[1224] It Takes A Village

I woke up this morning with the sentiment, “It takes a village” echoing in my head.

Yesterday, I arrived at a farm that belongs to my new employers. According to him, it’s only 2 years old. There’s all of the classic farm animals besides cows. When I got there, a 15-year-old was driving a tractor with a bush hog. This is another social work job, mentoring, tutoring, case-managing, but this one comes with the actual life-infrastructure and physical engagement that children need to properly learn things.

While me and one of the owner’s talked, I was left with the 10-year-old younger brother of the boy on the tractor. He’d only been at the farm for 2 days. He asked how I got so tall as he wants to be a center or power forward in the NBA. I told him it’s mostly genetics, but that he also needs to eat right and avoid sugar. He proceeded to list the heights of a dozen family members on either of his parents’ sides. When the owner got back, he set the boy to a task of breaking down a little pen that got twisted by a recent storm. He wasn’t great at it, and the “little” things that speak to success or failure really get highlighted.

This farm is located pretty close to the Indianapolis “normal neighborhood,” off a busy road, space. The kids that come here aren’t generally doing manual labor, and if they’re with a program like this have areas in which they or their family are struggling fairly significantly. The many things that you may take for granted in how to take down and move a small animal pen don’t exist in the mental framework of a child like this. He’s likely to pinch his fingers pushing in the little metal button that snaps into place. He’s not thinking about how to stack the polls in the cart so they don’t spill over the sides as he wheels it back to the barn.

I think most good parents are going to have thousands of examples like this in watching their kids grow up. It becomes too-obvious how much is missing and what else is needed in order for your child to thrive and survive. I don’t think it excuses, but I think it meaningfully accounts, for why so many immigrant families in particular put such an emphasis on working hard or getting extremely educated. Not that long ago, the alternative was pretty regular and visceral oppression and death. You need to be able to do things correctly. You need to be able to persist. A place like a farm will wise you up to that and humble your worst ideas very quickly.

Whatever you can say about the kids that find themselves under the care of a social worker, it’s ten-fold for their parents. The community is deficient. The family structure or set of assumptions is broken. There’s not just one messy or evil person going around sabotaging otherwise perfectly functioning spaces. As inclined as we are to bogey-man things, this framing always let’s us off the hook. This takes the direct impact of policy-makers and not-so-hidden agendas and keeps them abstract things to fight about.

There aren’t a lot of good-paying meaning-imbuing jobs that can account for the extent of needs. There aren’t enough institutions protecting and espousing a genuine education. There aren’t enough protections and long-term support systems that also don’t make people dependents. What we eat breaks our processing power and energy levels. What we watch reduces complexity into dopamine fixes. What we say keeps us trapped in circular self-sabotaging illogical blame games. We’re addicted, isolated, and constantly searching for heroes often ignoring the immediate fight we should be having every day.

Without a village, the loudest win. It’s a math equation at that point. The most violent, wins. The most diseased infects. The most money dictates. The village is the interplay and competition. If you refuse to play the game and stop competing, the worst wins. This is why we regulate markets. I think this is why we give mystical faithful beings codified evil to battle into infinity. We know we’re shaped by an immense amount of seemingly immeasurable forces, and individually it’s impossible to sort them out. In the interplay, we can mutually arrive at conclusions that enrich our knowledge and immune systems. It looks like teaching a kid how to stack things correctly. It looks like planting an idea seed that you shouldn’t eat too much sugar.

I’ve felt this problem for at least as long as my college cohort complained about how bleak the world looked at the time. There was a lot of discussion about what a little eco-village might look like. There was a lot of pain being felt about the lack of jobs. We stopped really hanging out, even before people flooded to Colorado and California. We neglected the best fix to the ever-atomized landscape provided by our phones, algorithms, and now A.I. We don’t challenge, learn, and meaningfully engage. We scroll through content. We default to irony. We allow ourselves to be crafted by forces that have nothing to do with why anyone would choose to stay alive.

Are you working because you love your job? Or are you paying the bills? Are you going to school and learning about how to craft and invest in the future? Or are you managing, poorly, debt and trying to look a certain way towards an employer who’s itching to outsource your job? Are you “dating,” or desperate to feel safe and find a narrative about being single, or childless, or “complicated” that doesn’t feel like a self-defeating parody? Would you drink the water in the nearest lake or river to you? Are you exhausted and checked-out trying to anticipate the fallout of “political” consequences?

Where’s your village? Who is in your tribe? Feckless democrats? A family more defined by the addictions and denial than anything passing for “love?” A friend group who sees each other once a year or less? A job that might cost you more in time, self-respect, and if you’re me, somehow MONEY, than you’re getting out of it? I’ve been in a dozen work environments where no one cared to unionize. I’ve watched friend groups deteriorate well after my exit. I’ve watched my family eat itself alive, next on the menu my alcoholic cousin gearing up to follow his older brother into death.

It’s our village’s complicity, a story told at every individual’s level, in how they respond, or don’t, to their suffering. Do they fight to protect the gifts and privileges and push what they’ve been given into even more, or wait for someone to “fix it?” No one is coming. No one was coming back in 2011 when all my friends pretended they were going to be a coherent accountable group. No is coming today or tomorrow. No one is going to teach you how to “adult” in a way that fights fascism one farm-lesson at a time.

For me, it’s always returning to what I have to do today, this hour, or when I write, this moment. I have to try to account, first. I have to try to articulate what I think is the problem altogether. I have to see my agency play out word by word. I have to control, at least one narrative, and look for evidence across time that I and what I’m responsible for exist independent of the amount of noise. It’s been work the whole time. It’s something that, were I not holding myself accountable to it, no one would do for me. I can take my existence on my land, my experiments entrepreneurally, and my patience and exploration for places to belong to for granted. I can also break them down and see them as a series of next-best-steps I could define about how to “deal with it all.”

When are we going to rebuild the village? When are we going to recognize the values haven’t changed? They’re no more complicated than the difference between specific practice and excuse-ridden theory. The excuses trap you in a job that doesn’t sustain you. They trap you in a family that exploits you. They trap you in a rental you’ll never own. They trap you under political leadership that sends you off cliffs financially, socially, and psychologically. What’s your, “This is how you stack the polls” thing you’re not doing for yourself right now? It has to be done thousands of times, together, right now, while the world continues to burn down around us. What’s the alternative?

[1223] Master Debaters

Part of me thinks each time I write I’m looking to round out a “grand theory of communication.” I don’t know what that means. I do know that I continue to notice patterns and experience frustrations in talking with people that steer me in a direction that there’s a better way to account for how we exchange information.

I have a really good friend who, I think it’s still “innocent,” will do this:

I’ll ask her, “If you had 10 people, 5 of them white, 5 of them black, would you be able to separate them into 2 groups based on color?”

Her, “I don’t know if they’re actually black or white! I would just feel so uncomfortable and wrong!”

Sure, but, that’s not really the point. It obscures the simple for the sake of the moral posturing. She knows, I know, we’re all mutts. She knows, I know, I’m not fishing for some racist conclusion. She knows, I know, colors are their own mystery and exist all along the color spectrum. She invites an infinite list of needless-to-qualify sentiments that obscures or obstructs what, at least everyone in our high school, could figure out in self-segregating at lunch. We also both know that she, and I, and nearly anyone on the planet, could do it easily.

This is also a friend who, at least initially struggles to notice characteristics that might be shared by different ethnic groups in general. This could be a form of prosopagnosia. I find I struggle to distinguish cars, maybe similarly defining mechanisms are implicated. Again, she knows, I know, nothing is perfect as there is no archetype “Greek” or “Italian” or “Somalian.” But it would be weird to pretend like traits aren’t shared and passed down, and that some people look like the groups they, in fact, belong to. When I go to Serbian fest, I see my uncles everywhere. When I go to Italian fest, I see my aunts and grandma everywhere.

I don’t know if there’s a discussion that even brushes against racial or ethnic differences that isn’t immediately derailed, so you can reasonably criticize me leading with these examples. They do give you a most visceral window into the nature of the immediacy of the general conversational derailment.

The classic space where this occurs is in religion “debates.” Legions line up to argue facts, science, history, genetics, evolution, psychology, chemistry, philosophy…and they don’t understand they’re up against “faith.” Hours of exchange improperly coded as “discussion” and “debate” and “reason.” No, you’ve been banging your head against their faith. Any topic for any reason can be subsumed by your faith in it.

I think we’re wired to protect “just whatever it is I believe right now.” I don’t recall what the more scientific or accurate way of saying this is. It’s not enough to call it “bias” of our own opinion. It’s deeper than that. There’s a survival mode invoked in the emotional experience of being challenged, contradicted, or “threatened.” We dress up that reactivity in myriad ways, but at bottom it’s a defensive reaction, not an owned and methodically accounted for and relayed relationship. We feel insecure, lash out or shut down.

I listened to comedian Dave Smith word-salad ramble against Coleman Hughes recently. The unironic “I know you are but what am I” sentiments flew out of Dave. The “whataboutisms” the “Sure, but” as though the point didn’t just land or wasn’t true enough to negate and move on from the lazy and incomplete thing Dave just said. It was a masterclass in showcasing how someone who is cursed with an impressive selective memory has no capacity to organize the soup in his brain.

But, there’s an extremely small group of people who are going to listen to the 3.5 hours of that exchange, recognize what’s happening, or translate what’s happening in a way that anyone else might understand it too. What purpose did it serve? Other “intellectuals” got to dip into the pool of “debate” and take their mind off whatever’s plaguing them that day. It’s not “helping” the “public conversation.” It’s another errant play by the attention economy to capture yours.

I do think there’s utility in serious thinkers and academics getting into these kinds of exchanges with idiots, frauds, comedians, propoghandists, and apologists. I don’t think there’s a broader theory of mind and strategy that most are following when they do. A Christopher Hitchens debated differently than a Sam Harris or a Coleman Hughes or a Professor Dave. Notably, most aren’t, even when I think they should, going to just call the dangerous frauds, “fucking dangerous fraud” as explicitly as they could.

Regardless of the topic or debaters, I apply my heuristics. Who’s getting defensive? Who’s asking explicit and should-be-easy to answer questions? Who’s name-calling, not because it’s correct and appropriate, but so they can jump away from what’s attempting to be focused?

This tension between focus and abstract is key.

This debate I just watched between Professor Dave, Dr. Dan Wilson vs Steve Kirsch and Pierre Kory echoed even more viscerally that foundational discrepancy between an errant exchange for attention and good faith discussion.

I think it will need to be part of our cultural immune system, word choice deliberate, to be able to recognize these kinds of tactics and exchanges quicker. We need to move past the idea that someone who is anti-vaxx is “merely skeptical.” We need to stop pretending that an ideologue, of any stripe, is doing “good faith” in their thought exercises. It’s a complete inversion of the words. It’s good for them. It’s self-reinforcing for their foundational faithful position. All you can accomplish is peeling layers of respectability and coherence off of your argument in the minds of onlookers by engaging naively with their position. You need to be able to disentangle, highlight, and embarrass what they’re doing while also educating on whatever the topic might be.

It’s a feat, to be sure. To look and sound reasonable under what is a literally insatiable desire and comfort for destruction, grift, and ego/brand protection is nearly impossible without training incidental personality quirks that not many of us share. Even with those people in our lives that we’d wish the best for our capacity to disagree and misinterpret leads to catastrophic outcomes so regularly, many people just shut down and don’t make waves as an act of self-preservation. Who has the time, inclination, motivation, etc. to combat and deconstruct what might be understood as the death of coherent coexistence?

Yet, I think we all will need to find our own engine of “actual debater” in order to last long term. Right now, we’re letting people die of measles because we’re acting like segregating people by color is hard or unreasonable. That is, we’re letting our fears and unwillingness to designate information as more or less reliable based on evidence instead of assumptions kill our capacity to sustain ourselves, let alone get better. Yes, if you’re having a assumptive discussion about who gets to be a slave, somehow always leaving aside the era or country, you are correct. Horrors would then abound and you’d be right to be deeply incensed and suspicious of the person presenting the exercise.

The nature of lying is what’s being protected. The story of how a lie manifests and contorts stays hidden. The reasons you would resist getting past your own insistence to lie stays a secret. The nature of your always-right, always concerned with your feelings god gets to exercise its power indefinitely. You don’t change. You don’t learn. You don’t grow. You don’t genuinely see the evidence or define that which can cohere between us all. That sounds like the death of us all.

As a counselor, I watch my words get twisted instinctively all the time. I can say, “The door is brown,” and be interpreted as, “That door has never been brown, will never be brown, and if you try to paint it brown, you’re an asshole.” That’s what feelings do. That distortion doesn’t just ignore or destroy our ability to see a brown door, it can take something innocuous and convert it into a feeling of being personally attacked. It instantly builds entire worlds around the subject matter from which “natural conclusions” follow almost as quickly, about the person, the door, the color brown, or why we’d be so bold and disingenuous to invoke the door at all!

Return to your questions and make them excruciatingly specific. It’s excruciating for the person who doesn’t understand they’re lying. It’s important if you’re going to maintain respect and rapport for the people in your life who are otherwise inclined to behave like bad actors, but without the intentionality. Those who are in on the grift will get angry. Those who are genuinely trying to think things through will let your questions linger and hopefully discover how to speak to them either more removed from their initial feelings or after better incorporating what that feeling was attempting to tell them.

I get 2% heated when my friend does the conversation obscuring, abstracting out thing. I have feelings just like anyone else that want to catastrophize and race through my pages of thoughts and experiences of things it rhymes with. I know that’s a thing. I don’t make it personal. I don’t treat her differently. I move on from nights where it’s going to get intractable and needlessly frustrating. She returns to the subject matter later, more specific, sometimes with questions, or with a demonstrated ability to digest more than what was happening at the time. It’s something I’m incredibly thankful for as usually I just have to pretend there’s not some growing well of irreconcilable resentment that tends to erase me from people’s lives.

We’re now in the future where that erasure is rewarded from AI to the attention algorithms. Whether you’re calling out errors in my thinking or vice versa, that whole exercise is gone if you’re not seeking it out. I’m prescribing a debate and communication process 10-steps long after we bother to agree on the nature of the problem or purpose and utility of engaging said process altogether. That’s an accidentally convoluted way of saying I don’t think we’re gonna pull that off. I also don’t know what our institutions would have to look like to mitigate the fallout of it never getting better. As it stands, they’ve proven to be ineffective against popular gish gallop.

Individually, you can recognize in yourself what I’m talking about. I know when I’m getting “elevated.” I know when I’m feeling “defensive.” I know when I need to learn more about a topic to discuss or debate it more effectively. I know when I’m inclined to make a personal attack instead of contend with what’s being said. I know there are real and persistent patterns across subjects that speak to the reliability of the person relaying the information. If your narrative is unconcerned, or incapable of defining, evidence, you lose by default. If you’re unable to build on relevant details, your trapped like a Sims character in a pool without a ladder. You have to figure out you’re playing the game and there’s only one way the part of you that’s struggling to find agency doesn’t drown.

[1222] Yuck It Up

I’m having so many thoughts on the Riyadh comedy festival it’s getting in the way of me moving on to other things. 

When I’m wavering between things, sometimes I use the percentages exercise. I’m like 90% in the camp of Zach Woods, Marc Maron, David Cross and the things they’ve discussed related to fascist regimes and state sponsored violence. I’m 10% with, not even the comedians or the patent justifications and excuses they’ve offered, but with the idealized version of reality where people are just people and we want commingling and seepage that doesn’t try to paint entire societies by the atrocities of their worst actors or leadership.

 

I don’t think falsely equivocating countries is a wise or honest way to say why you’ll participate. I don’t think downplaying attacks on freedom of speech, particularly now, particularly in a country that will kill you for what you say, as a comedian, is ever going to be something people should stop giving you shit about. To me, you’ve reduced yourself to “entertainer” or “podcaster” or “influencer” and rescind the title. You’ve lost the dignity that comes with wielding the weapon of your individual voice.

 

The 10% of me is trying to embody the idea that I’m offered a huge amount of money. What’s the first line of the first excuse I would offer? I don’t owe anybody anything. My career is my own. I do, genuinely, believe we are more alike than different, even if that’s incredibly hard to discern in someone raised in a theocracy or dictatorship. How fast can you expect “progress” to be? If I’m a Jewish lesbian like Jessica Kirson, who I love as a comedian, isn’t it a monumental moment to just be there and not immediately murdered at all? So they don’t want me to make fun of religion or the royal family? Do I make fun of my colleagues who are clean and don’t touch certain subjects?

 

It’s not abstract, though, that they kill people for what they say. It’s the greatest piece of evidence you have about how important your voice is and how useful of an idiot they believe they can make you. That’s what would stop me if I felt the devil calling. That’s what would make me look at $1,000,000 or more dollars and trigger an emptiness and a closing of creative and accountable possibility. Anyone who claims it’s just a payday who’s either already solidly rich or mingling and friends with those who give them rich access, is simply not seriously engaging with their moral center. A moral center that hopefully continues to nag them.

 

I do believe the comedians who went over are also captured and insulated. They’re all, mostly, each other’s friends and apologists already. Bill has turned Jessica into a name. All the podcast bros just are on rotation on each other’s shows, touring or otherwise. Some of the comedians are hardly “comedian” anymore than they are “global brand.” When you reach those levels of success, everything takes on a more abstracted character. It’s why I tend to find arena-level comedians and shows boring even if they were, technically, the same people who made me fall in love in the first place.

 

To me, it’s pretty much a bad taste at every level of context you could apply. As individuals, I’ve yet to hear a compelling reason-not-excuse to go that doesn’t pie-in-the-sky the conversation. As a comedian, I wouldn’t invite that much scrutiny from professional shit-talkers into my life if you paid me 1.6 million dollars. As an American who is on the verge, if not already lost, freedoms, and in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel, it just feels like stupidest kind of betrayal too-indicative of the times. Thankfully, I worship nobody, so while I can be disappointed and I’m going to be significantly less inclined to pay attention to or sing the praises of anyone on that list, it’s not like my identity has been shattered. You know how many comedians who’ve brought me to tears laughing who aren’t on that list?

 

I think, reasonably enough, comedy has achieved it’s modern pedestal because people are desperate for more “truth to power” spaces. Whether or not it’s the kind of exercise that nets anything but laughs, the laughs become sacred because it feels like all you can do. I think that’s why people would imprint on anyone with the ability to articulate how they feel. But it comes at the cost of agency. Your hero let you down? You make the next joke. You learn how to meaningfully impact the thing that’s keeping you down. Save your breath trying to indefinitely shame them as they spend their money and ask yourself why you’re so keen to make it about them instead of you. You also have a microphone.