30. The crisis of codes

Code has become an ubiquitous word. It's everywhere. From programming, gaming to marketing or spiritual awareness (eg bio-decodage) and without forgetting the Da Vinci Code... the notion of hidden codes that command processes -and some say even our own actions- is becoming bigger and bigger.

The movie "Inception" is a story based on the concept that an idea (in the form of a metaphor, a code) can be incepted in peoples' unconscious in order to command future decisions. In the movie, Leonardo Di Caprio's character is hired to incept an idea into the heir of a big business. He had incepted an idea before into his wife deep unconscious: a metaphor that she would interpret as "this is a dream". This hidden code drove her to kill herself: believing "this is a dream" even when awake, meant she could not connect with reality any more. She thought the only way to wake up was through dying. 

Even if this is a story, it illustrates what others also speak about: the existence of codes in life, unwritten decrees, adopted beliefs, that govern us in different ways. Because they are unwritten, they are not conscious. They are highly symbolic and mostly hidden from our rational filter.

Economics: Something beyond market forces

I'll start with Economics for two reasons: the first one is that nowadays it "governs the governments" and secondly because it is an area where cultural imperatives and ideologies are not named or frequently denied whilst hiding behind the word science.

In this video, Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz discuss the current state of economics. Even though, classical economics is based on the principle that men are rational entities, looking to maximise utility, they discuss that it is self-evident that this is not the case, that there are "forces beyond the market" that dictate many behaviours.

Thomas Piketty starts (min 5) saying: "I think there is a lot of ideology in the economic profession. And I think many economists have a view of markets which is not only idealistic and naive. They are defending the views that markets are working efficiently, are working well."

Joseph Stiglitz comments on minimum wage: "one of the things that 'Wall Mart raising the wage to that level' illustrates it is the fact that it is not just market forces determining minimum wages... they have the power, the choice to raise the wages. [] There are a lot of non-market forces determining what's going on." Later on, he repeats this assertion in relation to male-female wage inequality and the lack of female CEOs.

Paul Krugman comments on nationalism in America and some state's entrenched opposition to national programs that would benefit them: "there is a lot of discussion in the sociological and political science literature [] on the question of false consciousness. Clearly in the US, a lot of it is back to the original sin: it is about race."
Later on he adds: "I picked up a phrase, when Bernie Madoff scandal came, I learned a very useful phrase which is "affinity fraud": people are very easily conned by people who they think of as being like themselves, as being part of their tribe."

So if we have two Nobel price winners and a top economist saying that there is a lot of ideology and cultural beliefs being sold as "economic truths", why then the TINA (there is no alternative) principle of neo-liberalism has been so accepted?

Those structures built before us

There were several concepts that have become quite popular in this regard:
Check your privilege  is an online expression used by bloggers and in twitter  to remind others that the body and life they are born into comes with specific privileges we normally are blind to. This is illustrated by a TED talk done by Michael Kimmel. He tells an anecdote of how he learned about this concept (way before it was made popular by social media) having a meal with a study group. He witnessed an exchange between two women (a white woman and a black woman). The white woman says "All women face the same oppression. We are all placed in the same position in the patriarchy". The black woman replies "I'm not so sure. Let me ask you a question. When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, what do you see?". The white woman said "I see a woman". Then,the black woman said "You see. That's the problem. When I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror I see a black woman. To me, race is visible." Being the only man in the group, he thought oh-oh and then admitted "when I look in the mirror I see a human being. I'm the generic person... I'm universally generalisable." And then comments "that's the moment when I became a middle-class white man." (he missed the adjective 'american', though).

Another concept being talked about is Self-efficacy (and attribution): the extent or strength of one's belief in one's own ability to complete tasks and reach goals; the level of confidence we have that our behaviour can actually affect what we achieve and how much of our success/failure we attribute to our actions. It's a common concept looked at in cases of burnout, obesity and mental health in general.

How are these two linked together? When we think of system structure and which is our place in this system in this particular moment in time.

In this video, Paul Krugman discusses issues of infrastructure with Senator Elizabeth Warren (min. 56 onwards). He asks "New York city is expensive.[] Why are people here? It's because of the opportunities. Where do these opportunities come from? They come from all the other people who are here, from the interaction between them, they come from the incredible infrastructure []." But then he argues "I find it incredible that somebody had made the decision to be in this crowded place, in this expensive place -because of all these opportunities- but then they say, all that money 'is money I made', 'you have not right', 'it's all me', 'it's all my individual stuff'. And 'how does the government thinks it can tax some of that away?' to pay for some of the things that makes this place where I want to be. This city -and America as a whole- is an overwhelming demonstration we are more than the sum of the parts. And that's why we need more than markets, we need government to make things work." 
In this comment, of course, he describes a misattribution of success as a pure individual achievement without taking into account the systemic enablers (geography, family, point in History, class, access to education, access to opportunities, etc). On the other end of the spectrum, the self-efficacy of anyone with less privileges will be greatly affected, sometimes without fully accounting for the systemic disablers. Of course when there are systemic enablers for some and systemic disablers for others, there is systemic injustice.

Codes defining systems' structures

In this video, Fritjof Capra (introducing the book "The systems View of Life") explains that Systems science uses networks at the centre of the model to explain life in its multidimensional levels of organization, changing the old model that looked at systems as machines. Here he touches on biological, sociological and economical applications, but I'll comment on what he says when speaking about social networks (min 27): social networks are networks of communication. Social networks are self-generated but what they generate is non-material: they generate thoughts and meaning. They form multiple feedback loops, which eventually produce a shared system of beliefs, explanations and values, which is known as culture. And showing membership of a community means that you have to behave in a certain way. There are also restrictions on behaviour of their members, but these restrictions are generated by the members themselves.

In other words there is a code of conduct. 

According to Capra systems science changes the way of thinking towards relationships, patterns and context.

Following a similar line, "The culture code" is a marketing book by Dr. Clotaire Rampaille (who has also recently launched "The global code"), that describes that most decisions we make are unconscious. They are commanded vastly by a reference system we imprint in our early years of life, are shaped by the emotions we feel any time we have a "first experience" -and even more when this is repeated and reinforced-, and embedded in our reptilian brain (the most ancient part of the brain commanding survival and reproduction processes). This reference system will work as a code that defines what is accepted and rejected. Some of these first experiences are very individual, and some will be transmitted by our family and by our culture. In this way, most of our choices are decoded as survival tactics that we and our tribe have developed. 

According to Rampaille, this code determines what's the relationship we establish with an object, a subject, a notion, an idea and it is highly symbolic. The content itself is interchangeable. Applied to marketing, if a brand of shampoo wants to sell us beauty, it will tap into the culture codes of beauty (young, slim, symmetrical, in many cases blond, unattainable, etc). Any product that wants to establish a relationship with us using beauty as a bridge, will have to build a vision of beauty similar to our own. Many brands of shampoo could achieve this. But he goes beyond, and suggest there are codes that define what certain cultures look in a president, how they see their countries identity, etc.

So, if networks are relationships, and there are codes that ultimately determine relationships (by accepting/rejecting), these codes will determine the shape of the network, its structure, its geometry. 

It is probably in this context that what happened with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina can be interpreted. The Washington Post shared some of the findings of The Great Smoky Mountains Study of Youth that were tracking 1420 low income children, including this specific group. Suddenly, a Casino was built in the reservation which saw most families increasing their income. As a result children showed a significant increase a personality traits that are strongly linked with positive outcomes further in life: conscientiousness and agreeableness. It is hypothesised that the extra income improve the relationship between parents, the relationship between parents and children, and reduce alcohol intake, commenting that when this happens before the age of 8, these traits can become permanent. The codes that get imprinted about our most primary relationships are more positive when these relationships are healthier.

These findings are also in line with the views of Professor Robert Putman.

On-code, off-code or changing the code?

Coherence to the code is the key to success within a given system. In this sense, when thinking how few women get to the top Sheryl Sandberg makes very interesting comments. She speaks about self-efficacy and shares stats showing that men attribute their success to themselves, while women tend to comment on the enabling factors external to themselves. She gives cultural clues: men are positively correlated to success and likeability whilst women are negatively correlated. As a whole, she indicates to women that being "on-code" in business has to do with confidence, single focus on the business, individuality, challenging the rules and self-attribution-bias (even if it is partially delusional). There is a lot of sense in her point of view. Of course, it is not clear if this would be really enough when there are disabling systemic factors. You can hardly be more successful, committed and confident than Serena Williams, however she once said "I'm the most underestimated 8-times grand slam champion ever" (after this quote she continued winning and has accumulated 21 grand slams victories -and counting-). This did not stop her to achieve all that she has achieved. But the fact she is not being truly recognised is an indication that if she had played within a structure where achievements were measured much more subjectively, her success would've probably been limited. Her experience suggests that there is a bit more than attitude that play against women and african americans.   
It is not difficult to recognise either that there are many disabling factors against working mothers: some degree of cultural disapproval (still, and coming from both sexes),none or short maternity leave, lack of flexibility and even cost of childcare being higher than their own salary (the infamous I-can't-afford-to-work issue). 
We need to think too about the system geometry and the fact that men thrive in pyramidal structures (which is in itself a symbol of masculinity), probably trying to resolve some of their Oedypus complex every time they symbolically kill their symbolic father (their boss) by taking their place and thus penetrating further their symbolic mother (the company, that feeds them). Of course, pyramids are not inclusive of all men, they have mechanisms to exclude any group they do not see as matching their own identity (some people will be always off-code even if they are willing to mimic on-code behaviours).

Beyond this, studies on collective intelligence done by the MIT led by Tom Malone suggest that groups act more intelligently when:

•  there is higher social perceptiveness, 
• an equal share of the conversation amongst members, 
• and a high number of women. 

This is a real invitation to think how hierarchical and reward structures could be better in accommodating and recognising members that are enablers of collective intelligence. 
In this sense, it is important to remember that processes and structures cannot be decoupled.

Changing the metaphor

In Capra's video, he states: "There is a system awareness that sees itself through a metaphor, a code, and through this code, it designs processes. Indeed at the very heart of the change in paradigm, we find a fundamental change of metaphor of understanding life as a machine as understanding it as a network."

Even if we want to insist we are rational beings, science has shown that decisions are deeply emotional or plainly instinctive. In a world that is only trying to evolve through addressing the pre-frontal cortex (words and rational thinking) is neglecting most part of its brain that can only process symbolic information. The symbolic language we used to connect to in ritual once-a-week attendance to church (with all its positive and negative implications) is being used 24/7 by advertising and the entertainment industry which normally works in accordance to the current (mostly survival and competitive) codes.  

How do these codes codes get changed? How do we evolve? Personally and collectively?

My attempt to answer these questions would be:
1- Back to basics
Personally: Listening to our inner child (the one that needs), and provide him/her with the resources we have as adults. I think the awareness of our own history is important and understanding our early years is an important enabler to understand what are our codes, our most basic needs. 
Collectively: Improving well being of all children: (through addressing the main causes of distress of their parents), will definitely bring a next generation with new codes.  

2. Stepping outside our comfort zone:

Personally: New habits, new experiences. According to Einstein the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. 
Collectively: New conversations, embracing plurality, immigration. 
When people with different views of the world interact, these conversations will slowly affect the codes of all participants but only if this works as an exercise of acceptance and integration of the 'other'. This requires the mastery of the art of brave conversations, where we are willing to speak our truth and listening to a different point of view that might even challenge it. In this regard, it is not surprising to see defence mechanisms at play through a higher level of awareness of racial tensions and anti-immigration rhetoric  particularly in countries where Imperial codes (of racial superiority) might still be present.

3. Embracing moments of crisis: renaissance
Personally: Personal crisis are opportunities to get rid of what's not working. In this sense, there is a part of us that must be allowed to die: old ideas of ourselves, old expectations, old habits, old models. This is not a simple process and a full grieving is necessary.  
Collectively: crisis are powerful symbolic collective events. I've touched upon collective trauma in a previous entry. Collective crisis should also offer the opportunity to revisit old models, too. But in a globally connected world, there are other events that get imprinted too. Images that can be highly symbolic like "The Blue Marble", a photograph of the earth from space was embraced by environmentalist, Western counter-culture (movements for civil rights, peace, feminism, etc) as an image that raised our awareness of unity, of earth vulnerability and challenged our ego image. 
Some people say that the attack on the twin towers is in itself a very strong image that brought a sense of something big just happened, "this means change" to the entire world.
I would argue that the image of Aydan Kurdi has been also significant. Almost a warning telling us that point 1 is not being done properly.

Even if we can all rationally agree that the first point (well being for all children) is indisputable and what every society wants, current economical policies are working against it and we keep voting in their support.

Somehow, the never-ending economical crisis -that triggered several national identity crisis-, the new wave of civil wars -that led to a refugee crisis- and international wars seem to have started to shake things at a much deeper level, to reach core codes and beliefs that the beginning of the crisis did not touch, the ones that we need to confront and hopefully overcome.

Andrea

29. Crazy, warming world

Confronting with the reality of failed states, the consequence of the Iraq war, the raise of ISIS and the situation in Syria and how it is all exacerbated by to climate change, I started to wonder about the issue of structures and the difference between freedom and anarchy. 
Interestingly enough, I found a related article by historian Timoty Snyder in the Guardian, entitled: "Hitler's world may not be so far away" with the caption: Misunderstanding the Holocaust has made us too certain we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1940s. Faced with a new catastrophe – such as devastating climate change – could we become mass killers again?.

I'll approach the question from much more unconventional angles, but coming back to entwine some of the points I found interesting from this article. 

The brain as a predictive machine

Neuroscience tells us that our brain works as a predictive machine, remembering and forgetting, constructing, de-constructing and re-constructing memories constantly.

How does your memory work? Horizon documentary - BBC
(original page no longer available - by BBC)

In this sense the time question is central to our humanity. How can I avoid any life-threatening future? To answer this question, both our memories and our imagination are crucial. In our own experience, our family's and/or culture's, we find a vast bank of resources with ready-made answers to this question. If none of these are good, we use pieces from this experience and available information to create something new. Without memories we cannot predict or create a future.

Going back to the article: even though reading Hitler in a title might not be very encouraging, the article makes very interesting points. Firstly, it links the high food prices of the 30s with the current challenge that climate change brings:
On the one hand: "Science provided food so quickly and bountifully that Hitlerian ideas of struggle lost a good deal of their resonance – which has helped us to forget what the second world war was actually about. In 1989, 100 years after Hitler’s birth, world food prices were about half of what they had been in 1939 – despite a huge increase in world population and thus demand." And then adds "After two generations, the green revolution has removed the fear of hunger from the emotions of electorates and the vocabulary of politicians."
"Hitler specifically, and quite wrongly, denied that agricultural technology could alter the relationship between people and nourishment." and then explains "Hitler’s alternative to science and politics was known as Lebensraum, which meant “habitat” or “ecological niche”. Races needed ever more Lebensraum, “room to live”, in order to feed themselves and propagate their kind." 

The following video explains how this choice of going back (and looking solutions in our reptilian brain) or moving forward (looking for creative solutions in our pre frontal cortex) works in our brains.

Nowadays, climate change is putting pressure on agriculture again, either stopping altogether or threatening the predictability of food supply, affecting disproportionally certain communities: "During the hot summer of 2008, fires in fields led major food suppliers to cease exports altogether, and food riots broke out in Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. During the drought of 2010, the prices of agricultural commodities spiked again, leading to protests, revolution, ethnic cleansing and revolution in the Middle East. The civil war in Syria began after four consecutive years of drought drove farmers to overcrowded cities."

These reflections are important. Being able to recognise a past global experience must help us create a different future. If the "political eye" of Nazi Germany only looked back to History seeing what old empires had done ie finding a solution to food supply through territorial expansion, a self-declared racial superiority, colonisation, identification and elimination of competition- we should be able to look back now to see that these ideas belong to the past. We should focus our science and technological efforts to address both the emergencies and the core challenges that communities' self-sustainability face in the context of climate change.

“State and government was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita to the New York Times, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”

In this sense, the administration of ourselves (and/or of a anything we may need to manage), is first anchored to our view of the world. This view is the one that informs us if the structures we have and the processes we follow are suitable.  But when our eyes fail to see the challenges of today as new ones, we stick to obsolete responses and rely in old tools instead of looking for new solutions for new problems. This is essentially bad government. 

Freedom to create 

As moving into the future requires the ability to create the future out of the elements of the past, I'll touch upon the creativity process.

"Draw anything you like", can be a scary command. We may face a blank canvas panic. This amount of freedom may give us a sense of chaos and paralysis. Nothing comes to mind. Ideas appear and disappear. To kindle the fire of creativity, it is probably easier to start with more limits. "Draw an elephant". That's easy. The action gets going. We draw very badly at the beginning, it's all too literal or too childish. We let go, we continue, we learn, we improve and become more confident, until  we find the elephant premise too restrictive and we draw a cat, saying that this is a very creative elephant. And we feel smart by having challenged the premise. And then we continue outside the animal kingdom and really start to draw what we want. Until we feel that the black pencil is a restriction and we use colours. Then the paper becomes a restriction, and we find a canvas or do an animation or a sculpture, and we add music and people dancing...

Restrictions may seem to be the opposite of freedom. In this sense, our understanding of freedom enters anarchic territory, where there are no restrictions, no structures, no limits. But creativity is a self-restricting act. To create, we make choices otherwise nothing would happen: the possibilities would keep floating in the air without ever materialising. At each stage of the creative process of the example, all the restrictions played a double role: enabling and disabling. Creating and destructing. Restrictions are in fact, intrinsic to creation, they become its structure, and this structure is in itself content.

In the example, however, we are free to transcend the limits imposed to us, as we decide to do so. However, there is always a tension between the power of disobeying and the set limits. On the one hand, regulations and restrictions are there to be respected but at the same time, power can modify them. It is here, where the need of plurality and decentralisation of power emerges: in order to keep both "law that restricts government" and a "government with a power to change the law" in a healthy, slowly moving tension.

Collective creation (co-creation) requires collaboration, relations of trust, institutions to create, activate and regulate processes and to manage resources. Only through collective entities, rights emerge as a protective layer of the individual against the others and against the collective. In anarchy, there is no order, no structure thus there are no relationships, there is no collective and no creation but destruction (even if destruction is not the end in a life-death-life cycle). 

Where there is anarchy there are no rights

At this point I go back to the article: it points out that "all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled or seriously compromised.". By pointing out that most of mass killings happened outside the borders of Germany where states have been destroyed ie where there were no rights, it draws parallels with the destruction of states by civil wars and invasions, sending a warning to Syria. In fact, this is true for South Sudan too. Of course, we can argue that there are no many rights under authoritarian regimes. They do, however, maintain a minimal co-habitation code where people are not killing each other in mass numbers (through centralising the power to decide who should be killed, though). But in such low levels of social development, the rigidity of the regimes can also be a direct representation of their fragility. If Putin wants to build a clear picture that the regime change in Syria will destroy the state and bury the country under the anarchic and apocalyptic forces of Isis (hiding his own interest in the region), Obama is clear that there is a need of a political change and a government that can respond to the challenges of self-sustainability their people are facing (and obviously continuing the geopolitical game of the region). If we add to the equation the right of self-determination, and the aggressive actions of Assad against Syria's people (the majority of the refugees declare they are fleeing from Assad), we end up with a plural game with very delicate tensions and balances, where all current structures are being destroyed and no structures to sustain and protect are being built.


Beyond Syria or Iraq or Libya, in Western countries the question of the relevance of the state and state regulation is being constantly challenged. We only need to look at Volkswagen bypassing environmental regulation, the terms of TTP that have been agreed or TTIP agreement that is being discussed or the ever increasing lobbying power of private interests. The regulators appear to be more negotiators than actual regulators. In this article from James Dyson, he shares some insights about how regulations are agreed mostly following the lead of the dominant player. In this video, Senator Elizabeth Warren questions banking regulators and their avoidance to do anything beyond negotiating settlements. 

In this context of ever more self or laxed regulations, it is also important to recognise that a extreme liberalism of markets will end up being an anarchic force that erodes states, and with them our rights and our ability to respond to collective challenges. Private enterprise may have a lot of executive power, but it is exclusive (not inclusive) and tends to shy away of medium and long term investments. The state is the only entity that can act on behalf of the collective.  

Creating the future, a process of self-awareness and self-mastery

The creative process has been described symbolically in many ways. The most simplistic puts it in terms of the material integration of female and male principles ie idea and purpose, circle and arrow, science and application, knowledge and enterprise, egg and spermatozoa, imagination and decision, in the example before, the blankness of the paper and the pencil.

But if the brain is a predictive machine, the time question plays a role and therefore integrating the past is part of the creative process too. In the creative act we project into the future, based on the elements of our past. But for this act to be truly creative, we should've completed our individuation process, the one that allow us to stop repeating and reapplying old solutions (beliefs, patterns) without critique and come up with something new. 
On the issue of integrating the past, Timoty Snyder article adds: 

"A final plurality has to do with time. The state endures to create a sense of durability. When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. The defence of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future. Awareness of history permits recognition of ideological traps and generates scepticism about demands for immediate action because everything has suddenly changed. Confidence in the future can make the world seem like something more than, in Hitler’s words, “the surface area of a precisely measured space”.

Individually and collectively, we need to become self-aware and master:

• our resources to satisfy our basic needs
• our emotions to build healthy relationships, 
• our will and self-discipline to create and transform our reality, 
• our thinking, to set priorities and make decisions to keep balance, 
• our truth, our story and contribute to the creation of the collective wisdom.

Can we become mass killers again? That seems to be the default solution if we fail to really address the multidimensional crisis we are going through, truly integrating our collective past and consciously embarking in creating new, more plural, smarter solutions.

Andrea

28. The ghosts of conflicts past

There is something in medicine called ghost or phantom pain. It's the pain that someone feels on a limb that has been amputated. Beyond the anatomical mechanisms, it is almost as if the brain needs to emphasize that "something big happened here" by feeling pain.

Collective trauma
There seems to be a different time-scale for dealing with trauma. The intensity of the emotions we feel, cannot be contained in an instant and jump to a realm where there is no time and leave a strong imprint in our unconscious. These memories get frozen in an eternal state of present, like in Picasso's Guernica. There is no time in the unconscious and there is not time in the collective unconscious. The feedback that the moving reality keeps providing us with, stops being fully computed or is simply ignored. There is a part of us that gets anchored to that unprocessed moment.

Guernica by Picasso, Rein exposition

In the collective unconscious we store the memories of collective experience and collective trauma. I moved countries several times and as a foreigner I sensed some of these "social ghost pains", but the most obvious ones are also visible to a tourist or by simply reading the news on a foreign newspaper. It is this feeling of "something big happened here" when we are in front of visible scars, like in front of the reminding parts of the Berlin Wall or Ground Zero or in front of a graffiti in Belfast. The same happens when we hear the word miners in Yorkshire or mines in Vietnam or disappeared in Argentina or Franco in Catalunya/the Basque country,... or a taxi driver's comments on the Palace of Parliament build by Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and there must a reason why Switzerland law still states that there must be a nuclear bunker/shelter place for everyone. Also when we read the news related to guns or racism in America, or we learn about Apartheid in South Africa, Holocaust, etc, etc, etc. These are all traumatic social experiences that had been shared by a large group of people that linger on, sometimes perpetuated through generations, with an incredible quality of quasi-eternal present. We are not short of social traumatic experiences. And even if we "think" they belong to the past, they don't. To the observer they look like a veil that is covering the mood and altering the perception of the present time with the forgotten-memory of this pain.

Pain needs to be expressed to be released and somehow its quality of "present pain" needs to be respected, even if it was not our own experience but something we have inherited. That's why art that captures these feelings is so important. Every piece of art, a picture, a sculpture, a song, brings an emotion to the present, increasing the awareness of its existence. So everyone that feels any of this emotion and expresses it, releases part from this stored collective stock.

I was struck by the documentary telling the story of African Americans "returning" the Ghana either to stay or as a pilgrimage (there are two 10-min parts, worth watching). Returning, of course, is figurative. They arrive to Ghana, re-enact the kidnappings of their ancestors by slave traders, they tell the story mixing past and present tense, they cry this ancient pain. However, even if for them this pain is very real and present, and there is a part of them that feels they returned home, they find themselves in Ghana being seen as foreigners, Americans and even "white". Their emotional reality does not coincide with what the observer sees. It is almost the perfect example of "No man ever steps twice in the same river". You are not the same you when you return, and the river is not the same river. However, this process of trying to reconcile past and present is important for all of us because it is the only way of liberating ourselves from this heavy emotional burden. It is only through this liberation, we can act and make new decisions that affect our actual reality.

Political and economical ghosts

In lighter subjects related to political and economic issues, we also inherit tools, structures, views of the world that sometimes do not properly fit in today's reality but continue unchallenged nonetheless. There is a part of us stuck on each of the collective traumas the world has lived through (the ones I mentioned are of course only a few examples). But when thinking of politics and economy, we need to look back at the part of us that got globally stuck sometime in 1950, still in shock after WWII, when the new global institutions were being founded (IMF, UN, World Bank, NATO, even ECC), when the world was divided into winners and losers (the winners conforming the security council, the highest hierarchy rank in the nations world order), east and west, communist v capitalist nations, the new ex colonies and the new ex empires, etc, etc. And yes, it is also in the baby boomers' early childhood period (when most of people's personal trauma comes from), the moment they were absorbing all the emotional charge of their parents, people that lived through WWII (and had been born to the people that lived through WWI...) which probably paid a big role in shaping them in the "Me generation", with its lights (civil rights movement and progress) and its shadows (narcissism, individualism, turn to a liberal-conservatism and generational accumulation of riches).

The world progress continued, but the view of the world got frozen.

In the TED talk: "The best stats you've ever seen", Hans Rosling speaks about preconceptions regarding our view of the world. In his work as a professor of International Health in Sweden, he discovered his students had a preconception of the world that divided it into "we and them: the Western World and the Third World".

However data shows that the views the university students had, were more aligned with the reality of 1950 and 1960's: the one that describes the world their grandparents lived in.

In this subsequent video, he goes further in showing what different household incomes look like, how much the world has changed, and most importantly how fast. So we don't live in the same world the baby boomers were born in. It is not the same river we are looking at. However, it is almost as if we stopped looking at the world and took their word for it.

In this RSA video, Dirk Philipsen dares to call GDP as "Granpa's definition of prosperity" (ja!) to point out that an obsession with GDP growth is neither suitable nor sustainable... it is simply outdated.

In this interview of New Yorker's journalist Dexter Filkins to Argentina's president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (subtitled in English), the topic of how much the world has changed is touched upon between minutes 31 to 40 approximately. The journalist starts this segment by asking if the financial/economical rules need to change, if rules are unfair. She replies that the current rules are not useful to anyone, developed or developing countries, sharing some US stats and illustrating it by pointing out that a TV series not so old as Friends now looks ludicrous as people of that age cannot afford such flats in New York. He then asked a very telling question on foreign policy: is Argentina moving away from the US and closer to China and Russia (and Venezuela and Iran)? (showing how the capitalism v communism ghost plays a role in judging what it used to be the third world, the non-aligned... in other words, which side are you?). She then responds that US is the second largest investor and holds a trade surplus v Argentina. That deals with Russia and China are only reflecting today's reality of a multi-polar world. Whatever the opinion of her performance as President might be, in this exchange she appears to have a clarity that others lack.

A veil that polarises everything into good and bad has many advantages. A world full of nuance and imperfect decisions is uncomfortable, but it is also more real. A world view that can be reduced to the format of a football match with two emperors disputing territories or trying to prove their system better might be easy, even entertaining, but keeps us in the illusion that we are mere spectators. We do not connect to our reality and thus we cannot affect it. But if studies show that we find truth in groups, and that the way that thought, science and emerging structures are networks and not trees, that means that each point, each individual, each nation is important. Our own personal perspective might not be "the truth" but it has a purpose and in expressing it, it can help the person next to us to drop his own confirmation bias and vice versa. And for that happening, we should not be all saying the same things, repeating the words of others, aligned. 

This veil not only polarises but also fragments. It decouples economy and politics, warfare and arms trade, freedom and the structures that provide opportunity, and probably most importantly past and present.

The ghosts from the past are the ones that don't allow us to see the present. Without confronting them we won't be able to act to change what we would like to change. 

Andrea

27. Sight and insight

I always joke about the super power I'd like to have: "being able to roll my eyes 360 degrees" (As in being-able-to-perform-an-epic-eye-roll in front of someone talking non-sense). Definitely. It was a joke until I thought that I might actually have another, more interesting and less cynic, reason of why I'd like this super-power: it'd be the power to look in, to see clearly something inside that changes how you see the outside. The power of insight. 

Insight is this moment of recognition of an internal truth that changes how we see and interpret reality. It is something that had previously been hidden, but which we recognise when it emerges. The journey of how we find insights -and thus discover these inner truths- is not easy. Most of the times, we try to do it through observation (sight), sometimes in constructing (or attracting) outside something that we "feel" inside, to then observe it (sight again) -as in the Infinity sand sculpture by Carl Jara-.

Infinity (sand sculpture) - Carl Jara

In this sculpture the true insightful moment would be when one of these men turns around and, instead observing only a smaller version of themselves, they see what's behind. Bringing forward what's back, making conscious what's unconscious, elevating his awareness of reality.

In Marketing and Advertising insights are used either to create propositions or to make an existing one more appealing by making them "resonate" with the public. By "resonate" here I mean that the public recognise it as a "truth" and therefore identifies with it, albeit unconsciously. To give an example of what insight is, Top Gear is a good case. It is a BBC program described to be about cars and driving. However, the insight behind the success of the program is that it is about male camaraderie with a car theme. There are many programs that speak about cars, with experts and maybe even more accurate reviews. What had made Top Gear appealing is that it is about three "friends playing with cars", the cars and the information about cars is important but not central. This is the difference between what you see and what you don't see, but is. Sight and insight. If you are the producer and have this insight, the way you'll put the program together will be completely different to one that only focuses in the cars themselves: you would allow episodes when the presenters build their own cars, and cheat each other in phoney races. Its insight is what makes it unique. Its insight informs what's the creative coherent space to play with.

The following advertising plays with the concept of "Golden shadow", with the insight that sometimes prejudices don't allow us to recognise potential.

Insight is only found through a trained used of our intuition, a skill in which we are all almost analphabets. It is about submerging ourselves in the world of ideas, of symbols and concepts that sometimes are incongruent and ambiguous, and making connections to then articulate a simple idea, a truth (or for the artist to create art).

But why is this important? It is important because we are all looking for our own inner truths. We are all exploring the geography of our identity, with its ever changing landscape and its moving borders, trying to understand what's in and what's out, what is ours and what's "foreign", ultimately trying to answer the question: who am I? 
There are three quotes attributed to Michelangelo about sculpture that have to do with this process (I hope that at least one of them is real!).

 

We are both the sculptor and the block of stone. We know that inside the block of stone that is ourselves, there is something that simply is. Finding these insights, as Grayson Perry puts it "these truths we didn't know we knew", is powerful because it is liberating. We chip away that piece of marble that wasn't us, and we feel lighter.

National Portrait Gallery: Grayson Perry's Who are you? Introduction

Of course, we are not only eyes that roll between sight and insight, deep in contemplation, observing and reflecting. So what happens when we get out of the our inner cave, step outside the church or the museum? We have to create. Play a new game. Make something new. Make new decisions. Express ourselves from this new found centre.

This is so important that funerals are increasingly more personalised and popular songs started to replace the old hymns.  "My way" was the first hit to top the funeral charts. So even though we are not all great innovators, breakthrough thinkers, artist or rebels, being able to claim we did things -big or small- "our" way seems to be a worthy badge of honour.  

As an opposite example, we can hear Johnny Cash singing Hurt:

If I could start again 

A million miles away

I would keep myself

I would find a way

And yet, as long as we are here, we can always try to find our way.

Andrea

PS: You have to love the British that now moved on to Monty Pynthon's "Always look at the bright side of life" and songs like Queen's "Who wants to live forever" for their funerals.

26. Walls, language, resistance and adopting a new motherland

Chinese symbols for adopt, accept, naturalise

They don't speak our language! is one of the most common complaints when any European is arguing against immigration. Language becomes a wall between two equals, a way to shut the other out. "I'm in this country but I don't want it inside my head" might be the never-articulated thought of one of those immigrants. And thus showing a degree of resistance against the "adopted" motherland. From this point of view, it's probably a process of self-preservation, of not mutating too fast (or at all) and getting lost in adaptation.

In France, the language conflict is probably even deeper: the French criticise immigrants whilst the French themselves are also consciously or unconsciously resisting the imposition of English as the "universal language". So, I'll try to touch the two points of view with the hidden emotional significance they share as they touch our sense of self but also loyalty and betrayal.

video: RSA, Sudhir Hazareesingh on How the French think

Learning a new language 
Anyone that has ever taken a language course knows that language is not innocuous. It is not a tool that we use. It is a tool that by using it, it changes us too.

Grammar as the world interpreter
Grammar is not only the structure of the sentence, it is the structure of the thought itself, which then affects how you interpret the world. The article in the Guardian "Think your view world is fixed? Learn another language and you'll think differently" by Panos Athanasopoulus reports on a study conducted on English and German monolinguals and bilinguals. 

"We showed German-English bilinguals video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket and then asked them to describe the scenes.
When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational, economic decisions in a second language.
When you give a scene like that to a monolingual German speaker they will tend to describe the action but also the goal of the action. So they would tend to say, “A woman walks towards her car,” or “A man cycles towards the supermarket.” English monolingual speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking,” or “a man is cycling,” without mentioning the goal of the action.
The worldview assumed by German speakers is a holistic one – they tend to look at the event as a whole – whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus only on the action."

The article explains that in English the Present Continuous exists whilst in German it doesn't, and somehow this may explain why the English speakers are happy describing an action in itself, whilst in German you feel you need a goal for the sentence to convey enough information.

But they also found that bilinguals who are given the test instructions in a second language "adopt" the perspective of that second language. So a German, performing the test in German would describe an action with its goal (eg A woman walks towards a car), but if he were performing the test in English, he would describe the action itself (A woman is walking). Participants were found also to change their opinions on how ambiguous some scenes were. So... we can wonder: Which of these different views we can have in different languages truly represents us? which one enables us to express ourselves? 

It makes me wonder how a language like Indonesian that -does not have future or past tenses, or that forms its plurals by repeating the same word twice- changes the way people think.

Hidden social codes
Beyond grammar, it is also easy to recognise that different languages come with different social codes. They are full of nuances regarding the choice of words, the formulation of an idea, the which words are emphasised, etc. We all know that when learning to write a complaint letter in English (British style), there is a specific structure. You are polite. You are not angry, but disappointed at most. In a German course, well... it is different. What Germans would describe as clear and to the point, British standards would qualify it as blunt. In the country where I can from, we wouldn't bother to write a letter. 

Beyond the course itself, when living in a foreign country these codes are almost as important as the language itself (I know it because I've lived in five different countries). You can get very frustrated if you don't learn the art of French confrontation even to discuss something utterly insignificant with a plumber. When trying to swim through the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy, building a familial rapport with the civil servants gets you a long way -in fact this used to drive mad an american friend of mine that expected customer service american-way-. You also learn the multi-layered meaning of the word "interesting" in Great Britain, which is very commonly used to express disagreement subtly. 

It is not only through language but also through these codes that you "make things work". 

As a consequence, the emotional charge you put in certain transactions has to change when you are performing them in different countries. If you are very uncomfortable with confrontation, France might feel hostile. If you are uncomfortable with building a sense of familiarity with someone you don't know, Italy might feel difficult. If you are not perfectionist, Germany might feel too negative-focused.
There is a point, however, that you learn to see as a game you have to play, which has certain rules. But that requires you to disembarrass yourself of some of your own feelings and emotions which might bring a sense of loss and even betrayal. Normally the mother-tongue is the one that carries the most emotional weight, as behaving in a certain way is related to being accepted or rejected by your mother (your family, your clan). Even though maternal love is supposed to be unconditional, maternal rejection exists (even in nature) and we fear its potential toxicity. Allowing yourself to be confrontational -for example- when confrontation was frown upon by your mother (or culture), or ambitious, sometimes even being thin or fat... is an unconscious betrayal. You are running a significant emotional risk of being rejected by your own family and country and thus cutting that umbilical cord that connects you to your home and the possibility to come back. And here is where the sense of self is challenged. Do my emotions define me? Are they defending me, my sense of self? Are they defending my mother's and culture accepted version of me? Are these boundaries mine? Where do the boundaries of who I am are? 
All these questions are not easy to answer, and it takes time. Sometimes crossing too many of the internal boundaries too fast brings of sense of identity loss.

Beyond language: Conflicting narratives and codes

Let me start with the most obvious of the examples. For many years History books described the arrival of Colombus to America as the "Discovery of America". There are even academic discussions about who discovered America first. The Vikings! And we naturalised it. But of course America had people already who perfectly knew the land below their feet existed. The ones that added America to their cognitive map were the Europeans. It is an European subjective narrative. The native narrative would've been very different.
So what happens when we confront two or more narratives? 
Studies prove that pluralistic groups can detect lies better, confirmation-bias is reduced. Groups are more successful than individuals to find the "truth" (as opposed to a lie). However, confrontation of narratives sometimes forces a choice. The ban of face covering in public spaces (effectively banning the use of the burqa in public spaces) or of the use of religious symbols in schools in France generated clear conflicts between two social norms whose rejection/acceptance criteria contradict each other. Adhering to one of them implies betrayal of the other.

I'll go outside the world of immigration for a second, to bring the example of Argentina's stolen children documentary by RT. During the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, the Junta organized the kidnap, torture and execution of opposition militants, including pregnant women. The mothers were allowed to give birth (but were subsequently killed). These babies were placed in "right" families, many of them were families of members of the army. These children grew up not knowing their origin and many times were educated under the ideology that justified the killing of their biological parents. In the documentary these babies, now adults, tell the process they went through when discovering the truth. Some of them approached the truth by their own initiative, but some others by judicial searches. In the latter, they were asked to provide blood to run DNA tests. Even though they could understand that there was significant evidence to suggest they had been stolen, some of them refused to give blood. They were facing all these questions that affected their identity that had to be resolved in what it probably felt a split of a second. They knew too that it represented a betrayal towards the family they grew up with and there would not be a way back, even if some of them were directly responsible of their abduction. The sense of identity changes deeply in this sort of process.

A little less than 120 out of the estimated 500 were found. It is suspected that many of the missing ones are not coming forward for fear their adoptive parents would go to prison. This is based on the fact that many of them approach the authorities once their parents die.
This is -of course- an extreme case of having to integrate a very difficult past. 

But I think this example illustrates in its extremity how clan loyalty works, how difficult it might be for some to go against it, and how it affects our sense of self.

Immigration as rebirth
All immigrants face this moment, like Frodo in Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings, when we need to let go of our "given" sense of self, our dependent relationship with our mother and the possibility to go back. But this moment comes with doubt and with resistance, not learning the language is one of them. If I shed the old skin... Who is giving birth? who is being born? who dies? what's the essence that survives in this transition?

How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Jes’ like a rolling stone?
~Bob Dylan

By attempting to answer these questions the awareness of who we are, what is ours and not, increases. Opening the doors to different ways of thinking, learning new meanings through new words, observing and comparing, we are bringing down some of our internal walls and connect with new parts of ourselves. But in this greater level of awareness the connection to this new motherland is not blind.  

The other end
So what is happening to the observers of these transformations? The ones that point a finger and tell their motherland "they don't speak your language". What's going on with them? They too are faced with the realisation their view of the world is not as universal as they used to think. For them, these immigrants act like messengers. Then they also start to wonder then, am I right? is this right? They also build a wall of resistance for not getting lost in the adaptation. They also need time to absorb. With this comment, I don't mean to "excuse" racism or xenophobia. We are all part of a human race that has historically struggled with change and otherness. Self-preservation instinct kicks in, walls are built. In the past most of these questions had been only answered by the generations that came after. They were the ones that having less internal barriers, being freer from some narratives, were more able to work out "the integration part" of the story. They become culturally bilingual. 

Somehow President Obama is caught in the middle of the question of how to integrate narrative with reality (at least in what internal politics is concerned), particularly when he needs to tap into the cultural narrative of the american exceptionalism. As a African American president, he cannot turn a blind eye to dark chapters of American History or even dark corners of American present. He cannot repeat the prevailing narrative without adding new tones. In preparation to the speech he delivered in Selma these were some of the ideas that appeared in drafts: 

 “Even today we continue to have debates about what it means to love this country, to be a true patriot. But what greater expression of faith in the American idea; what greater form of patriotism is there than to believe that America is not yet finished; that it’s strong enough to be self critical; that each generation can look upon its imperfections and say we can do better.”

However, he has constantly faced republican criticism like what Giuliani said to Republican donors: 

"I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. . . . He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”  

Even if it is easy to say that one is right and the other are wrong (depending on which side you are), I described above that we all have a little conservative inside who is concerned with self preservation and prefer to build walls (the main difference is what it is exactly that thing each of us wants to preserve). Obama addressed this opposition directly in his speech drafts:

“Those who only understand exceptionalism as preserving the past; who deny our faults or inequality; who say love it or leave it; those are the people who are afraid. Those are the people who think America is some fragile thing.”

With these words I'm not trying to endorse this exceptionalism claim, only to illustrate how narratives feel that any sign of self reflection is a threat, somehow showing that the biggest threat is internal. The thing that no one should see or know about us is what we fear the most, what weakens us. 

I round the circle I started in a previous entry, when I said that strength that is based on the rejection of weakness is a false strength. So it is probably only by embracing these weakness, this vulnerable self, that we can complete this re-birth process stronger than before, which allows us to defend the permeable walls that keep our sense of self from falling apart: the ones that protect our essence, our uniqueness, the "myself-but-connected", and tear down the barb wired concrete walls we no longer need. 

Andrea

Interesting articles:
Laurie Penny: "Gender-neutral language is coming - here's why it matters", The Newstatesman