Cactus Juice

On Super-Specialing and Self-Sabotage.

Why is it that we so cling to the super-special reasons why each one of us cannot have health, cannot have happiness, and cannot have success?  The appearance of strange notions in current self-help literature is a response to a true problem in our culture.  Basic, obvious, solutions to suffering are routinely rejected out of hand.  To grasp the simplest of solutions to life is seen as unusual and even heroic.  What the heck is going on here?!

One aspect of our current cultural climate is that we wish to make evil spirits our pets.  Ever since Freud, we have been defined by our afflictions.  Affliction, prior to this point, was unwaveringly woeful.  No one thought to meet Achilles on the battlefield and point out that his one area of moral danger was an opportunity for him to fully experience his humanity.  No one suggested to Job that he had been "given a trial" to learn from.  Rather, Job's suffering reveals a character which he has already formed.  These days, Elizabeth Wurtzel revels in her weakness while Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir rot on the vine.  Here's a clue:  Weakness is just not that interesting; each of us was issued plenty of it at birth.

In this post-industrial world, we are meant to express ourselves as individuals in a world-wide culture where it is difficult even to get 15 minutes of fame.  Being the crazy cat-lady in no-where, Wisconsin isn't good enough; you have to be the craziest cat lady in the entire world.  Gaining notoriety through rare excellence is unlikely, so we turn to rare affliction.  Wurtzel having her latest drug stash FedEx'ed to her latest writing venue.  Pathetically, these afflictions are quite a bit less than rare.  From addiction to family dysfunction, the same story is repeated a few million times.

To add to all of this, the Western World in 2008 is the most superstitious it has been in at least 200 years, and perhaps one of the most superstitious cultures of all time.  Magical psychology has replaced ordered ethical thought.  Christianity, frequently dismissed as a kind of superstition, has an ordering of the natural and the supernatural which brought about some of the greatest flowerings of human thought and advancement.  However, there are broad trends of Christianity, in America at least, which are drivel that rivals the most backwards back-desert Mullah that they would like to preach against.  The superstition cloaks itself in science- this isn't the Flat Earth Society; this is the radio preacher that gives his listeners exact Prozac dosages to request from the doctor (true story).

The media market reverberates with the echoes of these cultural trends.  A generation after Archie Bunker, on any given night you can select from about a dozen uninteresting family dramas.  In the commercials, we now have "nicotine receptors in the brain" that are responsible for your smoking habit, though you'd be hard-pressed to find such a "receptor" in an actual brain cell.  For a while now the anti-smoking pharmaceuticals have focused on your likelihood of failure more than your opportunities for success.

Re-direction to success is generally not the goal.  Success --practical, reasonable, success-- is dull.  Affliction is dressed up to be much more exciting than it actually is, more exciting than excellence and much more exciting than success.  I fall into this trap as much as anyone else (Obviously- I have a blog which partly revolves around my obesity affliction.)  If I had a normal BMI, I'd just be a slow, dull, distance runner.  One of the few million others that completed a half-marathon this year.  At 232 pounds, I'm something special.  And that's difficult to give up.

Popping in behind this culture of "super-special" affliction, of late I've noticed an explosion in the use of the absurd term "self-sabotage".  It has all the earmarks of a darling of this culture: magical psychology, lack of personal responsibility, and affliction.  It would be easy to dismiss the thought pattern I just identified in myself as "self-sabotage."  I guess the way you explain it is, "I don't really want to lose weight."  But that's only part of the picture, which is one of the problems with the concept of self-sabotage.  Using the term is one way to refuse to think through and take responsibility for one's actual decision making process.  In my case, I have to finish the sentence: "I don't really want to lose weight because I want to be a special fat person rather than an undistinguished thin person."

All rational people, and all irrational people too (such as psychotics), engage in decision making patterns exactly like this; they make decisions designed to make their life better.  There is no evil spirit, no magical psychology.  I have made a choice.  What can I do to make a different choice?

There are lists and lists of techniques to help me make a different choice, and I'd like to put them into two categories: those which focus on affliction and those which do not.  Techniques that do not focus on affliction but rather focus on health, on self-actualization, on successful outcomes, are the best.  Thus the exotic solutions in the current crop of self-help books such a the "law of attraction."  For more sedate acknowledgment of this principle, note that the AA Big Book says, "We ceased to struggle."  The New Testament advises not to "kick against the pricks."

Needless to say, these are not the solutions that are the most popular.  When it comes to controlling eating, rather than act like a healthy eater (such as on a Weight Watchers program), "dieting" systems that interact with, and circle around, and focus on, and make war with disordered eating are the most popular.  There's a whole circle of extremism in Overeater's Anonymous that I would say does the same thing.

Back to the question: What should I do?  To say that I shouldn't engage in self-sabotage is meaningless since I'm in fact not trying to make my life worse, rather, I'm trying to make my life better by having a special accomplishment. I am a healthy animal, a rational person, and I make decisions for a reason.  And not just any reason, but a healthy and completely normal desire to treat myself well and have a good life.  I can take responsibility for my own decisions.

What would it look like to "not engage in self-sabotage"?  I guess it means nothing more than "Just don't overeat!"  In response to that simplistic message, I will quote the Buddha, who said that you cannot "press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and force your brain a certain direction."

Here some different decisions I am going to make:  I am going to focus more on actual success and less on affliction.  Perhaps you will be hearing more about my running accomplishments and less on my eating struggles.  I have set myself up for a potential running failure that will be caused by my obesity, entering a marathon where I may not be able to make the time cut-off. Affliction is a lot less fun when it actually curtails the possibility of accomplishments and the reality of experience beats magical psychology every time.  There are no evil spirits lurking around the corner, there is just the reality of conflicted decision making and the burden of heavy cultural influences toward making the wrong decisions.  My affliction is not going to be my pet.

Change a Behavior and Finding God May Follow

The Business Self Help Book That Helped Self

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything isn't deep philosophy.  It isn't say, The Varieties of Religious Experience, where we will end up today.  But it is one of the best books in the self-help / business segment genre that I've read- I'll be adding it my shelf with First, Break All The Rules (a book that every parent should read on behalf of their children and every high school student should read for herself), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Getting Things Done (issue these two books and a good secretarial manual to each new college graduate).

A self-help book must give a prescription for change, preferably in a numerated list.  Influencer offers in the categories of personal, social and structural solutions a prescription each in the motivational and ability categories- six total.  For best results, the authors recommend throwing all six solutions at a problem.  Best of all, the book explains that these methods can be used not only to influence others, but to influence yourself.  The example provided is of a man who lost a large amount of weight; a real person.

Another requirement of the self-help book is that it speak from authority.  Statistics and case histories are presented to illustrate that the author knows more than you do.  Much more.  Your job, therefore, is to not worry about thinking but to simply follow the prescription.  I did, and I've lost eight of the 23 pounds I've gained since my last VFT (Virgin Fat Territory- a lowest number ever seen in a weight loss journey).

The particular lesson that influenced me was told in the history of the fat guy: Influence must be aimed at behaviors.  A goal does not contain within it the elements of influence that will lead to the goal being achieved.  My New Year's Resolution included getting to onederland (a weight starting with a one) this year.  Twenty-three pounds up was not getting me there, but the desire to get 23 pounds down wasn't enough to make it happen. 

What was a behavior that I could change?  Overeating is so complicated.  There are so many different reasons I overeat.  I recently saw a study that claimed the average adult made more than 1,000 decisions per day about eating.  I've spent more than a decade now with therapists and overeating comrades analyzing my eating.  All I needed was one behavior.

I decided not to eat food the minute it was in my possession.  Specifically, I decided to wait five minutes from having food until eating it.  For the most part I haven't waited five entire minutes, but I have broken the cycle of grabbing food and stuffing it in my mouth.  While I wait, I "write-before-bite", another important behavior in controlling eating but not the primary goal.  I also do general journal writing, which has been missing from my life because I "don't have time" for that.  I've lost those eight pounds.  But most importantly, I feel in control of my eating again for the first time in more than six months.  One behavior.

Where God Comes In

I have been meaning to write a post about the limiting nature of happiness, to go with the post on the limiting nature of strength.  You know the old footprints poem: God is rarely seen in happy times.  For an addict having the time of her life with good health, a great job, and fabulous friendships, getting one inch past Step One into that God stuff is difficult.  I'm a proclaimed theist of the Christian variety, but my sense of spiritual connection has been at an all time low.

And yet notice what happened when I started pausing before my food.  My selected behavior was not prayer, which would be more directed toward God and would be another means of pausing, and yet the behavior of pausing just for the sake of the space caused me to start writing in my journal again.  Not in itself prayer or intended meditation, but a space for a spiritual experience.

William James considered this space to be important.  On a separate page I offer a lengthy excerpt (pp. 395 - 398) from The Varieties of Religious Experience for those who wish to read it.   It is an excellent defense of creating space for spirituality through practices of asceticism.  Waiting a few moments before eating is a tiny asceticism, but an effective one in a life that is just too easy.  James, referencing the ease of 1902, wrote:

...it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty amongst the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. (p. 403)

Poverty isn't just a matter of zip code, it's a matter of separation from ease.  It is an asceticism enforced or chosen by interactions with the outside world.  Avoidance of poverty at all costs includes the willingness to sell one's soul at any cost; this is what makes it a moral disease.  Single-minded devotion to the things of this world is what makes it a spiritual disease.

Many years ago I read an a book of existentialist psychology.  There is no possibility I could recall the identity of this book, but it made the argument that addiction is a kind of necrophilia- a chasing after death.  When I mentioned this to my therapist he was so startled that it ended the conversation immediately.  Reading James, I realize that the concept was wrong.  Addiction is a maladaptive chasing after life.  One thing that the fat on my body says is that I have provided life for myself.  One thing that choosing food before anything else says is that I choose nourishment and life.

American culture has made an idol worship of not dieing- we don't spend a quarter-million dollars on the last few days of life on accident (the cost of the typical American dieing process); it is the final sign of respect to the idol.  According to James, asceticism is about increasing life through an acceptance of death.  The final paragraph from the excerpt mentioned above:

The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion.  The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning. (pp. 397-398)

I happened to finish reading  The Varieties of Religious Experience this week.  Much of it is relevant to  my spiritual struggles, and I shall surely be devoting a post just to wrapping up my interaction with the book.  The book is wide and souring and exactly the kind of philosophy that is central to my existence as a human being, but I know that this specific topic required changing a behavior first and letting the meaning follow.  As I mentioned in a previous post, without any experience of life the book was meaningless.  With the experience of one tiny, very tiny, behavior a "metaphysical mystery" became clear.

New Year's Day

New Year's Day is the special holiday for hope.  I'm not sure how much can enter into the boundaries of hope-  was Queen Elizabeth hopeful when she spoke of leaving her annus horribilis behind her, or was she merely wishful?  I'm not sure.  The power of hope is not in wishfulness, and neither is the power of faith for that matter; a topic I intend to write more about in this coming year.

In the local paper this morning was a report on First Night.  Apparently the Raleigh version of the event included a Resolution Oak Tree, where you could hang your resolution.  Considering how unfortunate it is to have your resolutions revealed with your name on the front page of a newspaper section, I'll be fair and reveal mine later.  This is what The News & Observer reported:

     Amid resolutions to lose weight and get organized were promises to "Make NC a Better Place," "Give Back to Others" and "Be More Green."
     Julie and Michael Massey of Raleigh made resolutions meant to start the new year off fresh.  Hers: "To love and forgive like a child."  His: "To be a better person."

I am someone who has over almost two year lost nearly 100 lbs. and kept off 75, so I know a thing or two about the Most Popular New Year's Resolution in America.  Those things probably apply pretty well to New Year's Resolutions in general.  The more I think about it, the more I believe that Fromm's four requirements for love (I looked it up this time) also apply to hope.  The union is so clear that it brings up the question of whether hope can be defined as an act of love; perhaps it can.  Fromm's requirements for love are: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. (The Art of Loving, p. 24)

Ultimately, a hope with no bearing on reality is just as wish.  It takes care and responsibility to bring a wish to reality, and a plan is the only way I know to do that.  A wish with no respect and knowledge is a flimsy thing that has no connection with the power of hope (or of faith or of love). My New Year's Resolutions come into my mind already in a format that falls somewhere between wish and action:

• Onederland. (A body weight that starts with a one.)
• Forty miles of training per week. (A minimum goal that I was already meeting through 2007.)
• Six hours with the French language per week. (A couple of days ago I was claiming 9 as the commitment, but let's call 9 the "reach" goal.)
• Return to a cash-based lifestyle. (After several years of living on cash, I had drifted over to my credit card with poor results.)
• Remove from my house the things that are not useful, beautiful or meaningful. (These categories are based on David Allen's Getting Things Done, but at the moment I cannot find his specific list of things one should have vs. not have.)

As a fairly concrete thinker, it takes effort for me to backtrack from hope to wish.  I am suspicious of any New Year's Resolution that is termed in wishfulness, and I give low marks to the likelihood of such resolutions ever reaching reality.  However, reviewing my list, I can see some value in wishfulness, perhaps the ultimate "why" of my activities.  Wishfulness backs up a step, presents some other alternatives.  I suppose if someone starts at wishfulness it might not be so bad, but after starting there hope and action do have to come back to earth in their proper stages.

Hope hovers just above where the rubber meets the road.  In making a New Year's Resolution I am the kid that has wound up the car and is just about to set it down, in whichever direction I choose to go.  Perhaps that choice of direction is nothing more than wishfulness.  Hope says that it won't sputter and stop, the gears won't spring apart when confronted by tall carpeting, the dog won't grab my toys and drop them in the bushes.  From where I have had success, I say make a plan- smooth out the path, where possible tie up the dog, and let those New Year's Hopes roll.

Does multilingualism start with me?

As the New Year's Resolution deadline looms, I find myself once again taking stock of my language situation.  Nothing about my American education provided me with languages skills in any meaningful sense of the word.  My native English would be barely passable for business use if I had left it to the minimum requirements of my university education, and university requirements for a second language are a joke.  I judge my English to be more than acceptable, so I'm left looking to the pitiful scaffolding of that second language education.

Over the years, I've persistently given myself a bit of time to study French.  Today I can solve basic face-to-face problems ("Where is the elevator to the basement laboratory?") with very poor grammar, or so exasperate a Paris subway help-desk attendant that he gave me a free ticket in order to be rid of me (true story).  I can read current events relatively easily, but the more expansive vocabulary of a novel is beyond me.  I can walk into a French-speaking milieu without feeling lost or terrified, but not really access a world of ideas and interactions outside of the English speaking sphere.  When it comes to the moralistic, "I really should 'have' a second language!", I always turn to French, though there's also one semester of Latin, a workbook of Greek (I was a philosophy student), an introduction to German (my ancestral language along with English), a few words of Hindi (I married an Indian), and a study of Spanish vocabulary (hey, that would be useful) rattling around in my head too.

So, what to do about this New Year's Resolution?  Should I have a second language?  Should it be French?  I just finished reading The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, which amongst other things addresses both questions.

The English-speaking world has been selling English as the only international language for about 100 years now and, even with no official bureau making the argument, it is a sale that has worked very well.  People coming from other languages are hasty to drop their mother tongue in exchange for English and, as a consequence, people who migrate to English speaking centers such as the USA generally lose additional languages within one generation, while people in other language centers neglect their own language so that it does not develop the vocabulary to deal with the modern world.  This latter problem has had to be addressed by official agencies keeping the French and the Hebrew language usable in modern times, but many other languages have given up the race.

In America, speaking a second language is seen as an esoteric accomplishment similar to being able to play the flute.  This is part of the reason I don't speak French.  After leaving a small liberal arts college for a large state-funded university, I found the quality and focus of the French education to be very different.  Unaware of the hornets' nest I was walking into, I commented on the differences in emphasis to the head of the department, prompting her to belittle me until I burst into tears.  I was unaware that foreign language was barely hanging on, only justified by the idea that it perhaps could provide useful to business.  Since 9/11, the idea of language as also being important to cultural understanding has resurged, but still fundamentally in a commercial & militaristic sense.  The intention is to suck at the target culture, not to interact or exchange.  Thus the most acceptable languages to be learning today are Arabic (for the military), Chinese (for business, but really the expectation is that they will learn English), Spanish (though there really is something wrong with them for not learning English) and French (because as much as Americans hate to admit it, Canada is right there and someone had to do business with them too).  We may be willing to learn a second language because we have to, but gosh darn it we are not going to like it!  Even in the EU, multilingualism is about commerce and economic development, not about culture.

As a person with a degree in philosophy, I'm not opposed to esoteric accomplishment.  It just so happens that I do business in Canada.  But there is something more:

In the extreme push to sell English, language has been portrayed as a zero-sum game.  Either you speak English, or you speak some other language.  A consequence of this thinking is the absolute terror that the public use of the Spanish language creates in the USA.  In contrast, my Grandfather was a third-generation German speaker while also being a very successful English-speaking businessman, and his wife's mother (Scottish ancestry) studied German, perhaps in politeness to her new son-in-law.  Closer to the present day, my Mother's German language skills were of the esoteric sort, since by then an English speaker would expect to only interact with English speakers.  Also World War II had an impact on the acceptability of the German language.  My mother also spoke French, but no language skills were passed to me in the family setting.  Nadeau and Barlow discuss similar factors of family history and national politics that shaped the decline of French in America.  In particular, French became unacceptable following the Civil War and the eradication of French in America was specifically targeted in the school system.  The ultimate goal seems to be to overwhelm the globe with English as the pinnacle accomplishment for commercial and military convenience.

But language is not a zero-sum game.  My multilingual ancestors were able to participate fully in American culture and business, and remain fully integrated into their Swiss extended family.  And though I am not expert enough to argue for this idea well, language is about more than convenience, it is a means of communicating nuances of culture which provide a broader perspective.  Being monolingual is to confine yourself to a province of the globalized world; a world which ultimately is not globalized in English.  Given that so many Americans are multilingual, the obsession with monolingualism is peculiar.  It isn't just that it is possible to use more than one language without reducing either language, the expanded territory of influence created where the languages intersect expands the value of each language.

Nadeau and Barlow make one more argument for the use of languages other than English, as argument that they borrow from the Francophonie.  The Francophonie started out as an organization of French-speaking countries, but the benefits of membership have encouraged other countries to increase their French-speaking citizenry to the level to qualify, and yet other countries to join as observers.  These observers also have a few French-speaking citizens, but the main point is that there must be a center of linguistic power other than English.  In supporting French they support the cause of those who wish to advance French as the primary bulwark against English domination, but they also support the broader cause of the value of multilingualism in general.  Because of the Francophonie and similar institutions supporting the growth of French, not just for it's own sake but as an alternative to English, the number of French speakers has been increasing alongside English.  Rather than English being the VHS to French as Betamax, French is Apple to English's Microsoft.  The growth of each as a global language reinforces the need for the other.

I have to admit that none of this is a very good reason for me to continue to study French, specifically.  Learning an additional language is an enormous sunk cost of time and effort the benefits of which, to an English speaker in particular, are uncertain.  Yes, a language may provide an economic benefit, but it may well be a different language that would be more beneficial.  Language provides a new sphere of art and culture, but there are expert translators who can give me a pretty good experience in English.  Most people who already own a Mac or a PC don't find that they also need one of the other kind.  On the other hand, absolutely no one needs to be able to play the flute.  So at the moment I'm after esoteric accomplishment, and all the hopes of multilingualism will just have to ride on that.

P.S.

In their book, Nadeau and Barlow reference The Story of English.  The authors also wrote a very enjoyable explanation of the culture of the nation of France, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong.

If you google "multilingualism resistance," aside from the occasional white-supremacist site, the majority of the listings return resistance to English as a second language.  These returns are only from the English language portion of the internet, and the message is that resistance to multilingualism is only something that can occur in non-English speaking population.  In the English-speaking work, multilingualism means "thou shall speak English," followed by a pat on the head and a suggestion that other languages may serve as markers of cultural heritage, but have no purpose.  It's almost enough to make a person want to learn French!