Nothing is in walking distance

I recently moved moved house from inner Western Melbourne (Seddon) to outer Western Melbourne (Truganina), hence my absence from blogging. The most direct way to the nice new house (and it is a nice new house, a vast improvement on the decrepit dump my housemate and I were previously renting) is along a road which has newly constructed, and to-be-constructed, suburbs on one side and dusty paddocks with sheep grazing on the other. (The dusty paddocks are, of course, every bit as much the result of human action as the new suburbs but the former have less biodiversity.)


Since I lived in Canberra for 11 years, the made-for-cars layout of the new suburbs is familiar. What is less familiar is how less well-designed they are. First, in Canberra, the linking streets between suburbs were mostly  dual carriageway as a matter of course. The linking streets where I now am are often single carriageway and so easily clog up in peak hour.

Secondly, nothing is in walking distance (and I count something up to 30 minutes walk away as walking distance). Both because, despite the single-carriageway streets, things are more spread out and because there is no shopping centre at the heart of each suburb. Instead, it is the land of streets of franchised megastores and drive-to-malls.

I realise that the push to have developers' pay for infrastructure upfront, so it is included in house purchase prices, is likely to lead to under-provision of infrastructure.  Upfront payment for infrastructure is a pretty silly way to pay for something that will be providing benefits for decades, that is what government debt should be for.

Same spot, different direction

But the point is not to rationally provide infrastructure, it is to maximise the value of land allocated to housing -- so incumbents get wealth effects from rising prices, so tax revenues from land are maximised and so government land corporations can maximise their return from the power to compulsorily purchase and control usage. The combined effect of which is to raise the cost of future infrastructure, because the land value is pushed up so much, and lower the benefit to government of providing infrastructure through higher taxes since it is cheaper and easier to raise the tax value of land by restricting its use.

There was an old joke that, if the Soviet Union took over the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand. The joke seems much less funny as government ensures that land-rich Australia has the most expensive housing land in the Anglosphere (apart from Hong Kong; rather a special case). Watching designed dysfunction in operation makes it much less funny too.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Have moved house

I have recently moved house from inner Western Melbourne (Seddon) to outer Western Melbourne (Truganina). This has meant a break in posting. I expect to start posting again in a few days.

Feeling a little out of place

I had a avoided the Glee thing -- too much of a cliche, gay man has to like a TV show about putting on musical numbers with a gay character. Alas, I started watching it during the flights on my recent overseas trip and have to confess to enjoying it a lot.

Rolling Stone magazine have produced a very amusing character moment for Kurt Hummel, the gay kid (played by actor Chris Colfer).

I am guessing his drink is a Green Dragon rather than a Grasshopper (further possibilities here). Can we suggest what tune the young guy should now launch into? (Would Macho Man work in a falsetto?)

Or perhaps, there is a bear in there?

Venezia at the QVM

While walking near the Queen Victoria Markets (I had spent some time back in Melbourne, working near the Queen Victoria Markets, before it struck me that said Markets were at the junction of Queen and Victoria Streets) I saw this shop display.

Somehow, it seemed vaguely familiar.

Public knitting

Just next to Yarraville Station, an act of public knitting was recently committed.


I found it quite charming.

Why the noise?

I am a single person and--due to an upbringing starved of physical affection or praise interacting with unfortunate adult experiences (the former making the latter both more likely and more likely to be of a traumatic nature)--am likely to remain so. I also like cafes, perhaps more than I should, given my low income. (Yes, I am an employer who is also on a low income; more common than folk might imagine.)

So, when I go to a cafe, I often read and/or write. For a while, that meant taking along my laptop; now it means my iPad. (Which has a rather nifty keyboard connected by Bluetooth; I love the sheer inventiveness of the modern world.) Between Kindle for Mac, iBook and ReaddleDocs, I have lots of books, pdfs and other documents to read on said iPad. (Dropbox is a wonderful thing; as is Baen Books.) I also often take notes during my reading.

Hence, it is more than a little irritating when waiting staff interrupt to ask you if you want something. It is bad enough when you are reading, but if you are typing away, you really don't want to have your train of though interrupted or, worse, derailed. It is not as if I linger; I rarely spend much time after having consumed what I have ordered and, if I do, it will only be when there are clearly spare tables available. If I want something, I will attract attention. If I am typing away, or reading, I do not want to be interrupted by unnecessary interrogation.

That is, however, an occasional irritation. What is more omnipresent is the apparent requirement to have music playing in the background; often quite loud and with an intrusive beat.

Either people are at cafes with friends, and wish to talk. Or, like I usually am, they are on their own and wish to read or write. Either way, music is likely to get in the way if its loud or otherwise intrusive. Yet, that is often precisely what cafes inflict on paying customers.

It is not as if I dislike music. In the car, I listen to Joy FM in part because I (generally) like the music thereon. But silence, or the gentle hum of voices, can be refreshing too.

This was really brought home to me just recently. I have taken to sometimes patronising a new cafe in Yarraville which has a nice range of teas (I don't drink coffee, I find it stops me sleeping). Its name and tone invokes Eastern mindfulness.

So, there I was, with my peppermint green tea, typing away and the proprietor interrupts my typing to ask if I want anything. To which the answer was no. (I always answer politely; perhaps that is a mistake.) She then puts on music--the quiet had been particularly pleasant--a loud, bouncy pop song. This was not mindful nor encouragement to the same.

I realise that the modern world treats loud as a virtue music should aspire to. Having heard plenty of live music which was perfectly fine without any electronic sound enhancement (speakers and amplifiers do not invoke the right atmosphere at a medieval feast), making music loud because you can does not impress me.

Being loud may have some ritualised group effect when the music itself is the draw. But where it is supposed to be an additive enrichment of the overall service, then having it be intrusive is not a positive. Background music is supposed to be precisely that.

Trouble is, background music is sufficiently subordinate to issues of convenience, quality and price that it is not likely to affect decisions to patronise a cafe on its own. So, there is little selective pressure to weed out the noise.

Pity.

Why Kids Kill Parents: Child Abuse and Adolescent Homicide

Criminologist Kathleen M. Heide’s Why Kids Kill Parents: Child Abuse and Adolescent Homicide is a lucid examination of how adolescents come to kill their parents. (Appropriately, the book was lent to me by a legal aid solicitor who is also a crime writer.)

Studying such acts (how much they are crimes rather varies) is inhibited by its taboo nature and its comparative rarity. In the US, between 1977 and 1986, more than 300 parents were killed each year. Which sounds like a lot, but is not in a country the size of the US: particularly given only a minority of the killers were adolescents. Few of the latter have been studied.

Fathers were killed at slightly younger ages than mothers, stepparents at slightly younger ages than biological parents. Adolescents were the killers for 15% of mothers killed, 25% of fathers, 30% of stepfathers and 34% of stepmothers. By comparison, only 10% of those arrested for homicide in the same period were under 18 (Pp3-4). (Children are wildly more at risk of abuse or murder by stepparents than by biological parents: the former likely affects the propensity for children to kill stepparents.)

The book is divided into three parts: facts and issues; case studies; implications, practical suggestions, and future directions.

The facts and issues section is fairly grim, but enlightening. Heide writes very clearly, which makes what she has to say more powerful. The first part includes things such as a nice differentiation of terror from horror:

Individuals experience horror when they are witnesses to events that are so shocking that their minds cannot fully comprehend them. Though there is no physical threat, the events are traumatizing to them and may stay lodged in their minds for years. Although fear may be an element of horror, the predominant feelings associated with horror are shock and dread, not fear. Individuals react with terror or experience intense fear when their physical survival is threatened. With terror, both body and mind are affected. Terror immobilizes the body just as horror stuns the mind. Events that are terrifying, unlike those that are horrifying, have a beginning and an end: one wins or loses, one escapes or is captured, one is assaulted or spared, one lives or dies (p.22).

Which is why people watch horror films for the intense experience but terrorism is a political strategy, and one that requires regular reinforcement to keep the fear alive.

So much of the story Heide tells is about power imbalances, abuse and despair. She is a notably clear and unsentimental thinker:

A child’s consent to be sexually expressive with a parent is meaningless because of differences in development and power between adult and child. A child who appears to consent to sexual behaviour with a parent may simply be acceding to the parent’s sexual demands in an unconscious effort to get his or her own needs for attention, affection, love, safety, and a sense of belonging met (p.23).

Her discussion of dysfunctional families is clear and comprehensive. But, as her analysis makes clear, understanding family dysfunction is necessary for understanding why children can be driven to kill their parents.

For that is what most such cases by children under 18 clearly involve. Heide covers physical, sexual, verbal, and psychological or emotional abuse, then physical and medical neglect, emotional neglect and emotional incest. Being a child of emotional abuse and neglect (a largely emotionally absent father, a very controlling mother apparently unable to provide praise or physical affection but very ready with the “why do you do this to me?” criticism) the analysis rang true for me. (The issue of abuse is largely independent of the question about whether parents love their children: indeed, if the child is convinced that the parent loves them, that can make the abuse more destructive, since the child is even more likely to blame themselves – after all, if a parent loves their child but shows no affection, then of course it must because the child is flawed and the parents are therefore heroic for loving such an unlovable person.)

Heide then examines the data concerning which youths kill. The serious study of such cases is relatively recent, the first study by a mental health professional being published in 1941 with fewer than a dozen case studies specifically addressing adolescent parricide appearing from then to the publication of Heide’s Why Kids Kill Parents. Her assessment interviews with about 75 adolescents charged with murder or attempted murder, which included seven cases of adolescents who killed parents, thus provide a significant expansion of available data (Pp35-6). She tabulates data from previous case studies to identify commonly identified factors (Pp40ff).

Heide notes that the small number of cases of adolescents killing parents makes it clear that it is impossible to identify which children will kill, but it is possible to identify which youths are at risk. She identifies the key risk factors as:

(1) The youth is raised in a chemically dependant or other dysfunctional family.
(2) An ongoing pattern of family violence exists in the family.
(3) Conditions in the home worsen, and violence escalates.
(4) The youth becomes increasingly vulnerable to stressors in the home environment.
(5) A firearm is readily available in the home (p.44).

A friend who was raised by a physically abusive malignant narcissist of a mother said the only useful thing his father did was bring home a copy of Lord of the Rings when he and his brother were 13 and 15, so that they were able to see what was happening in their house was small stuff and there were much bigger issues in a much wider world.

Heide identifies the characteristics of functional families before moving on to dysfunctional families. The rules of dysfunctional families can be identified as: don’t talk, don’t trust, and don’t feel (p.48). Needless to say, children in dysfunctional families are far more at risk of abuse than functional families. The children of addicted parents, for example, are at very high risk of emotional neglect. Part of the problem being that the non-addicted parent is often so busy attending to the issues arising from their partner’s alcoholism, drug use, gambling or whatever they have no emotional attention left for their children (Pp49-50).

This all leads to isolation as a serious problem for children of dysfunctional families. A pattern of increasing abuse, murder of partner or flight by the non-abusive parent followed by, in the case of flight, the child being expected to take over more and more household responsibilities (which both stresses the child and provides more points of potential conflict) is likely. If a downward spiral continues, the situation may become increasingly intolerable. If a firearm is present, the chance of the child killing the parent rises dramatically (Pp50ff).

The presence of firearm is the most common risk factor: 82% of fathers, 75% of stepfathers, 65% of mothers and 56% of stepmothers murdered by juveniles were killed by a firearm of some sort (p.53). Clearly, the pattern partly reflects whether a firearm more easily overcome an imbalance in size and strength.

Heide then examines the legal and psychological issues, since the two interact: particularly, but not only, in the question of mental competence at the time of the act – there is also the issue of whether the child is in situation of continual threat even if the threat was not immediate at the time of the killing. Part of the story here is increasing, if still erratic, understanding that there is often a much larger story behind the final, possibly desperate, act.

But part of the problem is the genuine complexities. If one puts homicides on two axes (intention to kill, desire to hurt) then we can identify situational (low desire to hurt or kill), intentional (low desire to hurt, high intent to kill), emotionally reactive (high desire to hurt, low intent to kill) and nihilistic (high desire to hurt and to kill) murders. Identifying which a case falls into is important, both for justice and because nihilistic killers are likely to remain dangerous individuals (Pp60ff).

In Part II, Heide precedes the case studies with an examination of assessment and its implications. This really ticked some boxes for me. Heide starts with:

Understanding why a particular youth killed a parent requires knowledge of the adolescent, his or her family, and the home environment (p.67).

This is why I tend to be deeply sceptical of therapy: the counsellor or therapist is, far too often, completely dependant on what the client tells them for their knowledge of the particular case. Taking into account self-delusion, ignorance, failure of perception, etc, how likely is this to be reliable information? Let alone sufficient information. Narcissists, for example, often get worse under counselling or therapy, as it validates their emotions – the physically abusive malignant narcissist of a mother mentioned above once announced to her children that her therapist had agreed she had not been hard enough on them (apparently, she should have broken more of their bones: in reality, the therapist probably had no idea that broken bones were an issue).

Forensic psychologist Nigel Latta’s point that he never bothers reading case files, since that is only a record of the lies the offender has told previous clinicians, may apply with particular force with the sex offenders who are his clients but the problem is extendable. Especially given Latta can use the trial records to find out what happened, a source of information not normally available about clients of therapy.

But it is worse than that. According to an article in Quadrant by Dale Atrens, Reader Emeritus in Psychobiology at the University of Sydney:

Treatments ranging from old-fashioned talk therapy through to modern cognitive-behavioural therapy are typically little better than placebos. Almost any treatment produces some benefit in the short-term. Alas, this therapeutic benefit is often short-lived. Therapy typically becomes less effective over time. More is not better: it is worse. Strange medicine

For example, those subject to therapeutic debriefing after a traumatic event are 22% more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder after 3 to 5 months: one study that they were three times more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder after 12 months than those who did not de-brief. Similarly, folk who “go it alone” in quitting smoking (or drug addiction, or gambling) are much more likely to stop and keep to it than those use therapy or support groups.

Between the wish that there be an effective available treatment and contemporary belief in The Awesome Power of Words, a dangerous superstition is widely supported: even, at times, legally mandated.

None of which negates Heide’s point that an in-depth personality assessment, analysis of the family dynamics and the home environment of the adolescent killer is necessary to understand what went on.

The three case studies Heide presents are fascinating, in a grim sort of way. They also include analysis, comments and asides on psychological processes and personality disorders. Such as:

The narcissist is absorbed with his image and invests himself in maintaining an image rather than being who he is (p.121).

Not quite how I would put it: I would say the narcissist invests in maintaining a fictional self rather than facing reality inconvenient to that such that their convenience becomes their reality principle. They invest rather a lot in being narcissistic.

Depressingly, there is evidence that narcissism is increasing and empathy decreasing, at least in the US. But wasn’t it John Kenneth Galbraith, or possibly Gore Vidal, who said the advantage of sharing a planet with the US is that you get to see what was going to happen in your society before it did?

The most vivid story is, however, not from any of the three in-depth case studies, but one that Heide relays in her Preface: of a 16 year old boy with two older sisters, who had left home, leaving him the sole target of abuse, trying to sneak out to leave himself. The house was arranged so he had to go through his parents’ bedroom. His father wakes up, knocks him down, pushes him over when he got up, then backs him into a closet. Which had a loaded shotgun. The terrified juvenile then shot his father. At this point, his mother awoke and sat up. The terrified juvenile then shot her too. In trying to recount the incident later, the teenager reported:

when she sat up in bed … the agony within the terror … The rest of its is more or less, sort of hazed out for me. I remember waking up completely. Standing there looking at the two bodies. Two people. What have I done now, you know. Like it was a dream (p.xiii).

Four petitions detailing neglect, abuse and physical abuse had been filed about that household. Three have been filed in the previous two years, all naming the son as being subject to abuse. He spent three months in foster care with an older sister and her husband. Then nine months in supervised care back with his parents. As Heide reports:

Ten months after the state agency terminated supervision, Mr and Mrs Adams were dead. Terry Adams was charged with two counts of first-degree murder (p.xiv).

Terry pled guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, was sentenced to life imprisonment and released on parole after seven years. The sentencing judge had presided over the dependency proceedings.

So, what to do? Heide is a supporter of therapy beginning as soon as possible after the killing and based, as indicated, on thorough and careful assessment. The issues she discusses are basically about providing after-the-fact replacement-parenting. While the discussion of the pattern and consequences of abuse is perspicacious, there is, alas, good reason to be sceptical about the prospects of therapeutic success. (Though Heide is, at least, advocating a course of action that avoids the normal epistemic problems of therapy.)

One of the themes is how often teachers, neighbours, relatives did nothing when told of abuse. Terry Adams is eloquent about why one should respond to a child who tells of abuse, while another case study killer, Scott Anders, is bitter about those who would not believe, would not help, when he told them. Since a sense of isolation and despair – that it will never get better – seems to be a key factor in adolescents killing their parents, this is a powerful point. (When I intimated to my mother’s younger sister – my Godmother – that there may have been a few issues with my upbringing, her response was so defensive of my mother – and hence so dismissive of what I had to say about my experience – that we have not spoken since. And I was in my 40s: how much more easily dismissed is a child or teenager?)

Heide suggests a range of measures such as having easily available classes in child development and parenting skills and school courses in child abuse and neglect (though the latter immediately make me wonder what use toxic kids may make of such information). Heide makes a point that is easily forgotten:

Abuse and neglect are not always obvious to their victims. When abuse and neglect are discussed in university classes, some students become aware for the first time that they were abused or neglected as children (p.54).

Or, in my case, they read an appropriate blog post by a psychblogger. If abuse and neglect are your “normality” and have been for years, are what you grew up with, it can be very hard to see it for what it is. Which helps create the pattern that Heide notes, that abusive parents were often abused children.

Heide suggests that Florida’s volunteer child guardian system is one worthy of wider adoption (Pp157ff). If isolation and despair are risk factors, providing an effective support and advocacy network is clearly likely to be beneficial. Heide suggests that the media can usefully popularise the existence of help services and centres, again breaking down the isolation and despair. Most of all, Heide hopes that criminal justice systems show intelligent mercy for an abused child driven to kill their parent or parents.

She concludes the main part of her text (there is a brief appendix, summarising the statistical evidence) with a story attributed to the Minnesota Literacy Council:

An old fisherman stood on the beach watching a young boy at the shoreline. As the fisherman approached, he saw that the boy was picking up starfish, which had been washed ashore by the waves, and was throwing them back into the sea. When the fisherman caught up with the boy, he asked the boy what he was doing. The boy did not stop his effort as he told the fisherman that he was throwing the starfish back into the sea so that they could live. If left until the morning sun, the starfish would die. The fisherman’s eye scanned the beach, revealing thousands of starfish ashore. He said, “But, son, there are thousands upon thousands of starfish on the beach. What difference can your actions possibly make?” As the boy hurled another starfish into the sea, he looked the old man in the eye and said, “It makes a difference to this one” (p.161).

Bollywood to the rescue?

We have been having some trouble with attacks on Indians here in Australia, and particularly in Victoria.

It is hard to sort our what is really going on. Indian students do work in particularly exposed jobs (driving taxis, late night retail) but without good statistics on cases, patterns, etc it is hard to pick out whether there is a specific problem or it is a visible manifestation of a wider crime problem. Though this does suggest there is a specific issue.

Sometimes, it helps to look at things a little differently. A friend, in another place, commented about young East Asian males who work in exposed late night jobs not being attacked:

The point about Chinese not being attacked as much having a fair bit to do with drunken yobbos not wishing to find out if the inoffensive-looking guy with the laptop is actually Jackie Chan's nephew and training partner.

Clearly, Bollywood should get right onto it.

But there may be a more serious (and somewhat consoling) point in this: that being ethnically Chinese is no longer “foreign” in the land of Oz, even to drunken yobs. And Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Karate Kid, martial arts movies have had that effect, as well as the one my friend was suggesting.

The vision of Bruce Lee—that Westerners could come to appreciate things Chinese through martial arts—coming true.

A house remembered

In early 2001 and early 2002 I visited New Zealand for the Sounds of Summer symposium, travelling with Daffyd. On both occasions, we met up with the Archwizard, the Wizard of New Zealand, Daffyd’s mentor who has been a fixture at the Sounds of Summer,

On both occasions, we travelled to, and stayed at, the Wizard’s house in Christchurch. I got to see the Wizard doing his thing in Cathedral square.

The house was the sort of residence a wizard ought to have. A rambling, two-storey colonial mansion made of wood, nestled in a large garden with a creek running through it. The house was full of memorabilia – art (particularly C18th and C19th prints), mementoes particularly on the wizardly theme, a huge vinyl record collection that seemed to be everywhere. In the drive was the Wizard’s famous ‘two-rears’ VW beetle.

The house was a warm and comforting place, both old-time and other-worldly. It seemed rooted in place, belonging to where it was as if had set down deep roots, and yet a haven that was apart from what was around it.

During my second visit, the Wizard talking about doing a Prospero, and hanging up his staff. A plan he later put into action.

It was my firm intention to stay with the Wizard and his lady in Christchurch in their wonderful residence on the way. The Wizard himself was very keen.

I won’t be able to do that. The house was destroyed by arson. They effectively lost everything. A haven of wonder was destroyed.

The whispering traitors of the mind

[This is a piece I published in the Adelaide Review, September 2002.]

I never really understood the fuss about depression until I suffered myself (albeit, relatively mildly) for a few years, not having been privy to any such experience by a close friend or relative. In my case, it was induced by circumstances and not a permanent imbalance of brain chemicals (and what follows comes primarily from my own experience).

To suffer from depression is to be regularly, debilitatingly, overwhelmed by one’s own emotions. All mental illness (and depression is definitely a mental illness) is a loss of touch with reality of some form or other. In the case of depression, the loss of realism is the overwhelming force of one’s sadness. I once came across a definition of depression as anger without enthusiasm. Quite so. Frustration of deep desires or emotional needs makes one angry, but the desires and the frustration are not sufficiently clear (that is, the anger is not recognised), or there seems to be nothing to be angry at or no point to anger or the source is mis-identified or whatever, so there is no resolution, so the feelings just go around and around with a deep sense of being trapped in a situation which is hopeless because there is an endless emotional treadmill with no way out. Hence depression.

I did the Australian blokey thing, and did not see any professional about my problem. I did have the advantages of philosophical training, an analytical mind and good friends, so I worked things through, slowly worrying at what I really felt, why I felt what I did, whether it was sensible to feel that way. Frustrated deep emotions are best dealt with by being brought out and acknowledged.

The way it manifest varies. A friend told me his depression hit as an overwhelming feeling of numbness, which can be so intense to become painful. Another friend was told by her doctor that, if you were intelligent and sensitive, it is more or less impossible to go through life without suffering from depression at some stage or other. Jeff Kennett, post-politics, taking up the cause of curing depression is apposite to the modern condition. It is a major cause of absenteeism (then again, workplaces are a major cause of depression).
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In the TV documentary by Bob Ellis The Bastards from the Bush, depression survivor Les Murray talks about his own experience. He said depression is like being in the first Act of Macbeth, chasing the witches away from their cauldron, cutting your head off, boiling it in the cauldron for four or five hours, putting it back on your shoulders and then saying ‘I’ll do this again tomorrow’ and so ‘boiling your head’ for four or five hours a day for years on end. Yes, something like that. As Ellis responds, you can be crushed and compressed by things which, in other areas of your life, are unimaginable.

Les Murray tell us he had become to believe, deep in his heart of hearts, that, by being an induced birth, he had been responsible for his mother’s continual miscarriages (the consequences from which she eventually died of) because he had ‘ruined the works’ inside her. He had come to believe that sex kills. Then he suffered the castrating persecution of being fat at school, and continual humiliation from teasing girls. He created a new body, a body of work, of poetry to substitute for the flesh body which was unacceptable to womankind. Until, years later, a girl from his schooldays used one of the old nicknames, and he began to come apart as the unresolved wounds burst their deep poison, and he had phantom heart attacks (which were really just panic attacks) plus a spiralling down into emotional breakdown.

My depression was also mixed up with things in my past, including the consequences of the profound inner demoralisation induced by internalising my parents’ insecurities and criticisms magnified by their failure to express affection or praise, and with working through the nature of my sexuality, which was primarily directed to my own gender, so according to the tenements of my own upbringing and culture not merely wrong but wicked. As my own deep poisons welled up, I had an alleged good mate telling me things which weren’t true, and he didn’t believe, in order to make me feel better. Increased unreality is not what someone suffering from mental illness needs. I, at some level, picked up the dissonance, and his behaviour inevitably failed to match his words, so I sought yet more reassurance and around-and-around we went, my loss of touch with reality being aggravated by a friendship which wasn't real or, at least, not anchored in reality. (These comments should not be taken as an injunction to blurt out brutal truths: tact, which is to say consideration of another’s feelings, is often required in dealing with the emotionally ill—brute truth can be very needed, brutal delivery is generally not.)

Getting an email from my former friend telling me (in a particularly spiteful sort of way) that he had put so much effort into reassuring me by telling me things he didn't believe (he seemed to think he should get positive credit for this, completely oblivious to the patronising contempt his behaviour had demonstrated) was helpful. Another exchange, which finally destroyed the lingering image in my mind of the person I had thought he was and, with which I was still ‘arguing with’ in my head, helped further.

But, by that stage, it had become just another piece in the puzzle. Emails from two of my aunts about my late father’s insecurities (I had never thought of him as an insecure man, blindingly obvious though it was once pointed out) helped enormously too. As did writing a private memoir of my upbringing – and it was very reassuring when my brother said of it “agree with every word”. (There were admirable things about my parents and the upbringing they gave their two sons, but there were poisoned chalices as well. Of course, they also had a few of their own to suffer.)

It is surprising how easy it is to be a stranger to one’s own emotions, both their real nature and their causes. Murray speaks of using the weapon of poetry to get at what was cross-wired in his head, what was making him crazy, and digging it out, which he eventually did, particularly in a poem called Burning Wand.

And that is the thing about these deep, buried propositions in our head, the whispering traitors of the mind. They are ‘cross-wirings’ which wither far more easily under exposure. For then either their falsity can be exposed, or the falsity of our response to them can become obvious. But such falseness cannot be exposed, embraced, wielded until the light of reason and understanding is shone on them. While they remain hidden, buried within, they continue to work their poison, powerful because they are unseen and unchallenged: potent demons in the dark, but at their most potent only in the dark.

Such things can not only cause depression: the number of foolish or other aberrant acts which are the result of such hidden traitors is surely legion. They can manifest in all sorts of ways and from all sorts of causes – for example, a work environment replicating undealt with and unrecognised pathologies of one’s upbringing.

Then there are the ways we misread our own emotions. Ignorance of the real problem can lead the causes of our feelings to be completely misinterpreted. The ways our hidden traitors can hide and mislead are also legion.

Once you are no longer at war with yourself, life becomes much better, much happier. The constant need for outside reassurance—via sex, drugs, drink, words of reassurance, comfort eating or whatever—to fight off the enemy within dwindles away. And it is a war, a war with real casualties, and it can be deadly. Suicide (either overt and sudden, or covert via a slow ruining through destructive, escaping pleasures, or simply taking one risk too many) is the chief killer. Sexuality is a prime battleground, since it about identity and deep desires and, in our culture, is so often so poorly dealt with. Adolescence is bad enough in simply coping with becoming a sexual being, without the added burden of being the so-called wrong sort of sexual being, either in appearance or interests or clumsiness or whatever.

The suicide rate among young gay males is very high, for example. And the inner demons of the sexually unhappy can find so many ways to feed through self-punishment, of which falling in love with the unattainable – the fat boy with the class beauty, the geeky girl with the football captain, the gay man with the straight guy – is only one. Fulfilling healthy sexual desires require somebody else’s cooperation, and there was so many ways for things to go wrong, or to not happen. (And if our own emotions can be hidden or unclear to us, how much more so can someone else’s be: as all those emotionally poleaxed men whose wives announce it is over when they did not even notice anything was wrong can testify.) When you are at war with yourself, when the inner self is wounded, it is so easy to internalise and accept the judgements (real or apparent) of others — a problem naturally worse when the self does yet have the strength of maturity.

But all these things can be dealt with. And believing in your own strength is a great way to find it (just as believing in your own weakness is a great way to find that too). Not asserting oneself, endlessly putting up with things, easily makes you a co-conspirator in your own demoralisation.

As philosopher David Hume wrote, reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions. Yet, the passions themselves are subject to the work of reason. Resolution of emotion is not the same as indulgence. In the light of reason, things can be put in their proper place, adjustments can be made, matters can be looked at differently. Meaning and value come out of our minds, both individually and collectively, and so the mind can deal with such matters, when it knows what it is dealing with.

The thing with depression is to hold on to the thought that this too shall pass, and it is a battle one can fight and win. And the victory is so very much worth having. ...

I have a little (slightly dated) list

Talking to a friend a few years ago about getting across economics for her public policy Masters, I argued that a survey course in microeconomics was better value than one on macroeconomics (a less well developed and more ad hoc area of economics).

Which led on to the question of what books in my library would be useful introductory texts. Unfortunately my copy of Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt seems to have wandered off, though it is available on the web: for example here. But I have assembled a little collection, excluding books I have reviewed already on this blog.

David Friedman's (aka Cariadoc of the Bow in the SCA) Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life is informative, cheerful and engaging. He is particularly intelligent on the methodology of economics. (Perhaps not so surprising, since his Dad wrote the classic article on economic methodology.)

Ronald H. Coase's The Firm, the Market and the Law contains Coase's two classic articles (The Nature of the Firm and The Problem of Social Cost) which kicked off transaction costs analysis. It is also a highly readable and accessible collection of pieces. The Lighthouse in Economics is a great cautionary tale about historical evidence, for example.

Murray Horn's The Political Economy of Public Administration: Institutional Choice in the Public Sector I found very enlightening. Hopefully, the language is sufficiently accessible. (I found it so, but I have long experience with economic concepts.)

Arjo Klamer's The New Classical Macroeconomics: Conversations with New Classical Economists and Their Opponents is informative about the macroeconomic debates of the 1960s to early 1980s. It centres on the impact of rational expectations on macroeconomics. Since it is mainly interviews with prominent economists of various schools, it is a good way to see how (macro) economists view the world. A lay reader would probably find a dictionary of economic terms helpful when reading the introduction.

Season's greetings

Hope my readers had good That Time Of The Year. I certainly did. Just the right amounts of friends, family and solitude.

The moral case for free commerce: Speech at the Launch of Richard Morgan’s book Lessons From The Global Financial Crisis

On Wednesday 6 December, I was one of the two launchers of Richard Morgan’s book Lessons From The Global Financial Crisis: The Relevance Of Adam Smith On Morality And Free Markets. The following is the speech I gave, except that the section in [] was not delivered at the event to save time.

The moral case for free commerce
We are here today to launch Richard Morgan’s book, a book that applies C18th wisdom to current circumstances.

One of the great virtues of knowledge of past ideas, is that it forces present thinkers to work harder. Not always an agreeable prospect. Hence the push to define the past as a realm of Stygian moral and intellectual darkness that our present knowing moral splendour has utterly superseded. Thus is current fashionable opinion both elevated and protected.

Yet much that has been paraded in recent decades as allegedly cutting edge thought is little more than ideas from as long ago as the C5th BC re-packaged. Indeterminacy of meaning, for example—which the post-modernists make so much of—was a hot topic for Socrates and the boys. While the politics of Plato’s Republic—with its Platonic Guardians, and their necessary supporting Platonic myths—seems to get endlessly recycled. Judges and international bureaucrats—some of them scientific—are notable current offerings as Platonic Guardians: with supporting Platonic myths from which dissent is, apparently, not to be permitted in polite society.

Against this recycling of the C5th BC, it would be quite an advance if we could get rather more academics and other intellectuals to advance to the standard of some good C18th thinking.
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Consider the famous passage by Voltaire in his Letters on the English, first published in 1734.

Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There thee Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled over his child. Others retire to their churches, and there wait for the inspiration of heaven with their hats on, and all are satisfied.

Let us consider for a moment how much turgid academic ranting on the allegedly intimate connection between capitalism and bigotry is rendered otiose by this simple observation of what commerce actually means. Commerce does not care for the colour of your skin, your religion, your sex, your sexuality, your ethnicity: what it cares about is the colour of your money. And the worth of your word.

It is politics, with its conjunction of coercion and category – often coercion-by-category – that makes the colour of your skin, your religion, your sex, your sexuality, your ethnicity important, even fatally important. Commerce wants your money and so must, perforce, attend to what you want. Commerce-as-commerce is not interested in any of the vile wars waged by believers—both secular and religious—against human nature-as-it-is in the name of human nature as-it-is-supposed to be. Commerce just wants your money. Preferably again and again. “It is better for me if you are happy with what I do” is practical commerce.

For requiring their consent is a great encourager of good behaviour towards others. As Adam Smith observed:

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

Down the ages, there has been much railing against commerce as undermining the moral order, how amoral the “vulgar merchants” are. Yet—when one bothers to look at the historical record—it is the commercial societies that have, again and again, pioneered social advances. The Serene Republic of Venice with equality before the law and sophisticated capital markets; the Dutch Republic being the first society to abolish the spectre of famine; England pioneering state action to assist the poor. No nations have been so morally tender about just about everything as are modern liberal capitalist societies.

The marginal in society are frequently rather better treated by commerce than by politics. A Fortune 500 company is much more likely to acknowledge same-sex relationships than a US State is. The former cares about getting and keeping good staff, and reaching customers. While political and religious entrepreneurs often seek to sell effortless virtue: to sell a sense of unearned self-satisfaction from simply being different to some other group—whites feeling terribly virtuous for not being black, gentiles feeling terribly virtuous for not being Jewish, straights for not being gay, those born and raised Protestant for not being Catholic, or vice versa. And so on.

If one is selling effortless virtue based on denigration of others, then one is selling bigotry. Something politics, and religion, are sadly rife with. Commerce, not so much. One attends in a different way to those you want to do business with, as Voltaire famously observed.

Long before people talked of the “pink dollar”, there was the Jewish ducat. While women could scale the heights of commerce when they were still formally barred from even the foothills of politics. The first African-American woman to become a millionaire was not Oprah Winfrey, but Madame C. J. Walker, who became a millionaire by 1910: and if you were a millionaire in 1910, you were really a millionaire. She achieved this by selling hair-care products, employing many African-American women in the process, quite deliberately so: no doubt a grave offence against the Equal Opportunity Act—don’t tell Rob Hulls.

When one looks at the denunciations of vulgar merchants and “immoral” commerce, again and again one sees the real complaint is that they attend to what people want, not what the critic thinks people ought to want. That they attend to what people are like, not what people allegedly ought to be like.

To any supporter of a static social order, the restless energy of commerce is a threat. And what social order is more static than one that seeks equality of outcome? The societies that have most raged against commerce have also created some of the most appalling horrors in history, struggling mightily and brutally against what people want.

Indeed, if one wants to establish any bigoted social order, one of the first things one has to do is to restrain commerce. As Thomas Sowell points out, part of the impetus for the Jim Crow laws in the American South was to ensure that a white person buying a first class train ticket did not find themselves sitting next to a black person. For, left to themselves, the railroad companies only cared if you could pay.

The apartheid regime in South Africa restricted commerce in all sorts of ways, as it had to in order to make race matter so much. Hence, when Helen Suzman was the only Opposition member of the South African Parliament, she represented the Cape Town equivalent of Kooyong. The commanding heights of South African commerce was where white opposition to apartheid was electorally strongest.

One of the great disasters of indigenous policy in our country was the law restricting consensual commercial relations between Aboriginal stockmen and pastoralists, by imposing full-time employment as the only acceptable form of contract. This, as was predicted at the time, devastated outback Aboriginal employment. Arrangements that had evolved to suit the people involved in them were abolished by coercive action by central authority because people, not involved in those interactions, had a theory. A theory that did not have pay any attention to what people on the ground actually wanted, and so what would actually work. A theory that classed itself as profoundly moral while it proceeded to stop people attending to what each other wanted.

Adam Smith had something to say about such “Men of System”, who attended to their own theories of government and not to people and circumstances. Such a person

… does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.

In Richard Trudgen’s Why Warriors Lie Down and Die—a necessary book to understand the serial disasters of indigenous policy in this country—there is a particularly appalling passage about “benevolent” government bureaucrats being frustrated when the locals continued to use their canoes to fish rather than the shiny new trawler the taxpayers had bought for them. But the locals knew about canoes and operated them within family and clan groups. The trawler involved new skills and its operation would upset agreed alliances and arrangements among those families and clans. But the bureaucrats knew nought of such matters, so they deliberately burnt the canoes to force the locals to use the trawler.

Needless to say, this wanton vandalism had no such effect. Indigenous Australians have suffered mightily from the coercive benevolence of the state.

For attending to what other people want is not a simple matter of selfishness versus benevolence. As C. S. Lewis noted:

“... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.”

As will those who torment others in the name of the general good. The truly terrible thing about a Nazi gauleiter or Soviet commissar was not that they lacked a conscience, but precisely that they had them: consciences that burned to “purify” society. Attending to others is a great restraint on oppression of all kinds: both those motivated by moral claims, and those not.

For great harms are often created when capitalist acts between consenting adults are banned. The high minimum wages, and grave difficulties in sacking people, of French law do much to explain the social disasters of the banlieu, the French housing estates. The harder it is to sever a working relationship, the riskier it becomes to begin it. The more productive someone has to be to make starting a working relationship worthwhile, the less such relationships will be engaged in. Instead, people retreat to ways of reducing the risk: they insist on more certification; they use networks so people they know can, in effect, vouch for any new person; they minimise risks in communication by hiring people most like themself, and so on. Consequently, if you are a young Muslim male from those French housing estates, your chances of getting a job are greatly reduced. Living lives of idle resentment, burning a few cars provides cathartic excitement.

Thus does state-imposed “morality” divide society by stopping commerce from bringing people together. Social disaster created by a whole set of “moral” theories that stop people attending, one-on-one, to what other people want.

Yet Voltaire, over two and a half centuries ago, could see what encourages people to live together amiably and productively and what divides them. We really could do with a great deal more such eighteenth century wisdom: a sentiment that can turn up in all sorts of places. When he was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic, Hu Yaobang was reported to have observed that it was the ideas of Montesquieu, rather than “outdated” ones of Marx, that China needed.

[There is much to be said for the brute realism of commerce. The ivory towers of academe generate more than their fair share of nonsense. Adam Smith famously described certain universities as having:

… chosen to remain, for a long time, the sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection after they had been hunted out of every other corner of the world.

But academics can peddle ideas whose consequences they do not have to deal with. Consider the fairly appalling state of modern pedagogical theory. Academics come up with pedagogical theories to be imbued in educators of teachers, who then teach student teachers, who then go and teach students, the ones who actually bear the consequences of those ideas. Few milieus in our society are more isolated from the consequences of their ideas than the peddlers of pedagogical theory and few groups produce so much arrant nonsense—and often grandly big-noting nonsense at that.

Not, I suggest, a coincidence. There are all sorts of good features to commerce’s attention to what other people want: to having to deal, often on a daily basis, with the consequences of what you do.]

It is a grave mistake to think that politics has any inherent tendency to better behaviour than commercial life. In his recent book on the Irish housing boom and bust, Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole refers to:

… certain landowners [who] had accumulated large landbanks at the outskirts of urban areas which they then released in dribs and drabs in order to manipulate the market and artificially to maintain high land prices.

In Australia we have a name for such people. We call them ‘State Governments’. If Australians were as free to buy and sell land as Texans—a State that has a bigger population than Australia, faster population growth, higher average income and a bigger proportion of its population in its five largest cities—our houses would cost half to a third (or even less) their current prices. Instead, a country with one of the world’s lowest population densities has the most expensive metropolitan housing in the Anglosphere. A true regulatory achievement.

As Adam Smith observed:

The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would no-where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

In the light of recent tragic events, we might consider the way regulations controlling removal of trees and bushes retarded people’s ability to manage the fire risk of their properties. We might further consider the failures in management of public lands—notably the failure to reduce fire loads along roads, and in government lands generally.

We might consider the failure to invest in dams to match the increase in Victoria’s population. The last being a particularly egregious failure to live up to Adam Smith’s third duty of government:

… the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain, because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.

But “global warming” provides useful cover for the failure to match new water infrastructure to the increase in Victoria’s population. A 30% increase in Victoria’s population without a significant new dam is so obviously the fault of the climate—one of those useful Platonic myths I referred to earlier.

The failures of regulation, and of government management, are so numerous, that to presume that they have some strong demand on our support—rather than requiring very careful justification—is a triumph of faith over experience.

By contrast, the economic benefits of free commerce are well attested, something Richard Morgan provides an excellent short survey of in his book. But it is a great mistake to think that those economic benefits are somehow separate, or even opposed, to the moral benefits of free commerce.

Not a mistake that Adam Smith himself was at all inclined to make. As Richard Morgan reminds us, Smith was a moral philosopher who produced The Theory of the Moral Sentiments years before he published The Wealth of Nations. To start with a short discussion of elements of The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, as Richard Morgan does, is entirely appropriate. The right way to frame the practical and moral advantages of free commerce, illuminated by the observations and wisdom of Adam Smith. Wisdom that, as Richard Morgan sets out, is entirely relevant to our own time.

The case for freedom of commerce is very much a moral case. I commend Richard Morgan’s short, and highly readable, book to you as an excellent primer to the continuing relevance of Adam Smith’s C18th wisdom. Perhaps more of our academics—and even a few of our politicians—might catch up to the C18th, so we can better cope with the challenges of the C21st. Especially as Richard Morgan has kindly made it so easy for them to do so.

Thank you

ADDENDA In his post of 3 December 2009, Adam Smith Scholar Gavin Kennedy has some nice things to say about my speech.

Summer work

The business has suffered from a drop in marketing efforts: October was very busy but November is relatively light, so income may be a bit tight over summer. Hence, I am available for summer work, if anyone has some.

Off to Canberra

I am driving to Canberra from Melbourne early tomorrow (Saturday) morning and am not back until Monday afternoon, so there may be some interruption to posting.

The occasion is a friend's annual cocktail party, a great chance to catch up with old friends.

So, hope you have fun too!

Digging up weapons

A couple of years ago, coming back from Spring War, Vandel, Margi and I stopped in with Sir Aedward and Yolande (also known as pointyhat). Sir Aedward is a sword enthusiast and I asked him about good books. He recommended Oakeshott. So, when I saw it on sale at a past Festival, I ordered a copy.

The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry is a fun read. Oakeshott is a genuine enthusiast who wears his learning lightly and conveys his enthusiasm well.

He also has a good practical sense. Weapons are to be used after all. Armour has to work.

One point of caution: the book is over 40 years old and scholarship has moved on a bit. The Goths=proto knights and the it’s-all-about-stirrups are a touch dated. (But I’ve had my rant about stirrups.)

But those are quibbles. The book is an engaging mass of information—Oakeshott even discusses shield strapping—and anyone interested in the history of weapons, particularly medieval weapons, and armour should read or purchase this book.

Buddhist film festival

From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, went to three films and a talk in the Buddhist Film Festival held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in their Fed. Square facilities.

Friday afternoon, started with the Festval's opening film, The Dhamma Brothers, a fascinating look at the introduction of Vipassana meditation into a maximum security prison in (of all places) Alabama. The head of psychology in the Alabama prison system was looking for ways to calm prison populations and came across a gaol in India that had achieved some success with Vipassana mediation. Since there is a worldwide movement (including in Oz) he was able to find two experienced practitioners to run the 10-day course for him for about 40 inmates.

The film takes us through the operation of the course, reactions by inmates (who tell their stories, being upfront about their crimes), prison officers, the gaol Warder, etc. There was a lot of scepticism beforehand and rather more support otherwise. Of particular interest, many of the participants wanted to continue to practice and met once a week to do so.

But, this is Alabama. Various Christian chaplains complained that the course was “teaching Buddhism” and the meetings were banned. Then there was a change in administration and it was back on. While the personal stories were quite inspiring, I was intrigued by the public policy politics involved. Clearly, the director of psychology is both an open-minded and quietly persistent chap.

Given that one of the charities the film festival was funding was the Buddhist Council of Victoria’s prison visiting service, a very appropriate film to open the Festival with. (The Council organised the film festival, the second Buddhist film festival.)

The next film I saw, later that evening, was Meditate and Destroy, a film about young Noah Levine, who wrote the book Dharma Punx. His memoir of how a drug-taking, juvie-returning, graffiti artist found dharma. The film was exuberant fun, including some great use of Second Life™ animation for portraying past events in his life quite powerfully. Noah Levine now runs courses in juvenile detention centres plus courses for young addicts and former addicts.
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Noah is the son of Buddhist author Stephen Levine, which made me very sceptical about Levine senior, given how angry and dysfunctional Noah’s adolescence was. As the film progressed, it became clear that he had not been raised by his father (his parents divorced when he was quite young). His mother, a little indirectly, took responsibility for “not being there” much for young Noah. Noah freely confessed that being a punk was a rebellion against a hippy father but it was also his father teaching him a meditation technique over the phone when he was “in Juvie” which Noah credits as being a key moment in his path out of what was clearly a very fraught situation. (It also turned out that his father had had similar drug-and-detention issues when he was young, which Noah had not known about.)

I was struck by how intense (as in lots of deaths) the punk scene was in Santa Cruz (not the pattern in Melbourne punkery) and how open and lively many of the people were in speaking about their experiences. Noah’s best friend turned out to be particular fun, giving Noah a fair bit of friendly shit on camera.

Saturday, went to a talk by the Abbott of the Braybrook temple, Senior Venerable Tic Phuoc Tan OAM entitled The Buddha Code (Dharma Talk) explaining the language of the gestures of Buddhist statues. I was, alas, a little sleepy so did not catch the whole thing. The (youngish) Abbott was, however, quite engaging, even if English was clearly not his first language. He mostly coped with the technology. So, right hand (sun) over left hand (moon) means meditation. Hand open and down means giving/charity. Hand grasping forefinger means wisdom. Hand touching ground means calling the Earth to witness (the Buddha’s enlightenment). Both hands with fingers steepled and intertwined means balancing contradictory forces. The lotus flower represents enlightenment coming out of the mud of the earth.

Usually, the thumb represents spirit, the forefinger fire, index finger air, ring finger water, little finger earth. So thumb with forefinger (fire) means passing the fire of knowledge. Thumb with index finger (air or nothingness) means enlightenment, thumb with ring finger (water or gentleness) means compassion. Doing so with hand down means offering these things. Postures also had meaning, but I did not retain them.

Sunday afternoon, saw The Devotion of Matthieu Ricard. Matthieu Ricard is the son of a French surrealist painter, Yahne le Toumelin, and well-known French philosopher, Jean-Francois Revel. I have just finished reading The Monk and the Philosopher, which was the main reason I wanted to see the film since I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The film was both about his life, particularly is very unexpected turning to Buddhism, and his current work. He is active as a translator for the Dalai Lama, in publishing books on or from Tibetan Buddhism, in being a test subject for neuro-cognition research (he has a Ph.D in molecular genetics) and in fundraising, and organising, for projects (mainly clinics and schools) in Tibet and Nepal as well as being an active photographer. He comes across as a very real, but happy, person living a worthy life with an excellent sense of humour.

I enjoyed the Festival. Having done a lot of reading and viewing, particularly just recently, on Islam, dealing with Buddhists and Buddhism is a considerable relief. It is not that Buddhism lacks a dark side, it certainly has that, it just that its central message is much more immediately useful and far less fraught. The tone is simply a lot lighter, one is dealing far more with happy people and open-handed compassion, rather than very patriarchal, very authoritarian, control with a whole lot of violence, and getting along with others, issues. Buddhist practitioners in prison seem inherently a lot more reassuring than Muslim outreach in prison.

At a more personal level, I found the Festival encouraged more self-examination about my own attachments and the problems thereof. A useful thing in itself.

Apologies for less posting

Apologies for the drop-off in posting. I have been sick and busy (self-employment, no sick leave) which means a lack of energy to post in the evening when I get home.

Things should start improving as I am feeling better (good) and work is falling off (not so good).

Emotional Vampires

Albert J. Bernstein’s Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry, which a friend put me onto, is the best extended use of an analytical metaphor I have come across.

Bernstein is a clinical psychologist and business consultant—the illustrative vignettes in the book are based on both family and business scenarios clearly derived from his years of experience. The prose is clear and direct and the book is clearly structured to be as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It is also extremely practical and unsentimental. One of the repeated lines is

always remember that attempting psychotherapy on someone you know you will make you both sicker.

The analytical conceit is to characterize manipulative people as vampires. So he lists (in Chapter 3: The Way of Vampires) the various characteristics of emotional vampires: Vampires are Different; Vampires Prey on Humans, Vampires Can Change Their Shapes, Vampires are More Powerful in the Dark, A Vampire’s Bite Can Turn You Into A Vampire and my favourite: Vampires Can’t See Themselves In The Mirror.

The book is based on a basic distinction:

When people are driving themselves crazy, they have neuroses or psychoses. When they drive other people crazy, they have personality disorders (p.3).

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He examines the five most likely types of emotional vampires to trouble one’s life—Antisocial, Histrionic, Narcissistic, Obsessive-Compulsive, Paranoid. Each is briefly described in Chapter 1 (The Children of the Night) and the bulk of the book is divided into a section on each, though he notes early (p.14) that most difficult people are blends of two or more types. The first line that leapt out at me was at the end of the initial brief description of Obsessive-Compulsives:

The second-longest wait in the world is for Obsessive-Compulsive to make a decision. The longest is for them to utter even a single word of praise (p.8).

Bernstein says that emotional vampires—particularly when acting up—are emotional two-year olds and the ways of dealing with them are the same:

setting limits, arranging contingencies, being consistent, keeping lectures to a minimum, rewarding good behaviour and ignoring bad, and occasionally putting them in time-out (p.14).

One of his big lessons is, actually, they don’t think like you:

If you interpret what they say and do and according to what you would feel if you said or did the same thing, you’ll be wrong almost every time. And you’ll end up drained dry (p.17).

He lists the basic social rules of emotional vampires as:

My needs are more important than yours; the rules apply to other people, not me; It’s not my fault, ever*; I want it now; If I don’t get my way, I throw a tantrum (p.18).

In Chapter 4 (Dark Powers) Bernstein explains how hypnosis works, starting with a killer first impression (p.23) and then working via misdirection, identification, isolation, control, alternative reality, false choices (pp24-26). The danger signs of hypnosis are:

deviating from standard procedure, thinking in superlatives, instant rapport, seeing the person or situation as special, lack of concern with objective information, confusion (pp27-29).

The final warning:

if you think you can’t be hypnotized, you probably already are (p.32).

Each Type then gets its own Part. These follow a standard pattern of description, checklist of likely symptoms, analysis, mechanisms for dealing with, therapy for. Part I deals with Loveable Rogues—the Antisocials. As Bernstein points out, a bad label since they are highly social, it is other people they don’t care about.

Antisocials are the simplest of vampires, also the most dangerous. All they want out of life is a good time, a little action, and immediate gratification of their every desire (p.33).

Bernstein divides Antisocials into Daredevils, Used Car Salesmen, Bullies.

Part 2 is Show Business, Vampire Style—the Histrionics, seekers of approval and attention. Part 3 is Passive-Aggressive Vampires (deliver us from ghoulies and ghosties and people who are only trying to help p.109). They are pathological givers who submerge part of their personality—from themselves. Bernstein criticises the self-esteem push:

the same thing that is missing in all Histrionic creations—namely, an attempt to go below the surface and deal with the self in all its complexity (p.117).

I was a bit worried by this section, because I have long been aware of passive-aggressive patterns in my behaviour (which is, of course, a sign of not being an emotional vampire: that I have long been well aware of it). The Therapy For ... section was enlightening. Indeed, I had a cheering experience the other day. Something annoyed me, I expressed anger and moved on. I didn’t repress nor angst afterwards. I just did. Yay! (Of course, learning to operate your emotions in a different way can lead to some adjustment wobbles**: but you note any such and continue to learn.) But my issues come from a pathological upbringing where expression of emotion (any affection from my parents, any anger or other negative emotion from me) was profoundly suppressed (of course, they were permitted to express anger and I was permitted to express agreement and acceptance).

Part 3 is Big Egos, Small Everywhere Else—the Narcissists.

More than loving themselves, Narcissists are absorbed with themselves. They feel their own desires so acutely they can’t pay attention to anything else.

One of the book’s strengths is Bernstein points out the positive aspects of the various Types:

There may be narcissism without greatness, but there is no greatness without narcissism (p.130).

The description of what it is like to be a Narcissist is fairly scary:

They can’t feel connected to anything larger than themselves, because in their universe there is nothing larger than themselves (p.131).

As Bernstein puts it,

emotional Vampires are people who have for one reason or another abandoned the struggle with the Narcissistic dilemma. Antisocials ignore it because it’s no fun. Histrionics pretend they never act in their own self-interest, and Narcissists believe that what’s good for them is all that exists. Vampires are forced to prey on other people for the answer that the rest of us must struggle to find within ourselves.
What’s the answer? Another great rabbi summed that up:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Narcissistic vampires break the Golden Rule, without so much as a thought. Does that make them evil or oblivious? Your answer will depend on how much damage they do to you.
The easiest way to get drained is to take Narcissists’ inconsideration personally, to get upset over what they must be thinking to treat you the way they do. The most important thing to remember is that Narcissistic vampires are not thinking of you at all (p.132).

In a nutshell,

to a Narcissistic vampire, other people are either prospective purveyors of Narcissistic supplies or invisible (p.136).

Bernstein divides Narcissists into Legends (with talent like theirs, who needs performance? and Superstars (You’ve got to love these guys! Worship them actually). The former are often highly creative and Bernstein is particularly unsentimentally practical about what creative really means (pp.146-7). He reminds us that

Narcissists are condemned to live in a world where nothing is bigger than their own egos (p.150).

Someone who deeply traumatised me seems a mixture of Loveable Rogue Anti-Social (Daredevil sub-variety) and Narcissist (Legend sub-variety). So I found the Narcissist section particularly striking.

The next Part is Too Much of a Good Thing—Obsessive-Compulsives. This where it got really scary. As soon as I finished reading the general description of the class I immediately rang the friend who put me onto the book to tell her I had been reading about my mother (and to thank her for putting me onto the book). The recognition bells started ringing with the first line

Can you imagine a vampire who drains you by working hard, being conscientious, and always doing the right thing? (p.179)

and just builds from there.

Obsessive-Compulsive vampires are deathly afraid of doing anything wrong. To them the smallest crack in their perfect facade leaves them open and vulnerable to all the seeping horrors of the universe.
Obsessive-Compulsive vampires see their existence as a battle against the forces of chaos. Their weapons are hard work, adherence to rules, scrupulous attention to details, and the capacity to delay gratification into the next life if need be. …
Obsessive-Compulsive vampires want to create a secure world by making everybody Obsessive-Compulsive. Only then can they be safe from themselves.
Here’s their secret: Inside every Obsessive-Compulsive is an Antisocial trying to claw its way out … The internal battle is too terrifying for them to face, so they force their gaze outward. At you. As long as Obsessive-Compulsives vampires are safely protecting you from your base impulses, they never have to look at their own (p.180).

What’s it like to be a Obsessive-Compulsive vampire?

Can you imagine how lonely you’d feel being the only competent person the planet? (p.181).

What are they like to be around?

Obsessive-Compulsive vampires believe punishment is synonymous with justice. Punishment is the only strategy that Obsessive-Compulsives know for controlling their own behaviour or that of other people. It is the only one they want to know.

Why punishment?

Punishment is clever device which allows good people to do bad things without seeing themselves as evil (p.182).

Their obsessive and compulsive desire for order is at war with the disorderly nature of the human. (And the emotional chaos they cause is, of course, “proof” of how much their control is “needed”.)

Mother was an almost text-book case. As was my boss at the job where it all went bad for me. I had never worked out how to deal with my parents except by moving cities, so I was pre-programmed to not handle (in fact, to revert to childhood patterns) when I ran into an Obsessive-Compulsive vampire boss.

(I told my friend that it was no wonder I had such trouble dealing with "emotional vampires" since I was pre-drained. She responded that I was already anaemic. Quite.)

Bernstein doesn’t deal with the issue of what it is like to have one of these emotional vampires as a parent—that is, someone with authority over you and considerable power to affect your own emotional development. But the book is aimed at adults having to deal with other adults.

Bernstein divides Obsessive-Compulsive vampires into two versions, Puritans and Perfectionists, but regards how to deal with them as imposing very similar problems and responding to very similar techniques.

Part 5 Seeing Things That Others Can’t (Paranoids) I read mainly for completeness, since I have not had significant dealings with any such. But then he made a comment about the strong Paranoid tendencies in Science Fiction, Paranoids and Narcissists being the two great sources of creativity (p.210), and it struck me that elements of the Paranoid mindset he was describing—the intolerance of ambiguity, the need to put everything in a vindicating pattern, the vacillation between naivety and cynicism—are not exactly absent from the Group Mind aspects of contemporary Progressivism, or political movements generally.

Bernstein divides Paranoids into Visionaires and Green-Eyed Monsters but regards the strategies for dealing with them to be very similar.

He concludes with a brief summing up of the varieties, their effects and most important elements in coping strategy—control, connection, facing your fears

the path to safety always goes through fear rather than away from it.

So

when you are dealing with vampires, there is always another choice, even if it’s only walking away ... the things that you’re most embarrassed to discuss are the things you most need to share ... when you’re dealing with vampires, the choice that seems most frightening is usually the right one (p234).

The key feature is understanding and counteracting the mechanics. There is no point speculating about how they got like that. Particularly not in seeing them as suffering some sort of sickness, because that leads one to accommodate them and their behaviours should never be accommodated (p.234). The only very partial caveat I would make is that identifying the patterns and so how it affected you can be—if allied to ways of dealing—empowering.

Bernstein’s concluding section for each Type on how that type of emotional vampires can get better I found particularly helpful since he makes it clear how difficult it is, a long term project. And never (assuming you are not one yourself) your project.

I found the book particularly helpful because, while I had identified many of the patterns of behaviour and outlook, I did not have an analytical framework in which to place them. I now do.

An extremely enlightening, accessible and helpful book.

* If it is not their fault ever, then it must be yours. Something that is never a conclusion for them, but an “obvious” premise built into the structure of the universe.
** The day I really got over anxiety patterns, I was late to the school because I was too relaxed—having squashed a dysfunctional mechanism and not yet fully developed the replacement. Getting over not expressing anger, I became harder on students. It is just a matter of being aware and adjusting accordingly.

A little local difficulty

My housemate has got dumped by his (and therefore my) internet provider for being two months behind paying the bill. So, no internet from home until the provider gets replaced. This may retard posting for a bit.