neews is, these stages can still be resolved successfully at a later time.

Stage Psychosocial Crisis Basic Virtue Age
1. Trust vs. Mistrust Hope 0 - 1½
2. Autonomy vs. Shame Will 1½ - 3
3. Initiative vs. Guilt Purpose 3 - 5
4. Industry vs. Inferiourity Competency 5 - 12
5. Identity vs. Role Confusion Fidelity 12 - 18
6. Intimacy vs. Isolation Love 18 - 40
7. Generativity vs. Stagnation Care 40 - 65
8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair Wisdom 65+

Extending Maslow's Hierarchy

This article is a review of a book called The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher. There’s some interesting concepts brought forward on this piece we could reflect on in terms of our current globally imposed economic and social structure.
First, here are some excerpts from the article.

A stable material and social infrastructure gives us the time and space to thrive as individuals
In 1943 the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed his famous hierarchy of needs. The banal premise is that some needs are prior to others. We need food and shelter, for instance, before we can seek friendship and love. And only once we’ve attained those can we attain the summit of the pyramid: the Shangri-La of “self-actualization,” defined as doing what one “is fitted for” and becoming “more and more what one is.” This vision of human flourishing has become ubiquitous in the decades since Maslow’s paper. A regular feature of school curricula and self-help guides, it has filtered into our everyday understanding of the meaningful life: one in which a stable material and social infrastructure gives us the time and space to thrive as individuals.

Raising Responsible Kids

Let's talk about this quote (p. 3-5) from Positive Discipline: The Classic Guide to Helping Children Develop Self-Discipline, Responsibility, Cooperation, and Problem-Solving Skills.

This book is 25 years old, and so lots of its content has already been incorporated into teaching and parenting practice. Nevertheless, the pages quoted below intersect nicely with a question I've been asking myself lately, which is: how do the radical changes society has been through in the last 20-30 years affect how we raise our children? Regardless of in the US or Taiwan, the teachers parents I know struggle with how much freedom to give kids, how much guidance, and where and what kind of limits to impose. This passage gives an interesting insight into the cultural source of some of our challenges.


Why don't today's children develop the same kinds of responsibility and motivation that seemed more prevalent in children many years ago?
There are many possible explanations, such as broken homes, too much television, video games, and working mothers.  These factors are so common in our society today that the situation would seem rather hopeless if they really explained our current challenges with children (And we all know of many single and working parents who are doing a great job raising their children because they use effective parenting skills.) Rudolf Dreikurs had another theory. 

There are many major changes that have taken place in society over the past few years that more directly explain the differences in children today.  The outlook is very encouraging because, with awareness and desire, we can compensate for these changes and in doing so can also eliminate some of the problems that many think are caused by broken homes, too much television and working mothers.

Equality not dominance/submissiveness
The first major change is that adults no longer give children an example or model of submissiveness and obedience.  Adults forget that they no longer act the way they used to in the 'good old days'. Remember when Mom obediently did whatever Dad said, or at least gave the impression she did, because it was the culturally acceptable thing to do?  In the good old days few people questioned the idea that Dad's decisions were final.
Because of the human rights movement, this is no longer true.  Rudolf Dreikurs pointed out. "When Dad lost control of Mom, they both lost control of the children." All this means is that Mom quit giving the children a model of submissiveness.  This is progress. Many things about the 'good old days' were not so good.

Is it possible to live without the Big Five?

The 5 big tech companies have a big impact on our society, but how difficult it is to avoid them? The author of these articles tries to cut each of the tech companies out of her life, one each week, and then the last week, she tries to cut all of them out. She encounters hilarious and also thought-provoking obstacles each time.
The story is worth reading in full, but below I’ve pulled out some of the more interesting facts and conclusions, for us to discuss.


Amazon:
Amazon reportedly controls 50 percent of online commerce, which means half of all purchases made online in America, which is obscene.
Amazon is not just an online store—that’s not even the hardest thing to cut out of my life. Its global empire also includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the vast server network that provides the backbone for much of the internet, as well as Twitch.tv, the broadcasting behemoth that is the backbone of the online gaming industry, and Whole Foods, the organic backbone of the yuppie diet.
AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.

CDNs obscure AWSs
Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block.
With the VPN up and running, I start to wonder why so many sites still work. Airbnb, for example, is a famed user of AWS, but I can search for a Thanksgiving vacation home there. I email Airbnb to ask if it still uses AWS for hosting, and a spokesperson confirms the company does. (I also could have confirmed it with this cool tool, which tells you about the digital provenance of a website.)
That’s how Dhruv and I discover a major flaw in our blocking technique. It turns out many sites, in addition to using a company like AWS to host their digital content, employ a secondary service called a content delivery network, or CDN, to load web pages faster.
If a website uses AWS in combination with a non-Amazon CDN, my blocker sees the IP address used by the CDN and lets that AWS-hosted content slip through. When I check with Gizmodo Media Group’s tech team, I discover that our own sites are hosted by AWS and use Fastly as a CDN. Just like Airbnb, Gizmodo is sneaking past my blocker.

Bad News

We're going to play a game where we create fake news, and talk about it as we play.

Bad News

An article from the University of Cambridge about this game: Fake news ‘vaccine’ works: ‘pre-bunk’ game reduces susceptibility to disinformation

“We wanted to see if we could pre-emptively debunk, or ‘pre-bunk’, fake news by exposing people to a weak dose of the methods used to create and spread disinformation, so they have a better understanding of how they might be deceived.

“This is a version of what psychologists call ‘inoculation theory’, with our game working like a psychological vaccination.”

The study, published today in the journal Palgrave Communications, showed the perceived reliability of fake news before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news.

“We find that just fifteen minutes of gameplay has a moderate effect, but a practically meaningful one when scaled across thousands of people worldwide, if we think in terms of building societal resistance to fake news,” said van der Linden.

Narcissism

Narcissism has not only become a normalized social condition, it is increasingly being incentivized.

Lack of empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, superficiality, anger, rage, arrogance, and shallow emotion is a manifestation of pathological insecurity – an insecurity that is experienced at both the individual and societal level.

The paradox is that we value these patterns – and venerate them through social media, mainstream media, and consumerism, they represent a fast-track to financial and professional success. These traits are endemic in political, corporate, academic, and media leaders.

Our culture is immersed in tales of hope, redemption, and forgiveness, and while that's all very healthy, in the wrong hands hope and forgiveness may not represent an opportunity for growth or change or restoration, but rather permission to just keep things going as they are, because with narcissists forgiveness is interpreted as, "Hey let's just keep the status quo."