Resilience, Freedom of Speech

There are those who want to take away suffering and pain, and those who want to teach people how to be resilient despite it.

This basic approach underlies a number of different views - do we cut down the lower branches of trees so children don't get hurt climbing them?  Or no?  Do we limit how high we build a swingset?

Some will say that we just can't make the world safe enough.  That we would have to put everyone in full padding, pad all the corners, smooth out all the streets and steps.  Safe is unrealistic.  Teaching people how to safely manage risks, how to identify and avoid dangers...that's more realistic.  (Though there's risk, of course.  Children can break bones or even die falling out of a tree.  In the abstract, accepting the risk seems realistic.  When it comes to your child, are you still willing to accept those risks?)

I was thinking about this with regards to First Amendment rights, classic liberalism, and freedom of speech.  The old school liberal would say "we need to tolerate all speech, even the worst of it.  In an open marketplace for ideas, the best will rise to the top and the worst will fail."  There's a confidence there, a belief that we, as a society, are strong enough and will make wise enough choices that we don't need to be afraid of the worst.  The haters, the conspiracy theorists, etc.

So why, then, do we have the 'new' liberalism?  The focus on being politically correct?  On creating safe places?

I read an article that covered something relevant, a pretty good article that discussed what made some children resilient even when faced with pretty horrific situations.  It's a great article and worth reading in it's entirety.  I'm only focusing on a few small pieces, because they illustrate a few important things.

First of all - resilient children have at least one person who truly believes in them.  It doesn't have to be their mother or father, but they need someone to believe in them.  (This, btw, is why I'm a Big Sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program.  Study after study shows that this sort of long term and involved caring works.  I encourage anyone and everyone to volunteer, to join as a mentor, or just to donate the funds so they can keep doing what they do.)

To bring this back to freedom of speech - yes, we all should learn to have confidence and grow a thick skin.  There will always be haters, there will always be prejudiced, bigoted, fill-in-the-blank people.  Yet it's hard to have that confidence, hard to shrug off those words...if you don't have someone who believes in you and tells you a different story.

For me?  I never really paid much attention to what color dolls came in, or how a character on TV was portrayed.  I listen, though.  And for every story of a minority kid who didn't care (read one recently where the parents received the wrong toy, a white doll when they deliberately ordered a black one for their little girl...and the little girl hadn't noticed and didn't really care) there's another one who gets all excited and amazed that they found a doll that's just like them.

If you have a child who is told every day that they are stupid.  By their mother, their father, their teacher...if every day they are told they are stupid, we can't really expect them to turn around and shrug it off.  To say "no, I'm really smart, despite all of you".  That's called verbal abuse.

So the people who are pushing for political correctness have realized that we, as a society, send messages to people 'not like us' that (for people who don't have that source of support to make them resilient) can be overwhelmingly powerful.  That you are lazy.  You are stupid.  You are less than others.  You are dishonest.  Untrustworthy.  Going to hell.  A wimp.  Less important than others.

And they are trying to address that, by changing the messages we send. 

What would be better, of course, is to build resilience.  Considering how hard it is for my program to find Bigs, however, that's not easy to do.  So many people are not willing to make that kind of long term commitment.

Which is a shame, because I think it's the only thing that truly works.  Sure, there are charities that do good work.  They either create that context for long-term involvement, or they are dependent on a number of factors to be successful.  Many, unfortunately, aren't as successful as they hope.  You can read up on that if you want, lot's of reports and studies have explored why that is.

Personally?  I think any attempt at charity that comes across as patronizing, holier-than-thou, or a fly by will probably not work out too well in the long term.  And the sub-text of a lot of charities have these elements. 

This is not meant to say it's hopeless, or that we should give up, or stop trying.  Even if there's an element working against you, some help may be better than none.  It's just to say that we need to admit there are no easy answers, that trying to find answers requires a certain level of commitment and involvement.

The Quest for Security and Predictability.

In international relations there's this theory about what causes wars.

A lot of theories, actually.  But I wanted to talk about one in particular.  There's a theory that the nations at the top want to keep their status.  So they do things to try to make themselves feel more secure.  Like England before WWI, insisting that they should have the largest navy in the world.  Meanwhile, up and coming nations are asserting themselves andwanting to have a say that is commensurate with their power.  So there's a desire to disrupt the status quo, especially if that status quo fails to recognize their gains.  (Germany, deciding to build a larger navy...which England felt threatened by, so you had a bit of a naval arms race.  Obviously a lot more went into WWI than that, but once Germany became a united country and started asserting themselves as the powerhouse they were on continental Europe it caused tension with England.)

This theory fits with a psychological study...namely that we tend to exaggerate how much something hurts us and minimize how much our actions hurt others.  Someone takes out your eye, you round up a couple of buddies to go kill the other.  Escalating the response, even though it felt natural and right to you.  Hence the reason why "an eye for an eye" was a way of limiting responses and preventing an escalation into a blood feud.

I brought it up because, bloodiness aside, I think the same feelings affect the quest for economic security.  Someone who is near the top (but not totally at the top) will do what they can to try to feel more secure.  Find some measure of safety in the world.  This gets even more confusing and messy when you consider the quite natural desire to take care of your family.  To pass the benefits on to your children.  The janissaries were a big deal partly because they were forbidden to have families.  It gave the Ottoman Turks a force that was dedicated to the state and less likely to abuse their power for selfish interests.  But it's not normal or natural for people to do that, so eventually they wound up having families anyway...and the normal incentives came into effect.  Janissaries would try to let their sons join, too.  Natural...and turned it into something that was hereditary.  Corrupt.  And an obstrution to reform.

The quest for security is sometimes at odds with what we claim are economic efficiency.  Or rather, it can create situations that make it harder and harder for those not already born to privilege to gain access to it.

This isn't meant to say it's good or bad.  For example, the book on economics I've been reading talked about sticky prices...sticky wages, more specifically.  From a human perspective it makes perfect sense to want this.  I have a mortgage.  Bills.  It would be hard to pay those if I couldn't count on at least a certain minimum income, so if my wages adjusted regularly I couldn't plan for anything. 

From an employer side, 'perfect' economics aren't always so good either.  The author brought up the economic situation in Detriot before Ford decided to raise wages for his employees.  It was a 'perfect' economy in which labor could move around as needed to where the work was...except that the business paid a lot when there was high turnover.  Constant loss of resources as you had to train new people, for example.

Heck, Rockefeller became a big deal because he tried bringing some stability to the oil industry.  The constant boom and bust made life very uncertain, you never knew if you were going to make it or implode.

So some stability is necessary...and too much can make a system ossify.  Harden the control those on the top have, prevent up and comers from having a chance.  (It really is Hope for the Flowers all over again.)

This is pretty important for some of the things I want to explore.  Do all the hedges and securities people put in place to maintain their wealth and status have a side effect of locking into place the status quo?  Does doing so open us up to greater disruption on a larger scale?


The Black Swan theory, in a nutshell. All the efforts at creating security actually reduce our resilience and the robustness of the system, making people feel more safe while actually creating a system at greater risk than ever.

Again, it's not that some group is 'good' and another is 'bad'...it's that the decisions each individual makes, the ones that seem good and appear likely to promote security in the long run...all of them can actually create risks that catch us off guard, and make things instable in the long run.