OK. Time to take another crack at the question of people’s relationship with math and numbers.

I keep coming back to his subject because it puzzles me. I find it hard to understand why so many people have this strong mental aversion to things involving math, even very basic math. So I suppose I am looking for answers.

The root of my puzzlement is that the sort of math I am talking about is very simple math. We’re not talking about strange mathematics involving bizarre sounding things like “n-space” and “asymptotic variables”. We’re not even talking about algebra, the bete noire of many.

We are talking about extremely simple math : add, multiply, subtract, divide. If you graduated from elementary school, you know how to do these thing. And you don’t even need to do these things yourself. That’s what calculators (or, more likely, calculator apps) are for. You only have to understand them.

So it is clear that it’s not that people can’t do or understand the math. They are perfectly capable of it. And yet they avoid math like it’s the worst mental torture known to mankind.

Ergo, it must be something deeper. Something about the nature of one’s experience with math, perhaps.

One possibility is that it’s entirely random. If your first experience with math is easy and fun, you form a good opinion of it, and said opinion leads you to be open to more math, and hence you become good at it and comfortable with it.

If the first experience is bad, the opposite happens. The mind closes down on the subject because math is now treated as a threat imposed upon one from above, and the scenario is set for a person to learn only the absolute minimum required in order to get through school and then to cleanse the mind of all math once school is done.

This phenomenon is greatly enhanced by the nearly universal belief that some people are just naturally good at math, like they have the “math gene”, and for everyone else, it’s nothing but mystery and misery.

I don’t believe it, and I think belief in this “math gene” is very destructive. It gives people an out that seems like a relief at the time (guess I am just not one of those math people) but which, in my opinion, leads to people being unnecessarily subnumerate and hence open to manipulation, not to mention unable to exert the control over their lives that a comfort level with math brings, especially when it comes to finance.

Money is numbers. And numbers are power.

I don’t think it’s a gene and I don’t think it is random chance either. I think it goes yet deeper than that, into the deeper layers of human psychology. I think people become afraid of numbers and math because they understand that numbers are binding, and do not want to be bound by them.

The amount of money you have is a number. As such, it cannot be changed to fit better with your emotional needs. That’s why people think numbers are “cold”. They are not alive. They are finite. They are limited. And some people, right-brained people, simply cannot accept that kind of truth.

So they rebel against it. They do everything they can to minimize contact with the cold, finite, divided, “uncaring” world of numbers. They prefer to operate from an expansive worldview that is not tied down by numbers. They try, in a sense, to pretend numbers do not exist or do not represent truth in any meaningful way.

But the numbers of a situation do represent truth. Hard, unyielding, unwavering truth. And if the numbers don’t add up, nothing works. No amount of soul-searching, contemplation, examination from different perspectives, or prayer is going to change that.

If something costs $1200, that’s it. You either have that much money or not. If a bridge can only hold 1000 pounds, then there is no amount of negotiation that can convince it to hold more. If your child’s temperature is 104, then it’s time to take them to the doctor no matter how inconvenient it might be.

Numbers can represent truth that absolutely cannot be denied. No wonder so many people don’t like them.

Some people even give in to the feeling that the numbers somehow change when they are not looking, and it can certainly seem like that sometimes when you are dealing with numbers on a large scale.

But you know they didn’t. The idea is absurd on the face of it. What, did magical number gremlins change the numbers while you blinked? Of course the numbers haven’t changed. How could they? And armed with this irrefutable fact, you can go back to what you are doing and figure out where you went wrong.

Perhaps the difference is one of the qualitative versus the quantitative. Or pragmatism versus idealism. The idealist wants to remain in the world of untarnished ideals. The pragmatist accepts the limitations and imperfections of the world because they wish to get things done.

Being a pragmatist myself, as well as someone who is quite comfortable working with numbers, I might be biased. But to me, people’s refusal to do even the most basic kind of mathematical reasoning strikes me as childish and absurd.

And that’s what it boils down to. Once you strip away the things that a calculator can do and the belief that math is a “you got it or you don’t” proposition, all you have left is mathematical reasoning. People are unable or unwilling to think in numbers.

And these are not stupid people, necessarily. That’s why I think it has something to do with psychology or temperament. Some people inherently reject the cold hard inflexible truth of numbers, and will tell themselves whatever it takes to discredit mathematical truth so they don’t have to face their own refusal to accept reality.

“Oh, surely such a complicated thing as this can’t be reduced to mere numbers!”

Why the hell not?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Welcome to what is probably the last installment of the video roundup for now, at least.

I sort of miss talking about stuff.

Anyhow, on with the show!

Of course, we start with music.

In case you missed it, and I doubt you did, the reverse echoing stuff near the beginning and the excellent Peter Lorre quote at the end are the exact same clip.

I originally had the clip at the end of the song, by itself, but then I decided it would be much funnier if the music cut out right before he said “HE’S MARRYING A CHICKEN!”

And now, I confuse people by talking :

Well I had been listening to a very erudite female men’s rights advocate and I was sort of hot for the cause. And I was trying to illustrate a point. But I think I got a little carried away. I wanted to illustrate the different ways people think about different genders and how bizarre that is, and tilted against men it can be.

That was all I was saying.

Blah blah blah, more music :

Meh. No… that’s not strong enough. Bleh.

Some okay ideas but as a whole, it’s uneven, off balance, and clumsy. Kind of ashamed of it really. But it is, perversely, not in my nature to take something down just because I don’t think it’s my best work.

Logically speaking, that’s exactly what I should do. But that’s sane thinking, and I am not, in any sense, sane.

Not sure I want to be, honestly. It seems like such a drag.

And speaking of things I am not totally proud of :

It wasn’t originally called Test Footage, but I was unhappy enough to want some weasel words in there. I mean, it’s not horrible or anything, but it ended up falling a long way sort of what I was trying to do and that’s always depressing for us fragile and sensitive artistic types.

Love that ending, though. Almost makes up for the rest of it. I need to tap into my uber wacky side more often.

And now, part three of my self-abuse trilogy.

Man I was bummed. Now, after talking to my therapist about it and having him talk me down from mt tree so I could bounce back, it all seems almost silly. But at the time, I really did feel like I had fucked up big time and I was in deep doodoo because of it.

It’s sad how depression can keep you from seeing the solution to your problems. It makes your horizons so damn small.

This next piece is a companion video to this blog entry :

Not a lot to say here. I am not saying that it’s some major cross to bear to be a person who doesn’t have a lot of strict preferences. But it has been a issue in my life, not severe, but pesky. That’s why, like I say in the blog entry, I express preferences when asked even if deep down I don’t really give a shit.

That way, things go more smoothly and I don’t end up arguing with people who are trying to help me.

More of me just talkin’ :

It says something about my general level of impatience that I am already tired of talking CPAP. I went back to the place yesterday. My sleep apnea tests at just past the line between “mild” and “moderate”, like it did before, and things went pretty well with the CPAP machine once I a) remembered to get distilled (oh sorry, “demineralized” water for it and b) had a few nights to get back into the habit.

It’s still a pain to have to strap in just to sleep, but that will fade with time as well.

Oh look, I’m talking in natural light again :

And yeah, like I say, I am probably repeating stuff I said before in various venues. It was what was on my mind right before I made the video, and so I went with it, and realized partway through that I had already talking about this stuff.

But at least I eventually staggered into new territory.

The way I do things is so crazy!

But hey, check out those production values!

Well, if it’s not talking, it must be music :

Bleh. Bordering on blek. Volume balance is way off, and the whole thing seems lumpy, uneven, and sudden. I must have been really messed up that night and hence even sloppier than usual.

Honestly, sometimes it amazes me that anything I do turns out well. Just goes to show that method, reason, and careful scrutiny is one way to get things done.

But it’s not the only way. There’s a lot to be said for the joy of creation and the freedom of mind it requires.

And now, for something completely different :

Great fun doing this, although the sort of listening required is surprisingly draining. You have to listen very intently and yet in a very specific way. It makes me tired just thinking about it, to be honest.

I hope the results are funny to people, or at least entertaining. It’s a fine line between “LOL random” and just plain random. it seems funny to me, but I made the darn thing. I just might be biased.

That’s the thing with comedy, as least from where I am sitting. Sometimes I create stuff that feels right to me, but at the same time, I have absolutely no idea if anyone would find it funny at all.

So it’s not always the comedy writer sniggering at their own wit as they type out their gems of hilarity.

Sometimes it’s as abstract and intuitive as tone poetry.

Finally, we have this video of me being silly in my CPAP mask.

Sorry about the low volume. I guess you have to be Ron Perlman to be able to project through a mask like that.

Well, that’s it for now folks. We’re not totally caught up, but the rest can go into the roundup for next Sunday.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Here’s me being weird and ranting about things nobody else gives a shit about.

I look good in natural light.

I grew up drinking unsoftened water… in other words, water that had a little fluoride added and that was it. All minerals intact. My first experience with softened (in other words, demineralized) water, on a family vacation when I was 5, was quite a shock. It tasted so… wimpy. And insubstantial.

It was the Wonder Bread of water, more or less.

Next up, for those of you who don’t like music, there’s music :

A truly top notch piece from me, in my opinion. Simple, gentle, relaxing, and very pretty. I am especially proud of it because I actually overcame my urge to add elaboration and left well enough alone. The result speaks for itself.

Oh, and I also stepped outside the box in that I used a sound editor to do the fade in and fade out, which means I stretched my mind and my process enough to include an extra step.

Yay for me!

In our next piece, I vent a neurosis :

That whole business is the sort of thing that has been haunting my head for as long as I can remember. I have known I was extraordinary since I was three years old. And well-meaning adults told me that I had a lot of potential.

But because I am fucked up in the head, that just seemed like a looming, crushing obligation to me. The subtle oppression of high expectations, I suppose.

Why am I so afraid of leaving the middle?

More freaking music :

Another delicate, dreamy piece.

I don’t know why I beat myself up over doing so much music. It’s not like it’s low density content that I can just toss off. Each piece takes at least an hour of steady work.

But I will admit, it’s my default thing to do if I don’t feel ambitious enough to do more production=heavy content like some Interpretive Subbing or a Sarcastic Slideshow, but can’t think of anything to talk about either.

So to my overweaning superego, that means I must SUFFER.

Man, I hate that guy.

And the next thing is me talking about the theatre bug :

That time, I had just had the revelations and was able to put them to vid immediately. And I think they are pretty sharp, honestly. I am sure that this purpose gap in the modern world, the inability to feel the meaning of what you do for a living, reaches deep into man areas of our modern civilizations.

Marx called it alienation.

Back to music :

Not everything in this totally works, but I am still pretty happy with it. I am especially glad that I was able to do such a long stretch of solo melody without it being a total nightmare. Most of my pieces are low on that. I don’t know what else to call it… the parts where, if it was being played by an orchestra, it would be a solo.

Sometimes, I really hate being musically subliterate.

Yup. It’s more music!

That’s a pretty rockin’ piece, if I do say so myself. Maybe the flute bits could have been a little quieter, and that ending is pretty weak. But you gotta love that kickass bassline and the way the flute contrasts with it.

You know, I might just be getting good at this music thing. Maybe I should start working on a symphony. Knowing me, my symphony would be like, eight minutes long, tops.

Or maybe even…. dare we say it… NINE.

Up next : Yet more music!

Wow, that part where the sax cuts in is pretty rough. That definitely needs work. I mean, things go more or less okay from that point on, but in the future, I should work on being more critical of these moments before I throw my work up on the web for every Tom whose Dick is Harry on the Internet to see.

But what can I say. Some learn by study, others learn by just doing it a lot.

I do it a lot.

And the next piece of music is… not music! Psych! :

The title is stolen from a trivia book my friend Chris had when I was in college. Today, that type of book would take the form of a “fun facts you might not know” list article, or a site like Mental Floss. But way back when I was a callow youth and dinosaurs roamed the open malls, there was a big market for those sorts of books.

I was quite fond of them myself. I love info-snacking like that. I have a big appetite for knowledge.

Trivia books like those are like a big bowl of popcorn for the mind.

Well, enough verbal content. Time for more goddamned music.

That strings loop always gets stuck in my head.

And it still amazes me that I put this piece of music together without consciously realizing that the string part and the vibraphone parts are playing more or less the same notes.

I just knew they sounded right together. How thrillingly right brained of me!

And for our next selection, you get a nice thick piece of Sarcastic Slideshow :

Gah, I should not be this sleepy at 1:12 pm, especially after drinking a liter of Diet Coke. But sometimes caffiene actually makes me sleepy. That’s just how fucked up my sleep system is.

Maybe when I feel sleepy, I should drink alcohol instead.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right. I love how snappy the audio captions are in that one. I hope it didn’t go too fast for people. That’s always a worry when someone has to read what’s on the screen while also taking in what you are saying.

And finally, we have…. um…. part 2 of the same thing? :

Oh right! I had so many awesome “bad English” pics that I decided to split them between two videos.

Thank goodness I will never have so much content that I have to split it up ever again.

See you for Part 3, dear readers!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As promised, today I will start to “catch you up” on my video output.

First of all, we have this little wee rant of mine.

That was the night when I had finally gotten so fed up with the wayward and wastrel ways of our cousins to the south that I just had to vent. So out came a lot of things that had been in my mind for a long long time.

I mean, Jesus Christ, America…. for a country with so much pride, you have very little shame.

Maybe that’s what you need.

Oh, and is anyone else nostalgic for the time when the mass shootings were months apart?

Next up, the usual blurb of music.

My self-judgment : it almost works. It’s almost good. But not quite. The two samples are both awesome, but combined, they are just a little too cacophonous. Maybe if I had lowered the volume on them it would not have been so bad. But there’s a lot of areas where they just don’t meld.

It’s so easy for me to fall in love with a really cool sample.

Up next, we have another in a long line of Sarcastic Slideshows :

That’s Eric Clapton (who IS GOD) playing Classical Gas in the background. I really should do music credits for these sorts of things. It’s the least I can do.

Except when it’s my own music. Or wait…. maybe ESPECIALLY when it’s my own music. Hmmmm.

I assume the “All Employees Must Wash Genitals” is someone’s idea of a joke. Unless it’s from the set of a porno.

Then there is this one :

I’m not going to talk about it.

This next one is a little low on content :

Man, that was a shitty day. I am glad it happened, though, because I feel like I burned through a lot of the crap that clogs up my brain in the process of dealing with it. Especially the stuff about my childhood. That needed to happen.

Catharsis is freedom.

Next up : Music AND slides! Really, I spoil you people.

The slides come, of course, from the internet, but more specifically a site called Heroes in Situations that collects all kinds of comic panels that are hilariously “off” when viewed out of context.

The music, of course, is my own composition. So many of this tunelets of mine seem really promising, then they end. I have defeat my “one minute only” compulsion and stop being in such a hurry to be “done”.

Insert premature ejaculation joke HERE.

Note how the color of the text matches the color of the shirt of the person speaking.

That’s what I call quality workmanship. For a change.

Making those little re-subs is a lot of fun and a lot of work. I can never be sure if they are funny or not.

Once I pluck up the courage to have my voice acting appear in things, I will try dubbing.

Next : more music!

That is one of my favorite pieces that I have done recently. To me, it sounds professional, slick, and very cool, as well as interesting and somewhat unexpected.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Oh, and a word on titles : Like a lot (but by no means all) of writers, I hate coming up with titles. So I tend to go with the first thing that pops into my head that isn’t totally stupid.

Why is it called “Sunrise In Neon City”? Don’t ask me. I just work here.

Next, me talking.

As you can see, Joe is my saviour and he solved both of my reasons to be stressed out and I can’t possibly thank him enough for that. Honestly, I owe him a ton of thanks for a lot of things, but I am pretty sure that, while he appreciates appreciation, were I to totally give in to my effusive nature, it would make him highly uncomfortable.

So I get it done in one sincere, heartfelt, hearty “Thank you so much!”.

More of my happy shining face making words :

I have no idea why I didn’t just turn off the tablet that was making the spooky blue glow. I suppose I thought it would add texture in my inimically wacky ass style. I do remember that I was feeling pretty strung out that night from my various madical conditions and running on blind determination, so perhaps my mental faculties were on spring break that night.

I think the video evidence bears this theory out.

Next up, more of my ponderous pontifications :

Video suitable for thinkers only! Everyone else will probably start wishing there was more visual content.

And yeah, I should totally get on that shit. At the very least, spend some time with Google Image Search in order to get appropriate pictures, or do those cute lil Stephen Colbert’s “The Word” style text comments again.

Well, every day I get a little stronger. I am more open to effort lately. The idea that I am happier when I am busy is finally penetrating my crosswired cranium.

Yup, the next one is me talking as well :

Erf. Not my best work. I am even more incoherent and all over the place than usual. I remember it was jeezly hot that day, and knowing me, I was probably dehydrated. Plus, to be honest, I was probably also really sleepy. My sleep has been all over the damned place this summer.

But that is a subject for another time.

And finally, some more music, this time downright silly :

I love that piece because, despite the semi-dubious decision to use that very low-octave bassline that some people might not even be able to hear, the end result is so lighthearted and pleasant and just a trifle silly that it really feels like I stretched myself as a composer on that one.

Feels weird calling myself a composer. But that’s what I am, or at least, that’s the only word I know to describe what I do, with the samples and music and such.

Well, that’s all for today, dear readers. There will be two more parts of this exercise that are more or less just like this one. That’s how big the backload of unshared video has gotten.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Recently, I learned a very interesting fact. It seems that up until the 1970’s, all prominent sociologists and other social thinkers were positive, absolutely positive, that religion was on its way out and, given the steady march of progress, science, and reason, would soon fade away as everyone realized how silly the whole thing was and how they didn’t need it any more now that science had better answers and reliable miracles.

Clearly, this has not happen.

Instead, starting in the 1980’s, religion came roaring back all across the board. Religious fundamentalism caught on like wildfire, and suddenly secular governments were being overthrown all over the world by forces backed by religion.

And whether it was Falwell’s fundamentalists putting Reagan in the White House or jihadi militias kicking out the Shah of Iran, one thing was abundantly clear :

Atheism had failed. Religion was here to stay.

And why were those prominent sociologists so very wrong when it came to their predictions of religion’s end? Because once more, the liberal intelligentsia had allowed themselves to believe that through peace, love, harmony, and enlightenment, everyone would eventually see the light and become liberal intellectuals just like them.

And they did this without once glancing in the direction of the average person whom they were so sure was on the cusp of leaving the warmth ans safety of their churches for the chilly embrace of scientism and the ice cold scalpel of reason.

History says otherwise.

And just why, pray tell, did atheism fail so spectacularly to replace religion? Because it was, and still is, led by people who were raised with religion and thus still have within their psyche the structures and islands of stability such an upbringing brings, and thus were free to leave the actual dogma behind once their minds became mature enough to start questioning things.

But most people never get to that point because it requires a certain kind of certainty in one’s ability to figure things out for themselves that only occurs natively in people in the higher range of intelligence.

For everyone else, religion does the job.

And what a job! Atheism never stood a chance against the vast suite of benefits religion brings to the individual believer.

Atheism provides no comfort in times of pain and distress. It offers no sense of community, no social hub, no connection with something larger than oneself, no sense of being loved and cared for by the ultimate parent, no deeply satisfying regular group ritual which synchronizes and enhances the communal mood. It offers no deeply resonating symbols, no rich and colorful narrative filled with stories both interesting and education, no help when you are down, no counsel when you are confused. It provides neither someone to beseech when we fear powerless nor someone to thank when things go well, nor does it provide someone to blame when good triumphs over evil.

It doesn’t even provide someplace to play ping pong.

All atheism can provide is the cold comfort of knowing that you are “right” on a level so obscure as to be meaningless to the average person as it has absolutely no bearing on their everyday life.

Not everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is inclined to worry about what is “really really” true. Most people are just trying to get through life in a way that works for them. If belief in God, their religious leader, and their church provides them all the things I listed above and more, they have no reason to change. They have no reason, in fact, to even think about it, and all public atheism and its attacks on religion does is provide the exact kind of sense of community under attack that forges such deep and strong ties between people during times of war.

You’ve given their story a villain. Congratulations.

It was true that religion was declining very slowly in the Seventies, but that trend was purely the result of the Baby Boomers rejecting the religion of their parents and seeking their own way.

But then the Boomers who had rejected bourgeoisie institutions like marriage and work got married and had kids anyway, and got old enough to feel their mortality thus start needing real answers, answers that satisfied them instead of merely glibly deflecting the issue, and atheism could not provide these answers.

At the same time, as they aged, the Boomers’ minds became less and less able to adapt to change, and that feeling that the world is spinning out of control and becoming something they could no longer recognize crept up on them, and the rebel hippies became more and more conservative as time went by.

Then the Eighties comes along and almost all of those tie-dyed revolutionaries voted Reagan (or Thatcher, or Mulroney, or..), went right back to the church of their birth or something a hell of a lot like it, and atheism’s smug and lofty predictions of its own effortless victory was revealed to be as ludicrous, unreasoned, and blatantly self-serving and short-sighted as any scrap of dogma from any of the religions it thought was ripe for the scrap pile of history.

And the same will happen with the current crop of atheist bigots and religion bashers. Just like most people don’t think they will marry and have kids when they’re young but most people actually do, the current generation of Dawkinites will swear they will never go back to church again…. and most of them will.

And this will happen over and over again until public atheism stops strengthening religion by attacking it and focuses instead on replacing religion’s many levels of benefit with someone that works as well for people.

It has always been easier to complain than act. To attack instead of consider. To join in the fun of a public hate rather than stay apart by insisting we should love and respect even those with whom we disagree.

But the entire thrust of historical humanist liberalism demands that we restrain our worse instincts and strive to be better human beings by embracing the better angels of our nature.

Atheism has failed precisely because that is one thing it cannot do : inspire humanity to be better people.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Male culture is, even in this enlightened age, highly hierarchical. It’s easy to miss, because it’s not like every male group of friends had uniforms and epaulets. The hierarchy is, amongst peers, entirely informal.

But it is also extremely strong, and that means that nearly all men rapidly internalize the idea that they have to always be ready for a challenge, and that in order to protect their spot in the pecking order, they have to project a certain amount of menace. There has to to be those who are afraid to fuck with you unless you are at the very bottom.

Few men at the bottom are there by choice.

In fact, these are most likely the harmless men. The men who, for whatever reason, lack enough of the urge and the machismo of the male hierarchy in order to be able to (or even want to) intimidate anybody. They want to be liked, or left alone.

So they attract bullies. Bullies tend to be very invested in the hierarchy, and the harmless man puzzles them. They can’t understand even the possibility of someone opting out of the hierarchy. They will be drawn to the harmless man and pester them until they do something the bully can understand, namely fight back.

(That is, of course, a lab-pure example. Physics in a vacuum. The real world has many more variables, including gender role enforcement and recreational sadism. )

In fact, such is the confusion in the mind of the hierarchical bully that the harmless man’s attempts to withdraw from the hierarchy can feel, to the bully, like a kind of rejection. It is processed as if the bully had offered to shake the harmless man’s hand, and the harmless man had, instead, pulled away from the bully and ignored him.

Switching genders, women also enforce male hierarchy. They do so by evaluating men, at least partly, on that selfsame ability to produce a “don’t fuck with me” vibe. This leads them in the direction of men who seem like they could protect a woman from harm, usually in the form of other men who might be looking to take “their” woman.

Luckily for the harmless man, there is his female half, the gentle woman. The gentle woman does not like anything rough, brutish, or frightening, and she is drawn to the harmless man’s gentleness, kindness, and above all, how nonthreatening he is.

And that is where the harmless man shines. He is nonthreatening, and hence to some women, very approachable. And this approachability has benefits far beyond merely attracting the gentle woman.

In every man’s life, there will come times when dropping their guard and being gentle and harmless are not just advantageous but absolutely necessary. The testosterone driven alpha stud might very well be good at protecting a woman from harm, and be virile enough to give you strong babies, but might well be just as aggressive and challenging to his own children.

And who wants a father you can’t leave alone with the kids?

And what about how he treats you in between battles? The attitudes and behaviours that make him a prime cut warrior will lead him to be rough, even brutal, at home if he has no “off switch”.

From this heteronormative (the GLBT version of this phenomenon is beyond me at the moment) template, we can see that the ideal man according to the baseline of female desire would be a man who is an alpha dog outside the home and a sweet and gentle lapdog when inside the home.

This is, of course, the equivalent of the male-oriented female ideal of “a virgin in public and a whore in bed. ”

Nature is not usually so discrete, however. Not only does testosterone lack an off switch, the modern man is stuck with the dilemma of trying to both retain enough male power to make his woman feel safe and to retain her respect while at the same time reassuring her that he is no threat to her or the kids and is, in fact, a very good parent too.

The harmless man oversolves one half of the equation. He gives off all the signals of being a good and gentle, patient parent who will be safe to leave with the kid. But can he protect the home?

The aggressive man oversolves the other half. He definitely seems like he is the biggest and strongest and could take on all comers. But is he safe?

In this, the harmless man has the advantage, in that there is very little home protecting or wife earning to be done in the modern world. There is, however, a lot of caring and tenderness needed.

But sadly, the human sexual instinct has not caught up with that. Like with food, our brains are knocked around by supra-normal stimuli. In this case, it takes the form of the men and women we see in the media. Whether it’s the zero body fat Photoshopped supermodel with the huge tits or the equally Photoshopped mountain of meat with a killer smile, our sense of reasonable expectations is distorted, and what we imagine to be the “average” person is skewed by the adding of so many high potency sexually stimulating people.

And all the while, our basic human sexual programming tells us to go with the most sexually stimulating partner, not the one who is actually the most compatible or the best breeding partner.

So when people are young and full of hormones, they will let their gametes do the talking and sleep around with the high stimulus people, and for some people, the lesson that sex is no basis for a relationship takes a long time to sink in.

But the harmless man has the ultimate trump card in that once the hormones die down and the women become capable of thinking long term, they are the ones the women will turn to for long term romance and possible child-rearing.

Mot all the women, of course.

Just the ones worth keeping.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The self-minimizer, that is. People who minimize others tend to look like this.

Bring Myron Reducto back, Stephen Colbert!

No, what I am talking about is a psychological tic known as self-minimizing. When a person has low self-esteem (yup, we’re talking about that again), sometimes they have a tendency to self-minimize. That means that they always minimize their own needs and desires and treat everyone else’s needs and desires as more important than their own.

What they want isn’t important. They want to know what you want. It can seem like selflessness, and in a sense it is, but only in a very unhealthy and unbalanced way.

It partially comes from a very low sense of self due to intense self-loathing. To even ask the question of what one really wants or needs is to look at oneself, and for the depressed, that gives rise to an extremely high level of psychic distress as they gaze upon the object of their greatest loathing, themselves.

Thus, a lack of self-reflection retards the individual’s ability to perform the kind of soul-searching and examination of life experiences that leads to a stronger sense of self. The depressed person might spend hours ruminating over a painful incident from the past, or contemplating their fears about the future, but because of this intense self-loathing and hence self-aversion, they cannot put any of their ponderings into the context of the self.

Then there is the fact that depression itself is caustic to the self. As I mentioned last night, one definition of depression is “anger turned inward”, meaning that depressed people have a tendency to take their anger and frustrations out on themselves. This is not only detrimental to the self-esteem, but to the vry frabric of the self. It’s hard to build a solid sense of self when one is always tearing oneself apart.

Another route by which self-minimizing behaviour arrives is through a toxic childhood environment where the child’s needs and concerns are treated as trivial or even so unimportant that it’s a crime just to bring them up. Children write down everything that happens to them on those impressionable little minds of theirs, and it is from these notes that the child learns who they are and what their place in the world is.

Treat the child as unimportant or obtrusive, and they internalize this message and end up treating themselves the exact same way you treated them.

Now that we’ve established a few theories of origin, let’s look at the phenomenon itself. It is characterized by an unwillingness to express any sort of desire, need, or even preference in any matter. The overall message is “Oh, what I want isn’t important!” and, relatedly, “Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m just fine. ”

This is the person who says “Oh, it doesn’t matter to me. Whatever you want is fine!”. Or “I’m just happy to get anything at all. ” Or “I’ll just have whatever you’re having!”

And if, by some bizarre brain abnormality, the person genuinely did have absolutely no needs, desires, or preferences, that would be fine. But of course, they are human beings who actually do possess the usual complement of needs.

That too would be fine if the person lived in a world of total sociopaths. But in the real world, there is bound to be at least a few people in your life who care about you, and that’s where the trouble begins.

Because if you care about someone, you want to make them happy. That means seeing to their needs, catering to their desires, and respecting their preferences.

And if you are dealing with a self-minimizer, none of that information is available.

What seems superficially to be selflessness and compassion is revealed to be something darker and deeper. No matter how much you love and care about the self-minimizer, you will be unable to get the information about their desires etc straight from the source. You will have to get it via observation and deduction.

So already, this “selflessness” is actually forcing people who care about you to work a lot harder than they have to with other people who are not so “selfless”.

But it is actually much worse than that, because the self-minimizing behaviour comes with an even heftier price-tag, namely the total abnegation of personal responsibility. By withholding all information about their own desires etc, the self-minimizing person guarantees that they are not responsible for anything that happens.

And this would be fine if it was possible for responsibility to simply disappear, but it does not. For the most part, responsibility is preserved, and what responsibility is not taken for oneself is inevitably forced upon others.

Also, self-minimizing people lie. They lie all the time without even thinking about it. When someone expresses no preference when some part of their mind knows damned well that they have a preference, that’s a lie. When someone says they don’t care about what happens to themselves and (of course) they do, that’s a lie. And worst of all by far is when someone says they don’t need anything when they in fact they desperately need many things, that’s a lie.

Think of what a position it puts people who care about you when they can’t even ask you how you are and get a straight and reliable answer. Helping and pleasing a loved one isn’t merely a desire, it’s a human need, and by denying someone you claim to love and care about the information necessary to do so, you cause them immense and needless distress.

And that’s the message I want to leave for you, gentle readers. When you compulsively self-minimize, you are not being selfless. You are in fact being incredibly selfISH and causing untold pain and suffering to those poor souls unfortunate enough to care more about you than you do yourself.

For their sake alone, fellow self-minimizers, you need to get over your self-aversion and, if not exactly get in touch with who you really are, at least make up a plausible set of preferences et al to use when the situation calls for it.

I think you owe it to those who care about you to give them at least that consideration.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Also, remember what it means when I shift into the second person…. )

What, exactly, do people get out of having low self-esteem?

Because make no mistake : nothing happens within the human mind which does not, in some sense, benefit it. It might be a lousy deal which costs far more than what is gotten out of it, but the actions are still in search of something.

Indeed, the main problem in the life of the modern human is a question of how to meet our many and overlapping emotional needs. We have thrown open the gates of possibility, and that has made this happiness equation more complicated than ever.

So what, exactly, is the need met by low self-esteem? Even self-loathing?

The most common hypothesis that I have encountered is that the need met is one for a sense of safety. Lurking within the mind of people with dangerously low self-esteem is a very deep fear that higher self esteem will somehow attract danger, and that it is only by staying buried in the mud out of humility that one can avoid attracting the lightning bolts of the gods.

This is an excellent theory, and I think gets to the root of the problem. But it is not a complete theory. There is a lot more going on than compulsive humility. We must dig deeper.

Another theory is that low self esteem is the product of people taking out their anger on themselves, internally. Everyone’s life results in some frustration and anger, and while others might take it out by becoming cranky and irritable, and hence securing a target for their anger, a low self esteem individual might well attack themselves instead, criticizing themselves and attacking their own self-worth as a way of venting that anger without risk of confrontation.

Of course, this is tragically futile, because when attacker and the attacked are the same person, the short term gain in vented frustration comes at a heavy, heavy cost to the self-worth of the individual in question, and from that low self worth comes a whole new world of frustration and pain.

It’s a lousy deal.

Then there’s the chemical argument. Without the right serotonin levels in the brain because of the too-hasty re-uptake of it by the brain’s own cells, all positive emotions are suppressed. Normal emotional expression is impossible and the psyche cannot help but be warped by this constant chemical imbalance.

In a sense, if this is true, then all other theories must pale in comparison. It may simply be impossible to love yourself when your serotonin levels are off, and there is only so much modern medicine can do to fix them.

My antidepressants keep me from killing myself by keeping my mood above a certain level. But they don’t make me happy.

However, when examined, this proposition begs the question : how did those levels become chronically low in the first place?

Maybe it’s a genetic defect. Or the result of an infection we didn’t even know we have. Maybe somewhere within us, there is a parasite that is very fond of the raw materials for serotonin.

But we can’t discount the possibility that the reason is entirely psychological. We are still very shaky on the relationship between brain chemicals and psychological reality. In fact, we generally don’t like thinking about it at all. We prefer to think of ourselves as more autonomous than that, and the notion that something going on in our minds, possibly even the result of a consciously made choice, is to blame for a chemical imbalance offends and disgusts us.

Myself included, of course.

We can accept that what goes on in our brains is electro-chemical in nature, and we can accept that our psyches can be supported or damaged by life events, but when you interpret one in terms of the other, things get discomforting pretty fast.

See that little blip on your brain scan? That’s the time your father took your bicycle away.

Another theory of low self-esteem is that it stems from a lack of positive self esteem input from one’s life, either in the past or in the present. This is often misinterpreted as a lack of praise and positive reinforcement, but that interpretation leaves out the vitally important ingredient of meaningful effort. Self-esteem, in short, must be earned. It cannot simply be handed to you by the powers that be.

It is certainly true that the “nurture” of one’s life can be wildly insufficient and one can suffer from a kind of emotional malnourished as a result. This lack of emotional nutrients can even lead to something akin to a disability in life.

But no amount of unearned praise or arbitrary reward will fix that.

That is why I think that we need to incorporate meaningful labour into our conception of human needs. It’s not a need like oxygen is a need, but it’s a need like love, sex, acceptance, and so on. Society needs to recognize said need as well as realize that it is in its best interest to find a use for everybody, and do its best to provide for that need.

Sorry, that was a rant, not a theory.

So which of these theories is true? Probably all of them, in different ways. They are all different perspectives for something that is too large for us to see all at once, and as such, can see radically different from one another and even in conflict, but they are all true perspectives on the same enormous subject of human self-esteem.

The truth is, we know so very little about how our minds work, even a century after Freud. The human brain is the most complex object in the universe, as far as we know, and the more we learn about it, the more there is to learn. Every answer spawns a dozen more questions. And it’s a tossup as to whether the scientists or the psychologists will be first to the finish line.

One thing is certain : low self esteem is pandemic in modern civilization, and we need to understand the nature of the problem before we can find a cure.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Author’s Note : I am not talking about comfort food or delicious food. Also, I am going to rant about nutrition again.

You hear a lot about what food tastes good, and what food is (supposedly) good for you, but very little about how food makes you feel. And this seems odd to me.

It’s like there is no happy medium between the (sometimes very) long term thinking of healthy eating and the extremely short term pleasure of flavour. After all, we human beings are not terribly good at thinking in the long term when it comes to our basic pleasures like food and sex, and on the other hand, the most delicious taste in the world is gone seconds after you experience it. There has to be some kind of middle ground.

What I want to know is how foods make you feel later that same day. What foods lead to a better day, and which ones are almost guaranteed to make you miserable? In short, how does one eat to be happy?

This problem is complicated by something I have talked about before, which is the need for human beings to stimulate the reward centers of their brains in order to maintain positive self-worth. It might well be that the high-reward foods we love so much that it is killing us are nevertheless, in a strictly short-term sense, the better bet for being happy that day.

Or maybe not. The problem is, we simply do not have the information to make this kind of decision. The world is polarized between “tastes good” and “good for you”, and while corporations compete to push that reward button harder than anyone else, they also compete to sell you health food and fad nutrition.

Meanwhile, ideologues of nutrition, as well as people that can only be described as nutrition denialists, muddy the waters further by trying to get followers for their own little empires of thought and influence, and all under the guise of trying to help people lead better lives.

If they truly wanted people to lead better lives, they would look at the whole picture.

We the public are left without plausible data. The world of nutrition research is maddeningly unscientific and non-comprehensive. as well as completely without method or reason. There are so many vested interests trying to sway the science their way, and so many people wedded to their nutritional beliefs because it seems like they worked for them, as well as various actual medical professionals selling, with total innocence, nutritional folklore as science, and it’s no wonder that the modern human just shrugs and eats whatever seems to make sense to them at the time.

And when it comes to how foods make people feel good after eating them, the data basically does not exist. People have theories about it, but there is no systematically collected and carefully collated dataset on which to base these theories.

All we have is mountains of unhelpful anecdotal evidence, and people’s own life experience, which as I have mentioned before is not so great at long term thinking when it comes to basic needs.

A person could live a decade in deep depression because of how they eat and have absolutely no idea. In fact, they might double down again and again on the very foods making them miserable because they use those foods to self-medicate their depression.

This is clearly and categorically unacceptable.

What is needed is a coordinated and integrated effort to study the effects of nutrition on mood. Not a million little projects from corporate scientists looking to please their masters or desperate professors seeking tenure.

Instead, it should have the same combination of open-source accessibility and the ability to put all valid results in a comprehensive framework that will lead to a single body of solid knowledge that the Human Genome Project used.

People will be free to claim a section of the problem and work on it on their own, and if their results are deemed valid, that section of the problem will be considered solved.

Frankly, this is how all large and complicated science issues should be tackled.

Of course, the first and most likely to stir the hornet’s next is a comprehensive review of all current nutritional data and beliefs. No sense in re-inventing the wheel on that score, but the review would have to follow all the current lore to its source and then evaluate the validity of that source.

And if no valid source is to be found, the information is deleted.

The next phase would be to do all the basic research needed to fill the gaps left in nutritional lore (I have a feeling those gaps will be quite large) so that the basics of human nutrition can finally be hashed out.

That will not be easy, but it will at least be a matter of biochemistry. The final phase is the really tricky one.

In said phase, we will have the enter the murky, slippery world of happiness research. You will have to feed people certain foods (or types of meals) and then figure out how that food made them feel.

Obviously, there will be self-reporting. As unreliable as self-reporting can be, it is still the best way to establish a baseline on what the participants think is going on.

Harder data would be more elusive. You certainly can’t tell how happy someone truly is simply by observing them. Possibly, in the modern day of fMRI, it might be possible to at least establish what is really going on in the brain, and by comparing that to the self-reports of participants, it might be possibly to get some kind of clue as to what the real story might be.

But for the most part, we would have to take people at their word.

In the end, what I hope for is to give unto the world the knowledge they need to make informed diet decisions. If people could see what they eat in terms of how it will make them feel after eating it, they would be empowered to make smarter choices and in the end we would have a happier, healthier population.

And that’s something we all want.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.