A consistent thread runs through reactions to the Occupy movements across the country. Everybody wants to know: what do they want? Their demands are unclear, their agenda practically non-existent. When will they figure themselves out?

One blogger posted, “Will debt forgiveness be the main policy push from Occupy Wall Street?” (read the article)

Another posts, “As more of an Occupy Wall Street person, my fear is that if there is no clear agenda set soon or if politicians do not soon respond, the energy might dissipate into who knows what.” (read the article)

And another posts, “…as OWS keeps reminding us, they never had a cohesive message to begin with…” (read the article)

According to a Yahoo! News blogger, “Forty-three percent of respondents to a new CBS/New York Times survey said they agree with Occupy Wall Street’s goals, while, 27 percent said they disagree. Thirty percent were unsure.” (read the article)

Pretty good ratings for a movement that doesn’t know what it wants. Or does it? Maybe we take lack of articulation for lack of definite intent. That would probably be a mistake.

I’m an idiot. I think that you’re an idiot, too.

If that bothers you, your judgment is premature at best, because you have no idea yet what I mean by an idiot or why I think that we are a couple of them. For all you know, what I mean could be absolutely right. You just don’t like the sound of it, and you don’t like what it means to you. That is, you don’t like what it would mean to you if you had to agree. On that basis, you might already have decided to disagree, maybe adamantly. Your initial reaction to being called an idiot might be, “No, I am not!” or something like that, and I’m sure that I’d agree with you if I understood what you meant by the idiot that you are not and why you think you are not one. But the fact would remain that you still have no clue about what I mean.

I am always intrigued when I encounter people who don’t like what they hear and reject it solely for that reason, without taking the time to find out if they heard correctly, let alone to consider if value lies in what they don’t like hearing. They seem oblivious to the possibility that the speaker meant something other than what they took it to mean. Especially if they hear something that pushes some negative emotional button in their idiotic psyches, they react like simpletons and, in one fell swoop, conclude that how they took it was how it was meant, and how it was meant was wrong. If the speaker objects that they misunderstood, they can be so smug as to argue that the speaker doesn’t know his own mind: how they took it was what the speaker really meant. Even apparently intelligent people who don’t subscribe to such crude and archaic paradigms like “right and wrong” backslide into crudeness and stupidity when you push the right buttons. I have found that this is surprisingly easy to do.

I spent a little time on a philosophy forum the last few days. I finally took the time to crystallize a few things that have bugged me for a long time about the God debate. My post appears as it does on the forum in response to the original post, “God Refutation,” with CAPS instead of italics. Hope it doesn’t hurt your ears!

I’d love to hear what you think.

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I’ve followed the God/no-God debate since the early 1970s. The most puzzling thing about the debate, besides its dialog-of-the-deaf characteristic, is an assumption SHARED by both sides.

That is, EVERYONE seems to think that God is unable to speak for him/her/itself.

Even someone as sharp as Bertrand Russell assumed this. In a 1959 BBC TV interview, he explained how he became an atheist:

Let’s make 2012 the Year of Jubilee. The 1% can afford it. The rest of us can’t afford not to.

Conservative anti-redistribution of wealth dogma be DAMNED, just like all dogmas should be. Besides, if conservative dogmas are worth their salt, it’s time to show it. They’ve never been tested, just squawked about by loudmouths and talking heads.

I did the math. Crude as it might be, it’s not off by much.

If the top 1% retained $1 million per person (no pittance) and the rest of their 42% of household wealth were redistributed, every single man, woman, and child in the 99% would receive about $70,000. A family of four would get $280,000. (see calc below)

The conservative arguments against wealth redistribution seem pretty pithy when a one-time redistribution is concerned. Note: ONE time, not a habit. Besides, why should TARP beneficiaries and other no-goodniks have all the fun? Bailouts must benefit corporations exclusively, not citizens, for what reasons, again?

Most of my life, patience meant to me that I was supposed to slow down, that my sense of urgency was inappropriate, that I should lower my expectations, and that I should be satisfied with slow rates of progress. I’ve never been able to accept this.

My Mom used to smile and sing, “Slow down, you move to fast; You got to make the morning last!” as I’d race past her (from Simon & Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song). She knew it wouldn’t change anything, but she smiled and sang anyway. As I got older my compulsiveness didn’t wane, but my guilt over my “impatience” waxed with plenty of help. People have told me all my life how impatient I am.

Last night I realized a resolution to my conflict over patience. Some might call it a “middle way,” but I have found that middle ways just mitigate problems, not solve them. Middle ways are the results of compromise or tolerance; great aids for living with problems, but not for eliminating them. The best solutions don’t accommodate competing problematic factors, but instead reframe problems to eliminate the competition. Then problematic factors resolve easily, or they simply become irrelevant. Some call this “paradigm shift.” I prefer “context shift” and practice it all the time, not just with big problems.

I’ll weigh in after a half century of life and observation: I am certain that we need to speed up, that urgency is appropriate, that our expectations are far too low, and that our rates of progress aren’t clearly better than zero. Am I impatient? Yes, but the reason for it surprised me last night. Now I am more patient, for the same surprising reason.

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A while back I met a very intelligent man. He was working on a book to show that we are a transitional species. He didn’t need to convince me. We aspire to humanity, but we sorely lack evidence that we’ve moved very far from our bestial past.

The way we recognize power reflects our transitional status. We could simplistically divide power into three types with their motivating characteristics:

1. Power of force, motivated by fear
2. Power of charisma, motivated by sex
3. Power of intelligence, motivated by reason and compassion

In real life, we rarely encounter any of these in “pure” form. After all, we’re human, and what is more human than inconsistency? One type of power can be used to serve the purposes of another type. One type of power can hamper the effectiveness of another type by design, as in a checks-and-balances system, or for dysfunctional reasons, such as those involved in addictions. Mixing them is not the problem, but finding effective mixtures has been.

Some interesting questions are:

1. Which type or types of power predominate in a situation?
2. Is the power mix is appropriate for the situation?
3. Will the power mix achieve desired goals?
4. How we can alter the mix when we want to?

I don’t pretend to have answers to those questions. However, I do have some considered opinions about the three types of power.

It’s time to stop putting up with stupidity—our stupidity. Bad enough that we think as poorly as we do; we don’t need to protect our right to continue the habit. Forrest Gump would tell us, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Please be aware that in the last century we exploited, abused, and exterminated each other more than ever before in our history, and that the ultimate victims were our children. 

Oh, well, that kind of stupidity. We have a couple of defenses for that. Out pop our internal Books of Common Knowledge.

Verse 1, the Creed of Futility: “Thus shall it always be.” We can’t expect people to change overnight, if ever. After all, we’re just human, and the jungle isn’t so far behind us. Craziness and evil are chronic, here to stay. The question is how to live in spite of them, how to mitigate them, manage them, even profit from them. Besides, we’re not to blame.

Verse 2, the Creed of Evil People: “Evil, crazy people do evil, crazy things.” It’s their fault. If we knew how to get rid of them, the world would be a better place.

We are so very used to thinking about ourselves as objects.

That might sound strange, but consider: we view ourselves as relatively powerless beings that are vulnerable to all kinds of forces, most of them more powerful than we are and beyond our control. We only feel really powerful when we compare ourselves to relatively powerless things. Other relatively powerless beings intimidate us with ease. Anything from natural disasters to microbes can end the whole lot of us, and we live in not a little dread of them all our lives. On a grand scale, how much do we really control and how much controls us? How then do we differ from objects? We don’t like admitting that we see ourselves through those glasses. We’ve worn them for so long that we forget, even deny, that they are perched on our noses.

I like to ask people what they want. Wanting, at least, is one thing that we don’t have in common with objects. Someone might complain about the poor treatment they received, or try to think through a problem, or strategize how to achieve a goal. I like listening to them for a while. It’s always interesting to hear how people frame the questions that they want to answer, and to see how differently a familiar situation appears when viewed through someone else’s eyes. Those are views you can’t discover on your own.

What would an approach to understanding life look like if we started with wanting? What if we validated desire, legitimized longing, and granted ourselves an uncontested right to want?

It is little short of mind-boggling to see how timorous we are with our own desires. We seem to universally hold certain assumptions:

1. We have no right to want anything unless we can show good cause.

2. Our wants are at best suspect and at worst the cause of all the problems and evil in the world.

3. There is no accounting for our wants, especially the problematic ones. In other words, they are rooted in irrationality, even insanity.

4. Shame is our default attitude towards our deepest personal desires, especially those secret ones.

Our philosophers and religious leaders have been cowards. Rather than do what could have been helpful and constructive, they each in their respective ways defined our real problems out of the question, then proceeded to offer solutions to “problems” that ranged from irrelevant to fictitious.

I’ve been spending time arguing with atheists on a discussion forum recently. When I mention this to people, they respond with a slight “there he goes again” roll of their eyes. Ah well, they love me anyway. But in the interest of a little more understanding and slightly less arc to future rolling of eyes, I thought I’d share the gist of something I wrote by way of introduction to that forum recently. I think it explains what I’m about pretty well.

I’m no different. Like anyone, I like being understood.

OK, now that you know that this is completely self-serving, don’t you roll your eyes, too! I promise I’m gonna make you think in this one.

I can go ’round and ’round with people, sometimes to their dismay and often to the amazement of onlookers. I make no bones: I can drive people crazy. There’s actually a method to my madness, though.

I am interested in the assumptions that we build our thinking on, especially the ones that we don’t realize we have. Getting people to talk about them is a prickly proposition. The extreme case is when we treat our assumptions as givens. We use signals to indicate that we are doing this, by saying things like, “Everybody knows that,” “It’s so obvious,” or, “How can you disagree?” If someone like yours truly keeps at it, questioning those “givens,” things quickly go south and get personal. That’s how you know that you’re onto one of them.

Very few people spend considerable time thinking about themselves. That might sound like a surprisingly dense or a surprisingly naïve statement; take your choice. You’ll see in a bit that it is neither. Narcissists in particular avoid thinking about themselves at all costs. You might think that most people think about themselves most of the time and that narcissists take it to the limit, but that just ain’t so.

Obsessing about what we want or don’t want is not the same as thinking about ourselves, rather it’s thinking about things. Granted, we are the ones who want or don’t want those things, so in a real sense we are thinking about those things for ourselves, for the sake of our own interests. But thinking about our own interests isn’t the same as thinking about ourselves. It’s just another way of thinking about something other than ourselves. It can actually be a way of avoiding the need to think about ourselves.

At this point, some people might wrinkle their brows in skepticism and wonder what I’m talking about. If I’m not talking about what we want and what we’re going to do to get it, what else could “thinking about ourselves” be? Wondering that would just confirm how unfamiliar we are with thinking about ourselves. Maybe we actually do some thinking about ourselves without being aware of it, but I’ve got to believe that being aware of it would be an improvement.

So what do I mean by “thinking about ourselves?” Thinking about ourselves isn’t something we do in order to get what we want or to avoid what we don’t want. Thinking about ourselves is something we do in order to understand what we truly want and why we want it. Understanding those things is about as close as we can get to self-knowledge, at least it seems so at this stage in our mental evolution. Ask anyone who has been in therapy: figuring out what we want and why we want it isn’t easy. We pay good money to get people to help us do it, if we go that deep at all. What if we could spare ourselves the expense? Maybe we could ask ourselves those questions and find the answers for ourselves without the plethora of psycho-tonics and miracle cures we continually hype to each other. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

We are taking our sciences too far. Our test tubes are becoming almighty.

I don’t mean that we are exploring matters that should be taboo or that we should curtail our scientific efforts. Far from it. Nor do I believe in limiting science by imposing a separation between it and non-scientific fields, such as those that deal with human meaning like philosophy, religion, the arts, spirituality, etc. Spirituality and science should not become our new Church and State.

I say let scientists have at it! They haven’t gone nearly far enough. Let them figure out the “neural basis of spirituality.” (See a news report or an abstract of a clinical study.) Doing so should not pose a threat to anyone or anything. Learning how something works does not explain why it works or why it’s important that it works, unless we decide beforehand that “why” can be reduced to an elaborate “how.” (By the way, that’s a philosophical decision that cannot be addressed by science or supported by evidence.) To the extent that science and other fields of knowledge are explorations of truth conducted in good faith, we don’t need the checks and balances between them that we require in order to ensure sanity and safety in other quagmires of human behavior, like politics for example.

So what is “too far” and in what way are we taking science there? We’ve gone too far in our expectations of science. We’ve come to expect that science should do things that it was deliberately designed to prevent. I’ll explain.

We don’t think well when we are afraid. We tend to do all the wrong things. We focus on what we fear rather than on valid alternatives, inducing us to engage with what we fear and disregard the alternatives. After a while, we get familiar and accustomed to the situation. Preferring a known evil to an unknown good, we become suspicious of alternatives that might eliminate what we fear. Eventually we learn to manage the situation. At that point, alternatives that would eliminate what we fear would also eliminate the mastery that we have gained over it. Our own egos can then stand between us and a release from what we fear. The model of addictive behavior applies quite well to the way that we tend to deal with fear.

When we interact with each other about subjects that are “safe,” we tend to have relaxed, open attitudes. We like to enjoy our interactions when possible, provided our ability to enjoy them isn’t hindered. We laugh, we tease, we listen and question with interest, and we explain openly.

When a conversation approaches our “safe” boundaries, and especially if someone seems bent on crossing those boundaries, we get anxious. It is visible. Our facial expressions and body language show that we have become guarded, defensive. Our attention shifts from the subject that we were discussing to the direction that the discussion seems to be taking us. We start setting limits and reinforcing our boundaries. We focus on the terms of the discussion instead of its content. Instead of matters of what did or did not happen or of what is or is not true, we start making a point of what is or is not appropriate. All of these are signs that we have disengaged, that we are no longer discussing but defending. Fear might seem like a strong term to use in this connection, but anxiety, disengagement, and defensiveness indicate some level of fear is behind them.

All my life I’ve been baffled by the behavior I encounter when I try to talk with people about god. At times it’s been quite humorous. The conversation can be  relaxed, going along smoothly. Then someone brings up the notion of god, and people tense up. It’s as if they put on their “now I’m dealing with the topic of god” hats and brace themselves for what’s coming next. On the other hand, if someone brings up the subject of reptilian aliens and their role in the development of civilizations, you don’t see nearly the same defensive reactions. It’s always puzzled me.

The problem of evil has been covered in depth by many great thinkers. I have a couple cents’ worth to add.

Simply stated, the problem of evil asks how a good god can allow evil to exist.

I like to refer to this problem by a more practical and empathetic label, the problem of suffering. Here’s a more complete statement of the problem.

Assuming that god is an “omni-god,” (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and absolutely benevolent,) god could and should eliminate the pain and suffering in the world.

The existence of pain and suffering in the world shows that god, if god exists, must be one or more of the following: not powerful enough to eliminate them, not able to be present where they need to be eliminated, not aware of them, or not concerned enough about our welfare to eliminate them.

Since pain and suffering do in fact exist in the world, it follows that an omni-god does not exist.

There are lots of assumptions involved in the problem of suffering. They are so familiar to us that we tend to think that they are self-evident and that no reasonable alternatives to them exist. That’s a mistake. Alternatives do exist, and what’s more they are reasonable alternatives. What makes the alternatives seem unreasonable is a second mistake that for now I’ll call an unexamined baseline. In other words, we take for granted that our unexamined convictions are a good starting point, a baseline, and tend to be biased against altering them.

We all seem sure that there is too much pain and suffering in the world, but I’ll show that we are hard-pressed to clearly describe what an acceptable amount of pain and suffering would be, that we don’t know how to begin quantifying that, and that we are unclear about the reasons why we came to our convictions in the first place.

After thinking through the problem of suffering, we’ll see that it isn’t nearly the strong argument against the existence of god that it first appeared to be. This will beg the question why it appeared to be such a strong argument when it is not. I think that the answers to that question are quite revealing.

Thinking small would be one thing if that’s the way we started out.

Friends of mine just had their third child. My eldest son lives near them. It has been years since he’s seen a newborn. What struck him most about the beautiful little girl was how big her eyes are and how they soak everything in. When her mother or father interacts with her, she focuses and responds. Otherwise, she calmly receives an uncensored flow of information through those wide eyes. She sees everything. Her possibilities are endless.

What were you going to be when you grew up? I was 14 years old at Arcadia Public Library reading for a term paper when I decided that question. I don’t remember who I was reading about, but he had affected history in a way that impressed me. I decided then that my life when it ended had to have meant something. I decided that I wasn’t going to live and die without doing something important, something great, with all the idealism and hubris that implies. I’ve spent my time since trying to figure out what is truly important and great and trying to do that, and in the process have become more realistic and a bit more humble. Strange, the places that kind of voyage will take you.