Re: OT: Inflammatory Post of the Week

Still thinking of Taleb. Permit me to add this quote from an interview
(Edge):

"By what I call the narrative fallacy, the media distorts our mental
map of the world by feeding us what can be made into a story that can
be squeezed into our minds. For instance (preventable) cancer, not
terrorism remains the greatest danger. The number of persons killed by
hurricanes, while consequential, is dwarfed by that of the thousands of
isolated daily victims dying in hospital beds. These are not
story-worthy, implying; the absence of attention on the part of the
press maps into disproportionately reduced resources allocated to their
welfare. The difference between actual, actuarially defined risks and
the perception of dangers is enormous - and, sadly, growing with the
globalization and the media, and our increased vulnerability to visual
stimuli."

People are traditionally rather incompetent at assigning hierachical
values to the risks they face. How many Americans have been killed by
terrorism since 2000? Compare that to the number of Americans killed
while driving in their SUV's, or even by drowning in thei past year
alone. Given our hysterical response to the threat of terrorism you'd
think we'd run screaming from the mere sight of an automobile. And yet
we treat the family car not as a deathtrap but as a trusted friend.
Likewise, mothers clutch their children's hands with a deathgrip at the
shopping mall; as though child abductors were following their every
step. And yet vastly more children are killed or injured each year
while riding in the family car than ever are abducted. And it's what we
perceive as the new risks that often has us running for our lives and
turning our lives upside down (9/11, SARS, Bird Flu, etc.) when the old
risks (cancer, heart disease, car accidents, etc.) remain far more
deadly to us. The "spare tire" that so many middle-aged men carry
around their waists ought to worry them far, far more than any threat
from Bin Laden. No, I'm not particularly frightened that I'll be killed
by terrorists. Instead, I'm afraid that my wife will someday discover a
suspicious lump in her breast. I'm afraid that heart disease will kill
me as it has most of the men in my family before the age of seventy.
I'm afraid of suddenly finding dark blood in my stool. I'm afraid of
slipping off a snowy road on my commute and wrapping my car around a
tree.

Something else pointed out by Taleb has long been a pet theme of mine.
Each day this planet of 6 billion people is scoured, top to bottom, by
vast networks of specialists employed to chronicle our very worst
behavior. If a child is abducted in Utah everyone of us knows of it
that evening. Every murder, every sordid detail gleaned from the entire
population is then condensed and presented each evening on our
televisions. Night after night we hear of the rapes, the homicides, and
the child abuse. The "news" usually ends with the anchor saying,
"That's the way the world is" or "That's a look at our world today,"
and so we sit there with our fingernails buried in the sofa, gasping
that this world has surely going to hell.

Bull***.

In fact, we are are more civilized today that at any time in our
previous history. Old timer's often say, "It wasn't like that in my
day". That's because they didn't hear about the awful things that
happened in their day. When I go out with my wife for the evening I
don't have to wear my sword on my waist. I don't have to carry a rifle
across my arm or slide a Bowie knife into my boot. Everywhere I go
people greet me with courtesy and when I leave they bid me farewell. My
Vermont neighbors are extraordinarily kind folk, and I've received the
same treatment at my wife's family home in Italy, in my travels across
Europe and having lived, as a child, two years in North Africa.

I'm not saying we live in a non-violent world. I'm not saying there
aren't hideous thing going on; civil wars, famine, poverty, etc. There
are truly awful aspects of this world only the awful parts are not
typically where we've come to look for them. I'm saying that instead of
harming me, people are working diligently at this moment to provide new
medical treatments for my benefit, farmers are out working the land to
put food into my belly, and so on and so forth. People are good to me
and I am good to them. I need them and they need me. Hell isn't other
people, as Sartre famously remarked. On the contrary, hell would be
this world without other people.

Walking down an otherwise deserted backroads one morning, I came across
a couple of schoolgirls waiting for their bus. I greeted them with a
smile and a cheery "Good Morning." Instead of returning my greeting
they reacted with visible fear. They shunk back and said nothing as I
passed by. Having no other pressing matters to dwell on, I walked along
wondering about what had just happened. I decided that it must have
been their parents who instructed them to fear strangers - especially
men. And this thought saddened me. If we teach our children to view
shrink away from strangers; to automatically treat them as a threat and
thereby not interact with them then we do our children a terrible
disfavor. We instill in them an "us" and "them" view of the world which
is a detriment to us all. By shrinking inward in search of safety we
lose the sense of our universal brotherhood. Not one man in
ten-thousand would think of harming a child, but if we teach our
children to exclude the ten-thousand from their lives in order to
protect themselves from the one, well...it is a cause for sadness. I
could have told those girls the name of a songbirds just across the
road. I could have remarked upon the beauty of the morning light coming
through the trees and, perhaps, recited my favorite line from Tennyson:
"Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies
open unto me." But they chose safety instead. Sterile safety.


The last time I went home to see my extended family, I found my nephew
sitting alone with his little video game whilst the rest of us were
sitting aroud the table laughing and enjoying each other's company. He
was playing "Grand Theft Auto," a game I probably needn't describe for
you. I asked him to talk about the violence, and he assured his Uncle
Mike that playing the game dosen't make him want to go out and car-jack
or randomly gun-down pregnant women on the street (as he did in the
game). I suspect he's right about that. And yet in a broader sense,
what he's doing is not so different from the adults who spend their
evenings watching CSI Miami, CSI Peoria, CSI Mayberry....in other
words, using murder as entertainment. I agree with my nephew that
violent video games or an evening spent viewing murder as entertainment
probably won't drive the average guy to commit a felony. People are
generally clever enough to seperate a sordid fantasy from their actual
lives. And yet, I think it does indeed have a sneaking, pernicious
effect on us. For example, as we watched George W. Bush on our
television propose that we invade a country and start a devastating
war, viewers ought to have shreiked in horror - as though he'd just
publicly proposed having anal sex with his twin daughters. We ought to
have run outside and banged our pots and pans. We ought to have but on
our boots and converged on the city square. But no, we remained sitting
passively, as we do for our daily dose of television violence.
Afterwards, perhaps, we switched over to CSI Las Vegas. The violence we
use as entertainment seeps into us so insidiously that we scarcely
sense it. It becomes part of the woodwork. Think of the dairy farmer
asked by the city tourist, "What on earth is that horrid smell?"
Replied the farmer, "What smell?"

It's us - it's we acquiescent sheeple, moreso than the wolves among us,
that bear responsibilty for the worst attrocities in this world.

Mike

.