what you believe vs. which side you're on

I was as surprised as anyone by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. I remember being in a restaurant not too long afterward and overhearing a conversation between two women, one of whom was trying to make sense of the fact that her parents had voted Trump. She kept saying, “but they’re good people! They’ve always been good people!”

Many of us can probably relate to that woman, trying to figure out how someone we know voted for a candidate whose values don’t seem aligned with their own. I admit, I didn’t have these kinds of conversations in person, but in looking around social media I kept running into a few general rationalizations:

“Sure, he’s said some awful things, but other people have said worse things than that.”

“I’m voting for him because he’ll do X. He’s not really going to do Y - that’s just something he said to get votes.”

“He’s no saint, but he’s the type of person we need.”

I was really blown away by the contortions some people were willing to twist into to make their vote make sense. It made me wonder, “do you really know what you believe, or do you just know which side you’re on?”

I realized once I put it into words that if I was going to ask that question of others, I had to ask it of myself first. I don’t mean the minutiae of “do you support a capital gains tax on blah blah blah.” I mean, what are my beliefs about freedom? Or democracy? Not many people would say they were against freedom or democracy, but what happens when the freedoms of others make us feel unsafe, or democracy starts to feel like rule by mob?

These are obviously huge questions that I can’t even begin to do justice to yet (or probably ever). Hopefully over the next few months I can put everything I’ve been learning and thinking about these subjects together into something cohesive. I’m not trying to write a dissertation or anything, I just want to organize my thoughts and state my current beliefs clearly.

Anyways, what made me start thinking about all this again was something the professor said in my lecture series about America after the Cold War. At one point he casually mentioned how Bill Clinton was chosen by the Democratic Leadership Council as a candidate who could move the party back toward the center and win back white middle-class voters. It was news to me, and it caught my attention because I find the constant shifting of the platforms of the two major parties very interesting. All the more reason to be aware of what I believe instead of just which side I'm on.

emotional economics

Let’s play a game. Imagine you and another person each go into separate rooms. The person in the other room is given an envelope containing $100. You’re told that the person in the other room gets to decide how to split the money with you. They will take the money they want, and leave their offer to you in the envelope, which will then be brought to you by a third party. You can accept or reject the offer. If you accept, you walk away with the amount of money the other person offered you. However, if you reject it, you and the other person both have to give your money back, and walk away with nothing.

What’s the lowest amount of money you would accept? If you’re like most people, you would gladly accept $50. You might even be willing to accept $30. But would you accept $5? $1? Again, if you’re like most people, probably not. But why not? How did you arrive at the minimum offer you would accept?

This problem, called the “ultimatum game,” is widely discussed in business and economics, because it flies in the face of a core assumption a lot of businesspeople and economists make: that people will generally do what’s rational to maximize their individual economic gain. A purely rational person would accept one dollar, because they would walk away from the game a dollar richer. But most people don’t do this, which means there is something else at work in their decision-making.

Let’s look at another example. In this game, one person is given a mug, and told they can either keep the mug as a gift, or sell it. Another person is simply shown the mug, and asked how much they would be willing to pay for it. In this game, people who were given the mug placed its value almost twice as high as people who were shown the identical mug.

This is an example of the “endowment effect,” the finding that people generally value what they already own much more than if they didn’t already own it.

You can tweak the endowment effect to make it work in favor of the seller too. Suppose you see an ad for a used guitar, best offer, with just a general description and a picture. Now suppose you see an ad for the same guitar with the same description and picture, but now the seller has added a story about when they first bought the guitar, and descriptions of the many times they played that guitar on stage. Odds are you would make a much better starting offer if you saw the second ad.

The lesson you could take from all of this is that people are irrational, emotional, easily-deceived creatures, but I think that would be a lazy and misanthropic conclusion. Instead, we can think a little deeper and discover the hidden logic behind these seemingly illogical behaviors. With our used guitar example, it’s easy to see that the added story behind the guitar shows how much value it has to its current owner, which probably makes you willing to pay a little more.

Now suppose instead of talking about guitars and mugs, we’re talking about something vital and perishable, like food. If we were living in a less technologically advanced era when food was more scarce, we would probably place great value on the food we already had stored. Acquiring more food might not always be worth the risk of going hunting or going to war. This could help explain why our brains naturally place greater value on what we already own.

The ultimatum game is a little harder to explain, and people have different theories on it. My own theory is pretty simple, and it starts with the anger we can all imagine feeling if we were offered that single dollar. That anger comes from a sense of injustice. “No,” we think, “you can’t just take $99 and leave me with only one. I’d rather we both walked away with nothing.” To me, this goes back to the lecture on “Retribution and Revenge” from Daniel Breyer’s course on the dark side of human nature: we are driven to get even with people who have wronged us because a society where wrong-doing goes unpunished is not stable. Most of us feel it’s worth a dollar (or five or ten or twenty) to teach that other person a lesson about the kind of society we ought to live in.

All of this can be summed up by a quote from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: “We are not necessarily thinking machines; we are feeling machines that think.” That’s not a bad thing, either--there’s a kind of wisdom to our emotional decision-making.

green space

Picture from me and my wife's hike up Whittaker Wilderness Peak Trail

"As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens." -Oliver Sacks (source: James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter)

Lately I’ve been hearing two pieces of advice for dealing with quarantine that needle me a little. The first is to go outside often and get some fresh air. The second is to make a space in your home that is designated just for work.

Neither of these things is easy for me and my wife in our little one-bedroom breezeway apartment. We had been planning on starting our home-buying search about this time. One of the things we talked about was yard space, and we agreed that we wanted a little room to garden and enjoy the outdoors, but not a huge lawn to mow. Maybe just enough grass to lie down on.

I can’t help feeling a little bitter that we’ve had to put off that dream. I think we’re all learning a lesson about the value of outdoor space right now. A few of the folks I work with seem to really take it for granted. I guess I did too before my wife and I got into hiking. A few years ago, the closing of trailheads probably wouldn’t have even been on our radar.

It’s important for me to remind myself that if not being able to hike or look at real estate are the worst hardships I’ve had to deal with, I’ve gotten off really lucky. Yesterday we were finally able to get out to Cougar Mountain and enjoy a pretty quiet hike.

I hope that we as a country (or a state, or a city) come out of this crisis with a renewed sense of the importance of greenspace. I also hope we start thinking about ways that we can make it a little more affordable for everyone to be able to own a little bit of outdoor space, where they can garden and have privacy and pride of ownership. It’s all well and good to tell people how important it is to spend time outdoors and in nature, but we need to make sure that stays possible.

parasite

Damn, this movie kinda messed me up. It’s rare to go into a movie with such high expectations because of all the buzz, and have those expectations beat. I think what stunned me most was the humanity of it, the way it made me really feel for all these characters, even as they did some really terrible things. It was able to evoke that weird, jealous, delirious feeling of being a poor kid at a rich kid’s party, in a way that made me feel really nostalgic for some reason. It spoke directly to our present situation of inequality, but it also felt very timeless. It almost felt like a story by Charles Dickens or F. Scott Fitzgerland or something.

As always, it reminded me of the course I’m listening to right now, about the American West. The lecturer keeps returning to the point of how economic and technological progress was generally good for society overall, but left individual lives destroyed in its wake. For instance, farming on the Great Plains produced a surplus of food that drove prices down, which was a net positive effect for most people in the country. However, it was bad for the farmers themselves, whose farms yielded less and less profit due to overproduction, and who often ended up working their whole lives for next to nothing (not to mention the Native Americans who were robbed of their homes, cultures and ways of life by the westward expansion of the US).

I feel like this is what every argument I’ve ever had about capitalism, ever since high school, has boiled down to: one person telling me that the Kim families of the world depend on the Park families, and me saying the Kims and the Parks should be equals. Instead of Mr. Kim driving Mr. Park around, they should each have their own car (or be carpool buddies!). A lot of people scoff at this idea, or get outright pissed off about it, and I think that’s funny. I find it hard to believe that anyone who has ever had less than, felt less than, and been treated less than somebody else could watch “Parasite” and not have at least some sympathy for Mr. Kim.

It reminds me of the essay “The Freedom to be Free” by Hannah Arendt. There’s a quote in that essay from John Adams:

“Wherever men, women, or children are to be found, whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low...ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approve and respected by the people about him and within his knowledge.”

Arendt goes on to say:

“It is the desire to excel which makes men love the company of their peers and spurs them on into the public realm...this kind of freedom demands equality, it is possible only amongst peers.”

No matter how hard Mr. Kim works, he will never be on an equal footing with Mr. Park. He’ll always be Mr. Park’s employee being paid extra for a favor, not his buddy helping him out. He’ll never be able to have a real conversation with Mr. Park without “crossing the line.” He’ll always have that “smell.” Mr. Park may like Mr. Kim, but he’ll never respect him. The fact that a character screams the word “respect” right before the climactic moment drives that point home.

Of course none of that excuses what Mr. Kim (or the rest of the Kim family) did, but I think that’s the beauty of this movie: it doesn’t make a moral point either way. It portrays these people so well that you understand exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing, even if you don’t think it’s right. You may not agree with it, but you kind of respect it.

it's always been like this

One day around the time I was finishing college, my dad and I were at my grandparents’ house, watching the news with my grandpa. I don’t remember what specifically they were talking about, but it was shortly after Obama’s election.

At some point my dad said, “I don’t remember things ever being this polarized.” It was one of those moments you know is going to stick in your memory, even as it’s happening. It was an uncharacteristically reflective and vulnerable thing for my dad to say. He rarely talks politics or expresses uncertainty--it was strange to hear him do both at once.

My grandpa, in his usual way, muttered something about how “it’s always been like this.” At the time, that seemed sort of wise and comforting. Grandpa’s seen it all, I thought. Things aren’t that bad, they just seem bad because I’m young.

Looking back on it now though, I see what my grandpa said as a little dismissive. Sure, politics have always been divisive. It’s important to have a thorough understanding of history, especially recent history, to be able to put current events in context. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into the trap of believing that things are worse than they are, and pining for a mythological bygone era.

But on the other hand, we also shouldn’t let ourselves become apathetic toward current events, writing off real cultural shifts as “politics as usual.” In retrospect, my dad’s casual remark was a pretty important observation about the changing state of political discourse at the time. I think it may have also been a little window into his own evolving political views. I wonder what his other thoughts and feelings were between 9/11 and the great recession.

I thought about this moment again recently after my wife told me about an interview she read with Fran Lebowitz, where she said “it is a very startling thing to be my age—I’m sixty-nine—and to have something happen that doesn’t remind you of anything else.” I guess everyone reacts to that startling feeling differently. I think some people, like my grandpa, react to it by underreacting.

It makes me thankful that my own parents have remained curious, thoughtful people as they’ve gotten older. I hope I can do the same as I get older myself.

the stories we tell ourselves

“Stories are ordered from the beginning in a way that we can only do by virtue of hindsight, by looking back afterwards and trying to make sense of everything that came prior. Therefore, when we recount our own lives as stories, as we so often tend to do, we’re basically fictionalizing what really was.”

This quote is from a video on the YouTube channel “Like Stories of Old,” and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. The lecture series I just started about the American West starts by making a similar point: whenever we look back at history, we tend to think of what came later as somehow being inevitable. As an example, the lecturer talks about the shape of the United States on the map. We’re so familiar with that shape that when we look at a map of North America without national boundaries, we project that shape onto the map in our minds. When we think about the formation of the country and its expansion westward, we still have that national shape in mind, as if it was already there and just needed to be discovered. It’s so easy to forget that the boundaries could have been drawn up many different ways.

The one I always think about is World War II. The story I constructed as a kid, from other stories I was told, is so baked into my brain that it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for the people actually living through that experience, who didn’t yet know how things were going to turn out. For instance, the citizens of London during the Blitz, who lived in a city under constant assault by terrifying weapons. It’s easy for us now to look at the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster and mythologize the bravery of those people. It’s a lot harder to imagine the terror they must have felt, at a time when defeat seemed a lot more likely than victory. The European nations were falling one by one to the Nazi war machine, the Soviet Union was still an ally of Germany, and the United States had not even entered the war.

I thought a lot about the Londoners of WWII when the COVID-19 situation started to heat up. I remember going into Trader Joe’s one morning and seeing empty shelves and slightly-panicked faces. It got scary for a while there. There were rumors that we’d all be ordered to stay in our homes, and that we’d need to have enough food to last several weeks. But then the governor announced that people would still be allowed to go grocery shopping, and Trader Joe’s stocked up and started letting people in a few at a time, and everything turned out alright.

That’s my story, anyway. As things have started returning to normal, I can already feel myself forgetting about the fear and uncertainty I felt during those early weeks as I put the story together in my head. Now that I know everything turned out okay for me and those close to me, I can look back and think, “yeah, I was a little worried, but I knew things would work out.”

It makes me wonder what stories other people will tell themselves about the crisis. What about my mom-in-law's boyfriend, who thought from the beginning that everyone, my wife and I included, was overreacting? I’m sure we'll be hearing his I-told-you-so’s next time we see him. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, what about my friend’s brother, who made apocalyptic predictions and brought his family and a bunch of loaded firearms to his friend’s farm to “wait it out”? He’ll probably find a different way of rationalizing his reaction and making sense of the crisis in retrospect.

If mythologizing the past is something our brains just naturally do, we have to be active in thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. We can't let ourselves believe that our version of events, the narrative we've strung together with the benefit of hindsight, is absolute truth.

old men

A few weeks ago during a family Zoom call, my uncle--my mom’s brother--made a joke. His connection wasn’t great so I didn’t catch the whole thing, but the premise was Spanish Flu and COVID-19 sitting at a bar. COVID-19 says something about bringing attention to income inequality, and Spanish Flu rolls its eyes and says “millennials.”

My sister and I couldn’t stop talking about it afterward. A few months ago my uncle also made a mildly off-color remark about gender-non-binary folks. And this is not “that one conservative uncle” we’re talking about--he’s a gay man who came of age in the ‘80’s.

It makes me think of a lecture series I listened to recently about conservatism. One of the recurring themes throughout the series is how conservatism is resistant to radical change and prefers what is familiar, but change is inevitable, so as the world changes, what is familiar changes with it. In the late 18th century, being politically conservative in the US and the UK meant being royalist and anti-capitalist. Capitalism was a radical new idea that “conservatives” were generally opposed to. It wasn’t until capitalism had been established for a few generations and communism emerged as a revolutionary alternative that being politically conservative came to mean being pro-capitalism and anti-communism.

It’s true that as people get older, they tend to become more politically conservative, but it’s not so much that our political beliefs change. It has more to do with the world changing around us. The radical changes that excited us when we were younger become the norm, and new alternatives emerge to replace them.

I don’t mean to pick on my uncle here, but what he said struck me as a stark example of how quickly we can let ourselves get jaded and complacent. It wasn’t that long ago that he was a young man fighting for the rights of gay folks, and already he seems comfortable chuckling at young people who are fighting for their own rights. I love him, I respect him, I know he probably meant nothing by that joke, but it made me mad, and I keep thinking about it. I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg of my feelings about the generational divide right now.

The best I can do is try to be aware of that shift as it happens in me, and acknowledge that it’s just a part of human nature.

art is hard

When I was in first grade I wrote a poem about America for a class assignment. The poem was a big deal. My parents and teachers loved it. I wrote more poems, and they loved those, too. When our principal retired, I wrote a poem for him and read it at a school assembly. I became Poetry Kid.

I learned two false beliefs from this experience. The first was that art is easy. It comes out of you fully formed, perfect the first time. I carried this belief through my high school and college years when I played in bands. I didn’t revise or re-work songs I wrote. I didn’t even like re-recording. So what if we made a mistake? Leave it in! That’s punk rock! However it came out is how it was meant to be!

Like a lot of smart kids, I didn’t learn how to practice, how to make mistakes, how to fail and try again. When I got older and read books like Stephen King’s “On Writing” that talked about the discipline of art, I ignored the advice. I continued waiting for lightning bolts of inspiration. I wrote for as long as the charge lasted, and when the spark was gone, I did something else.

The second false belief I learned was that art is for other peoples’ approval. It was for contests, school assemblies, or crowds of drunk college students. There was no point in producing something that other people couldn’t consume. People had to appreciate what I made, to give it value. When I stopped writing poems about America and retiring principals and started writing stories about shape-shifting aliens and barbarian-women fighting giant crabs, I didn’t get the accolades anymore (one time I handed my mom several chapters of what I thought was my sci-fi magnum opus; the only thing I remember her saying when she finished was “it was very violent”). So I stopped creating.

I’m still unlearning these beliefs. I’ve spent the last two years developing new habits and patterns. I got on a workout regimen. I started meditating in the morning. I’m discovering the value of doing things I don’t feel like doing. I’m learning how to stick to a course instead of letting myself be blown around by my moods. I’m finding freedom in routine.

Now I’m applying the discipline I’ve learned to writing. I hope I can make a habit of this, and that it’ll help me organize some of the thoughts I’ve been having about everything I’ve been reading and learning about over the last few years.

kentucky route zero

There’s a scene in the game Kentucky Route Zero where the game’s protagonist, Conway, is touring a whiskey distillery run by glowing orange skeletons. Conway came to the distillery to ask for directions, but the skeletons there seem to think he is a new hire. There is a feeling of mounting dread as you guide Conway through the cavernous structure, following a skeleton who explains how all the employees of the distillery are each working off some sort of debt.

The tour ends back where it started, and the tour guide offers Conway a shot of the “top shelf” whiskey, as a sort of “welcome aboard.” Conway, who we have learned over the course of the game so far is a recovering alcoholic, tries one last time to explain that he is not here for a job, but the skeleton doesn’t seem to understand. Finally there is just one option for you to click on: “Drink.” As you try to move your cursor around the screen, looking for some other way out, the cursor is taken out of our control, pulled back to that final option.

Not only does it break the rules of video games, it breaks the rules of computer interfacing in general. The experience of moving your mouse and watching the cursor disobey you is surprisingly unsettling. When the first act of Kentucky Route Zero was released, the trend in video games was open worlds, endless choices, and multiple endings. In contrast, the inexorability of the “drink” moment hits like a punch in the gut. It made me laugh the way tense moments in horror movies sometimes make me laugh, and the game is full of moments like this.

Kentucky Route Zero is a game that was released in five acts over the course of nine years, starting in 2011. The concluding act was just released last month. It begins with Conway, a delivery driver making his last delivery, pulling into a gas station for directions. While the sun sets in the background, the attendant tells Conway he needs to take “the zero” to get to his destination. Night falls, weird things start happening, and it becomes apparent that the zero is not an ordinary highway. We learn early on that there was a bad wreck nearby, and it’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that Conway died in that wreck and is now a spirit in some sort of limbo. But that’s not it. There are no such easy answers in this story.

What unfolds is a journey through an otherworld. The zero doesn’t appear to be the afterlife--it’s more like an axis running through different planes of existence. People are known to travel back and forth along the mysterious highway, between here and another place. At one point another character tells us that the people in this other place are like us, but different. Glowing orange skeletons aren’t even the strangest things you encounter on your quest.

Playing Kentucky Route Zero feels like playing Myst when I was a kid--the weird mixture of curious wonder and hair-raising uneasiness. I can’t decide if I’m longing to visit this place or if I’m dreading what’s around the next corner, but I want to go deeper. Like Myst, there are people who went before you into this place, and you need to find out what happened to them. Like all great surreal adventures, it’s more than a series of “OMG WTF” moments--there’s a thread running through it all. The themes of people struggling with debt, losing touch with family, and trying to find home are all recurrent, and deeply poignant for a story that started shortly after the great recession, and is ending during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s hard to play a game like this in the evening, then get up in the morning and try to work--especially when I do both at the same desk. But it’s worth the struggle to experience a truly groundbreaking example of video games as art.