What? Your life is not perfect? Your friendships and romantic interests sometimes become strained and they occasionally fall apart completely? Does your aging house need many types of maintenance and repair work? Are you concerned about your finances? Is your body failing in minor and major ways as you age? Do your digital devices often need new trouble-shooting, upgrades and passwords? Are the people you care about the most so worried about these same things that these worries and struggles are the topics that dominate your conversations?
No one ever promised us that our lives would be lived happily ever after. We have no right to believe that we would never be required to work hard to maintain our physical and social environments. These daily unrelenting challenges should actually be seen as opportunities because these "burdens" are not distractions from our lives. These "burdens" are the essence of Life. As Sam Harris notes in his thought experiment below, if you take away all the things that make our lives irritating, exhausting and scary, nothing of value remains.
We are not in "normal" times, but there is so much for many of us to be thankful. If you are looking for these good things, you will find them everywhere. Those who are looking only for problems and imperfections will miss most of the good things. On this Thanksgiving I find myself thinking of those countless people who strive daily to reach out to each other in reassuring and civil ways. Doing this takes many forms, including simply offering friendly greetings and encouragement (at a distance) to oftentimes randomly encountered fellow humans. But it also includes visiting your loved ones who are shut-in, living alone, hanging on, waiting to get to the other side, who suffer from the loud dull pain of social isolation.
I repeatedly think of the millions of people who have worked so hard to developed digital tools that have allowed so many of us to connect to each other. Thanks to incredibly smart people, my elderly mother and sisters have had a weekly Zoom visit each Sunday that has turned out to be a highlight of each week. I also feel deep appreciation for those many thousands of health care workers (including a recent graduate nurse named JuJu Vieth--my daughter) and STEM experts who have worked around the clock to nurture the onslaught of COVID patients and to give all of us extraordinarily sudden hope that a vaccine might be around the corner. We will get through this as a people. That's a given. It's time to raise the bar a bit, though, and aim to get through this in non-divisive ways that make each of us proud to be fellow Americans.
There's a lot of accusations that Americans on both the political right and left are now members of "Cults." What exactly is a cult? After doing a bit of research, I found these helpful descriptions / definitions / traits of Cult Leaders and their followers from the Cult Education Institute. The following material is from the CEI webpage titled "Warning Signs":
Ten warning signs of a potentially unsafe group/leader.
Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.
Followers feel they can never be "good enough".
The group/leader is always right.
The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.
Ten warning signs regarding people involved in/with a potentially unsafe group/leader.
Extreme obsessiveness regarding the group/leader resulting in the exclusion of almost every practical consideration.
Individual identity, the group, the leader and/or God as distinct and separate categories of existence become increasingly blurred. Instead, in the follower's mind these identities become substantially and increasingly fused--as that person's involvement with the group/leader continues and deepens.
Whenever the group/leader is criticized or questioned it is characterized as "persecution".
Uncharacteristically stilted and seemingly programmed conversation and mannerisms, cloning of the group/leader in personal behavior.
Dependency upon the group/leader for problem solving, solutions, and definitions without meaningful reflective thought. A seeming inability to think independently or analyze situations without group/leader involvement.
Hyperactivity centered on the group/leader agenda, which seems to supercede any personal goals or individual interests.
A dramatic loss of spontaneity and sense of humor.
Increasing isolation from family and old friends unless they demonstrate an interest in the group/leader.
Anything the group/leader does can be justified no matter how harsh or harmful.
Former followers are at best-considered negative or worse evil and under bad influences. They can not be trusted and personal contact is avoided.
What are the Health Effects of Lead? Lead can affect almost every organ and system in your body. In children six years old and younger even low levels of lead in the blood of children is poisonous. It can result in behavior and learning problems, lower IQ and hyperactivity, slowed growth and many other problems. Beginning in 1965, it took the heroic efforts by geochemist Clair Cameron Patterson (and see here) to convince the U.S. Government (over systematic misinformation from companies who profited from the sale of products using lead) that lead in the environment was dangerous to humans.
Tristan Harris argues that social media is the new lead. Instead of brain damage, however, social media causes people to distrust each other, making it impossible for people from the opposing tribes to work with each other or compromise with each other. Social Media is thus causing a massive breakdown of our political system. The following exchange begins at 85:21):
TH: Let's replace lead with problem solving capacity . . . Imagine that we have a societal IQ or a societal problem-solving capacity the US has a societal IQ, Russia has a societal IQ, Germany has a societal IQ: How good is a country at solving its problems? Now imagine, what does social media do to our societal IQ?
JR: It distorts our ideas. It gives us a bunch of false narratives. It fills us with misinformation.
TH: It makes it impossible to agree with each other, and in a democracy if you don't agree with each other and you can't even do compromise . . . People recognize that politics was invented to avoid warfare. So we have compromise and understanding so that we don't physically become violent with each other. We have compromise and conversation. If social media makes compromise, conversation and shared understanding and shared truth impossible, it doesn't drop our societal IQ by four points. It drops it to zero, because you can't solve any problem, whether it's human trafficking or poverty or climate issues or racial injustice. Whatever it is that you care about, it depends on us having some shared view about what we agree on.
Ten years ago, who would have ever believed that in the middle of a pandemic that has killed as many Americans as 1,000 commercial airliners crashing and burning within a period of 8 months (each of them carrying 250 passengers), many of us would have preferred political leaders who would falsely tell us that there was not a serious pandemic and we could simply go on with our lives? In the abstract, that proposition would have been absurd, but here we are.
Here is Christopher Christakis, a voice I trust on both the medical issues and on the political landscape regarding COVID (click through to hear the short statement).
If you'd like to hear more from Christakis, listen to Making Sense podcast #222 (with Sam Harris):
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