How did you make it past the title? Was it curiosity? Are you a masochist? Do you have no self-esteem? Do you actually agree with the claim? Really?
The thesis here is simply a reworking of the idea of that which bothers us in others is really what bothers us about ourselves. Do you hate arrogant people or distracted multitaskers? Well, dare I say look in the mirror! Don’t worry, I am no different. We all breathe the same air and started from similarly innocent-appearing little couplings of zygotes.
We are all so afraid. So afraid of not getting our (FAIR?) share. So afraid of the other. So afraid of too much (little) government, too much (little) attention, terrified that the Yankees (Red Sox) will win it all for as far as the eye can see. So afraid of too much (insert something), or of course too little (that same damn something).
We have so many problems. Trust in government, honest and transparency in pricing, rising sea levels and debilitating droughts, cheating in sports and business and life itself really. We are so hungry for truth and stability because we know that we are a desert of these things ourselves. Central banks cannot hold interest rates at zero forever. Yet every Olympics we set new swimming or skating or something-else records, maybe free money is sustainable? Maybe this time IS different?
I deeply believe this. There are no magic pills. Similarly, there is no existential threat, only a status quo threat. Recessions end, life gives way to non-life, and a new world will emerge from the one that we are seemingly throwing away with every new cell phone produced and home built. My family has owned several of these, and are even looking to get new ones, once again, mea culpa. I cannot repeat this often enough, Mea Culpa!
We are so given to seeking painless culpability-less ways out of problems. There are lots of problems. Maybe more maybe less than eras gone by. Or is there really just one problem, non-presence? How could we think that there would be any way for a business to report earnings other than what we call generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)? We created a that name, GAAP, because we recognize that we really can’t stop ourselves from essentially lying. Can’t we just call it honest or dishonest accounting? Zero down home mortgages, really? The nearly 2000-page documentation of the tax code is not big enough to contain all our dishonest fear of our selves so we create a second parallel set of calculations called the alternative minimum tax? Really? And then we “solve” problems with sunset-legislation? We took all the fat out of our foods so that we could keep eating and not feel that we were going to get fat ourselves, and then we hid all that fat in other foods which we ate, and threw a bunch of new sugar in the foods we took the fat from. Somehow, we did not lose weight, all we did is eat more sugar.
We know we are going to speed (did I mention mea culpa?), so we hire police to patrol the roads. Then, angry with getting tickets (there is always someone driving more egregiously than we are after all) we invent technology to circumvent the police surveillance (“fuzz busters” and google notifications of speed trap locations). Are we next going to create a new force to surveil the airwaves and internet and in essence shut down the circumvention techniques? Will we then develop industries complete with AI to conquer this secondary level of policing? Which came first, the fuzz buster or fat-free yogurt?
All is not lost! Every problem is simply an out-of-focus opportunity. It is so so so much easier for me (at least in theory!) to change myself than to try to change the electoral college or Facebook’s board of directors or how some unicorn tech company reports their “earnings”. Whoops, I meant META, Facebook had some problems, but now that they renamed themselves META we can forget all about the serious criticisms of Facebook, all must be good now, they have a new name, nothing to see here.
We really have no problems. All we have is a fear or inability to see and trust and love ourselves, and by extension our neighbor. Movements happen inexplicably and without notice. Let us all model the behavior we need. Love yourself and I will love myself. I will be honest (okay, at least much more honest than currently) with myself and you, and you do the same, and let’s see where that takes us.
