Friday, May 7, 2021

Excuses as a Smokescreen to Cover Up Lies

 Typically, in my book, Blame Game, How to Win It, I examine excuses in the context of face saving. I suppose that is the most common cause for excuse-making. However, liars have an additional reason to make excuses: hide lies. In such cases, the excuse implicitly creates the pretense that there was no underlying lie.


Photo by Quinten de Graaf on Unsplash

A typical illustration is the illegal border crossing "invasion" occurring in the U.S. The cause is that Central Americans know that if they can get across the border, most of them will be allowed to stay. All the signals from the U.S government are that illegals are now welcome. We stopped the construction of the wall, we "catch and release" immigrants, we provide free food, medical care, and housing, at least for a time, and we transport them to various sanctuary cities in the U.S.  All of this is the new immigration policy created by President Biden (not Congress).

In the May 1, 2021 issue of the New York Post, the editorial board quoted Biden as blaming former President Trump. Many former immigration officials had quit (which is typical when a new administration arrives to put its own people in charge. Biden failed to point out that Trump had actually expanded the border control staff. Biden failed to point out the illegal immigration had slowed to a trickle because of Trump policies (border wall, agreements with Mexico and Central America governments to halt the inflow, deportation instead of catch and release. On day 1 of his Presidency, Biden stopped wall construction and deportations, plus soon providing implicit incentives for more illegal immigration.

So, the lies and deception are clear. Despite the fact that only 15% of the public believe Biden's lies about immigration, he persists. Politicians have learned that repeating lies again and again gradually increases the number of people who believe the lies. The blaming of Trump is a way for Biden to avoid taking responsibility, while at the same time creating the pretense that Biden's new welcome invitation to illegals is not a fact. It also allows Biden to continue his goal of changing the voting demographics in the U.S. to give more advantage to Democrats.


Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Victimology: The New Way to Play the Blame Game

The old way to play the blame game, as I explored in my book "Blame Game, How to Win It," was to use excuses to mask one's shortcomings. But people usually see through excuses, so now the more subtle and less detectable approach is to take the stance of being a victim. Thus our social discourse inappropriately obsesses on such assorted invalidations as a war on women, a war on the working class, income inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, exploitation of the poor, and numerous other perceived affronts.
Self-identified victims respond to whatever disadvantages they may experience with a learned helplessness that was created by the society's privileged. Thus, their own personal responsibility does not apply. Another "advantage" of being perceived as a victim is that it hides envy and gives license to get revenge upon the presumed perpetrators. The revenge is often expressed by charging others with micro-aggression. Instead of confronting one's flawed attitudes, choices, and behaviors that created a disadvantaged position in life, "victims" can not only wrap themselves in a comforting cocoon but can feel justified to attack their enemies.
It seems as if we are experiencing a generational shift, where victimization ideology is most obvious in young adults. College curricula are being hijacked by misguided diversity and sensitivity training emphasis, expressed in growing dominance of grievance courses set aside for women, blacks, LGBTs, and politically correct instruction in such subjects as history, social justice, socialism, organic farming, and global warming. College students are notorious for chastising non-conformist peers, punishing professors who advocate free-market economics or "diminish" them with low grades, and for heckling or forcing disinvitations of guest speakers with conservative views. Comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have stopped playing college campuses because young people are too up-tight and politically correct to appreciate traditional humor. In the old days of Berkeley protests, students insisted on more free speech. Today's students want to suppress speech that is not politically correct. Many think we need to revise the first amendment's protection of free speech and religion.
Cherished traditions that helped make the country strong are being systematically destroyed. The Constitution's call for separation of church and state is being re-written to mean separation of state from church. Protestors demand that listing of the 10 commandments be taken down from public buildings. Kids can't pray or read scripture during down times in school. Patriotism is rejected to promote a united-nations new world order. America is bad. Europe is good. The President apologizes to the world for what a rotten country we are. Anti-Americanism reaches deep into revised school history curricula. To illustrate one recent consequence, a public school canceled its annual "America day" celebration, because officials were afraid some students would be offended by a display of pride in the country. Meanwhile, Mexican celebrations are welcome in many schools.
Today's young people are "fragile buttercups" creating a "cocked fist" culture, as Matt Labash described the situation in his Oct. 5 Weekly Standard piece, where fuses are so short that they lead to explosions of intolerance, name-calling, outrage, character assassination, race riots, cop killings, and mass killings. Labash explains how the victimology culture reflects rather precisely the official medical definition of paranoid personality disorder. Is our whole society going nuts?
PC police, in and out of government, are shredding the social fabric. The grievance industry manufactures wide-spread resentments that pit citizens against each other. Revolution may be just around the corner, either by those with manufactured grievances or by those who are outraged by social engineering.
How did this generation get this way? Of course, victimization is perpetrated by politicians who encourage grievances and embrace victim-hood. Politicians gain advantage in assuring and growing the presence of a victimized underclass when they cynically pledge to come to the rescue and help punish the imagined perpetrators. They create and grow a government-dependent underclass that is all too willing to sell its votes for tax-payer provided goodies. History shows that this is a road to fascism.
But some people have suggested that a more basic cause is the current over-protective generation of parents. "Tiger moms" are part of Chinese culture, not ours. Here, over half the families don't have a live-in father, and, with or without fathers, many moms wrap their children in the security blankets of false praise and excuses for shortcomings. We live in Lake Wobegon where all kids are above average. In my school days, if you crossed the line in school, you got paddled by the principal and paddled again when you got home. Today, if the principal uses a paddle, the parent is likely to sue the school district.
The PC police succeed because they make us all so afraid of their public derision and attack that we too are joining the PC ranks. The most grievous political incorrectness is to complain about political correctness. The need to walk on eggshells in social interactions makes us isolate ourselves into enclaves of like-minded people. It prevents the very dialog that diversity advocates claim they want to promote. It is diversity of ideas that is not acceptable.
Who gets to be acknowledged as the legitimate PC police? The answer is becoming a focus of political debate. In that environment, authoritarian leaders emerge.

Professor Klemm is author of Mental Biology, The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (Prometheus) and Blame Game, How To Win It (Amazon).

Friday, July 3, 2015

Our "Life is a Lottery" Culture

One of the things President Obama is famous for is dissing the successful as "life's lottery winners." This parallels his charge that successful businesses don't deserve the credit for their success, saying "You didn't build that." This is politically shrewd, because it taps into two basic weaknesses of human nature: envy and greed. His philosophy, and that of many liberals in generals, conveys the message that voters are justified in their envy of success and wealth. Voters are encouraged to demand income redistribution because the wealth of others was not earned.
Fairness doctrine dominates the ethos of liberals and lies at the heart of their increasingly successful efforts to punish success by government regulation and taxation policy. If success is due to circumstance and luck, then it is only fair to push for more equal outcomes in the efforts of people to succeed. Voters, perhaps now a majority of them, like the idea of leveling the playing field by taking from the successful and giving to those who have not succeeded.
At the other end of the spectrum, the lottery mentality offers an excuse for those whose lives are mostly marked by failures. Their problem is bad luck, or exploitation by the successful. This is another example of unfairness, perhaps even of the mendacity of those who have won life's lottery. No longer do we have to blame failure on bad choices and decisions or on laziness. Poverty or antisocial behavior can't be blamed on freely chosen actions. Those who fail can find scapegoats and blame them.
Politically, liberal politicians have found the guarantee of success: convince people they are victims and pledge to punish the perpetrators and restore fairness. As Jeff Bergner put it in his essay, "One cannot build a cult of victimhood on the soil of personal responsibility."
It is not just craven politicians who reject personal responsibility. Many brain scientists have arrived at the same conclusion from highly flawed experiments that seem to show that a person makes choices and decisions well before their claim of when they made them. This research has been interpreted to mean that the unconscious mind makes the decision and later that becomes known consciously. Thus, the decision cannot be made freely. It is driven unconsciously by our genes and past learning experiences.
Thus, scientists provide support for redistributionist and retributionist social policies, because life success is not based on merit. We now have defense lawyers arguing "diminished capacity" for criminal clients. We even have clerics who argue from original sin and predestination perspectives that we can't help our bad morals.
I am writing a book on "Making a Scientific Case for Free Will." So far, despite my track record of science-publishing success, no publisher will touch it. Has free will become politically incorrect?
So why try? If you succeed, you won't get credit. You will get diminished, perhaps even punished. If you fail, you won't get blame. In fact, you will get compensated. This is what life in America is coming to in this new age of "life's lottery."

Sources:

Source for quote: Bergner, Jeff. 2015. The fame of life. The Weekly Standard, June 29, p. 25-26.


Source for critique of free-will research: Klemm, W. R. 2010. Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Where We Place Blame Depends on What Is True

When we do something that others say is wrong, do we blame ourselves and repent? That depends on whether we agree it was wrong. In other words, the issue becomes one of what is a fact or true. Was what we did really wrong, or just some busybody's opinion?
Honoring truth is a value. People are taught values, and how and what they are taught is especially impactful on children. Both children and adults are prone to fuzzy thinking in general, but this becomes especially problematic when it comes to thinking about the pursuit of honorable behavior. In a New York Times piece by Justin McBrayer, a college philosophy professor, explains how fuzzy thinking about morals is leading children to think there are no moral facts, just moral opinions which they are free to accept or reject without blame. He is noticing that this moral ambiguity seems to be increasing among college students. He also observed that the issue was captured in a sign in his kid's secondary school, which posted the edict that defined fact and opinion as follows:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

When McBrayer Googled definitions on the web, he found them all to be similar to the sign in the school. The implications of such definitions are quite damaging for honorable behavior. It breeds a situational ethics mentality that says that opinions are not based on fact or truth, and thus opinions are fungible. Such definitions mean that there are no moral truths, because none of them can be proved to be true. Moral claims are believed to be mere opinions. For example, murder is therefore not immoral, just illegal, because a majority of people had an opinion it was wrong and passed a law outlawing it. No one person's opinions are any more valid than anybody else's. These definitions lead to a moral ambiguity that is systematically encouraged by Common Core standards which include the deceptively innocuous requirement that children learn to "distinguish fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text." Links to the flawed definitions occur in lesson plans and quizzes.
The reality is that we think opinions are wrong if we do not hold them. Often, our attachment to our own opinions is welded by self-interest and emotions rather than by reason and evidence. What reason and evidence we employ is used as argument for existing opinion rather than for evaluation of alternative opinions. But if one uses reason and evidence to examine a range of opinions, the opinion we finally accept as true is more likely to be true. We construct an excuse for ourselves from thinking hard to seek absolute truth if we accept the claim that no moral truths are absolutely truer than others. How convenient. Now we don't have to take blame for what otherwise would be moral failures. This could have been the rationale for the statements of Jesus, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," and the paraphrase of several statements that are equivalent to "Seek ye the truth and you shall find it." 

The pedagogical challenge is for schools to place more emphasis on evidence-based thinking. Too many teachers impose their own opinions as authoritative and true without compelling supporting evidence. This conveys the message that it is o.k. for students to do likewise with their own opinions. Science courses have special value because they require students to consider and value evidence for conclusions about the nature of the physical world. That is the mindset students should use for conclusions outside the realm of science.
The problem is not just limited to uneducated kids. McBrayer sees moral relativism all the time with colleagues in academia. Just what is the problem with these definitions and mind set? For one, truth does not have to have proof in order to be true. Some things can be true, even though proof is not yet available. For example, the theory of evolution has overwhelming supporting evidence, but many people have the opinion it is not true because it cannot be definitively proved. McBrayer points out that some things that have been "proved" turn out later to be wrong. Proof is a feature of our mental life, and if proof is required for facts, then facts become person relative. You can have your truth, I can have mine. How then do we refute the counter-argument that says "You are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts."
The second flaw in the definitions is that students are being taught that claims are either facts or opinions: they can't be both. Common Core quizzes for example require students to sort claims into one or the other category. There are demonstrable facts that certain people steadfastly refuse to believe, as well as beliefs about certain "truths" that are manifestly not based on evidence or fact. The main point, however, is the reality that a fact can be true and believed at the same time.
Unfortunately in school curricula, students are taught that value claims are opinions, neither true nor based on fact. In an online fact vs. opinion student worksheet, McBrayer found that children were expected to classify the following behaviors as mere opinions:

  • Copying homework assignments is wrong.
  • Cursing in school is inappropriate.
  • All men are created equal.
  • It is wrong for people under age 21 to drink alcohol.
  • Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.
  • Drug dealers belong in prison.

Our culture may be producing a whole generation that thinks there are no moral facts and thus no world view about honor can be true. Thus, no one can be blamed for violating moral values. We are left with the unavoidable problem, however, that adult life presents us with moral dilemmas wherein we must acknowledge certain moral values as facts. How, for example, can we be outraged when rioters destroy the property of innocents if this is not viewed as a moral fault, as dishonorable behavior? Or with McBrayer's example, how can we be outraged at the murder of cartoonists, if such murder is morally neutral? Indeed, we can rationalize it as o.k., because the cartoonist was extremely offensive. To protect people from crimes against humanity, we must acknowledge the reality that certain moral truths are indeed facts. As a society, we are challenged to think through the evidence that supports each of many competing moral claims to determine which claims are true. We abdicate that responsibility by believing that nothing is true that has not been proved. Unfortunately, it is easier to abdicate moral commitments than to live an honorable life.
Even when we acknowledge that certain things are right and others wrong, we seem to be living in a devolving culture where blame is something you place on others or on uncontrollable outside forces. How long will it be until blame is no longer politically correct, where we can't hold anybody responsible for anything? Maybe that time is coming soon, as witnessed by the numerous recent scandals and failures in government agencies where nobody is held accountable.
There is much more to be said about honesty, and I am working on a book about truth and falsity. In the meanwhile, I recommend the book by Dan Ariely, "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty."

For more about Dr. Klemm's writings, see his web site at http://wrklemm.com and his blog on Improve Learning and Memory at http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com.

Source:

McBrayer, Justin P. (2015). Why our children don't think there are moral facts. New York Times. March 1. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/?_r=0. Accessed June 25, 2015.



Saturday, February 28, 2015

Blaming the Victim

"What did we do to make them hate us so much?' America and Western civilization in general are under attack by Islamic terrorists. Apologists assert that we brought this wrath upon ourselves by our historical sins (like the Crusades) and therefore we must not only apologize but also make excuses for terrorism and take blame for their dysfunctional governments (created by colonialism) and their poverty. So what if our people get berated, bombed, and beheaded. We had it coming.

Yet such self-hatred fails to recognize that the Crusades were conducted to take back the Western countries and Christian holy sites that Muslims had conquered. Colonialism was a problem, but America had no colonies in Middle East or African colonialism. Dysfunctional governments seem to be the rule in Muslim countries, but we don't make the rules there. Muslims do.

Moreover, how do sins of the past equate to sins of the present? The Christian church has gone through many epochs of reform. Radical Islam does not seek to reform itself. It harkens back to Islam's original and literal scripture in the seventh century.

***

"So what that we don't have immigration papers? Our country is poor, yours is rich, and we have a right to violate your laws because you stole our country and made it poor." Norte Americanos are blamed for banana republics and the historical government dysfunction in Latin American. Today, open-border activists argue that the U.S. deserves the chaos of illegal immigration because of our misbegotten riches, historically stolen from Latin American countries who now have a right to seize our entitlements and jobs from our own poor.

Only Mexicans can claim we took part of their country, but it wasn't originally their country. It had belonged to Spain before Mexico rebelled against Spanish rule. Texas in 1836 was a province of Mexico, and Texans seceded because of mistreatment and restricted political rights by the Mexican government. Mexico refused to grant Texans their freedom and independence, apparently unwilling to honor the wish of Texans to do the same thing that Mexico had done to Spain little more than a decade earlier. California, Arizona, and New Mexico territory were purchased in 1848 from Mexico with cash and forgiveness of debt owed to Americans.

It is not clear what natural resources we stole from Central and South America. On the contrary, we created NAFTA trade agreements that help their economies. We transferred to Venezuela and Mexico the oil technologies that help to prop up their economies. And the countries that are complaining about our not taking their emigrants have much stricter immigration restrictions than we do. Talk about hypocrisy!

***
"Your ancestors were racists and held slaves. Therefore, we are entitled to affirmative action, reverse discrimination, and even reparations." The ancestors of most whiteys in America weren't even here when slavery existed. They were in Europe and Asia and came after the civil war. And among those who were here, 359,528 Union soldiers died to free the slaves. Where is the condemnation of the blacks in Africa who captured fellow blacks and ran the slave trade? American blacks are free to return to Africa — interesting that they don't want to. Around the world, blacks want to come to America, not leave it.

***

These and other examples of blaming the victim that could be cited are political or religious. i these areas, rational and unemotional discussion is usually futile. So let us consider other examples.

Defense lawyers in general often use "blame the victim" tactics when they know their defendant is guilty. Soft-hearted juries are swayed by clever excuses and specious argument. I bet they teach this stuff in law school.

Among the many examples of blaming the victim are rape victims whose assailants charge were dressed provocatively and thus were "asking for it."  The excuse is that what a woman wears, says, where she goes, or what she does can make her responsible for the crime committed against her. No amount of saying no or physical resistance seems to nullify the excuses. Lawyers try to gain sympathy for rapists by pointing out how unfair it is to tempt men. Indeed, this idea is probably the basis for the Muslim requirements that their women cover their whole body and even their face when in public.

A related example is domestic violence, typically inflicted by males on their spouses or girlfriends. The victim is blamed for enabling the violence by refusing to end the relationship. While resistance to leave can sometimes develop because the woman is emotionally weak and dependent, often they have little choice for economic reasons or often justifiable fear for themselves or children if they dare to leave. A common explanation for why women do not leave their battering relationship is Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness." The teaching of helplessness comes from their abuser. In some locales, the victim faces a high tolerance of wife beating by police and legal systems.

Chronic victims may be inviting perpetuation of their abuse when they believe they are victims of outside forces beyond their control. When helplessness has been learned, it is hard to generate the will and initiative to use internal psychological resources to overcome the abuse.  Chronic victims commonly have low sense of self-worth, low sense of efficacy, feelings of shame and guilt, and may even believe that they deserve to be punished. The task of recovery from victimization is to take responsibility, moving from helplessness to accountability and from hopelessness to optimism. Seligman makes the point that optimism can be learned too.

Then there is the death fatwa on Salman Rushdie, whom former President Jimmy Carter says invited the attempts on his life by writing a "blasphemous" book. Freedom of speech, according to Carter, seems to apply only for speech that does not offend. He does not elaborate on where one draws the line where murder is warranted for verbal offense. Maybe it just applies to religious challenges.

Bullying is often blamed on the person being bullied for all manner of reasons, such as being gay, ugly, fat, too smart, in the wrong minority group, some negative or annoying personality trait, being weak or too sensitive, and so on. How does the bully justify his own negative traits? Well, of course, that question never arises because bullies pretend to feel superior and are condescending.

Whistleblowers and investigative reporters are often blamed and disparaged when they disclose embarrassing or criminal actions of others. Their colleagues often shun them. Perhaps shunners feel inferior and shamed by their own lack of courage to do the right thing. If those of us on the sidelines don't speak up for the true victims, maybe nobody will. Those who victimize others need to be held responsible, not excused.

Why do people blame the victim? One reason is that people want to believe that life is fair (it is not), and therefore unfairness is hard to accept as a cause of victimization. The victim must deserve her state. Another reason is that making excuses for others provides a rationale for excusing ourselves. If we can lift the burden of personal responsibility on others, we can justify doing it for ourselves. Thus, we don't have to face our own weaknesses. Excuse-making is profound cowardice.

Dr. Klemm's latest books are:

Mental Biology, The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate and
Improve Your Memory For a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine

Sources:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Blaming_the_victim

http://bullying.about.com/od/Victims/fl/6-Examples-of-Victim-Blaming.htm

http://www.zurinstitute.com/victimhood.html#dont


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Guadalupe_Hidalgo

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Patience May Indicate Free Will


They say that patience is a virtue. It may also support the notion of free will. A person may defer action, as in pursuing a reward for example, because of a free choice to delay. This possibility lies at the heart of a new study in a long series of studies that began in the 1980s that have tested the notion that free will might not exist, that it is an illusion.

The prior experiments, widely interpreted to indicate that free will does not exist, demonstrated that neuron activity in  a movement-control area of the cerebral cortex accelerated prior to a conscious decision to press a button. Thus, scientists interpreted this to mean the decision was made unconsciously, prior to the conscious realization that a decision had been made. I have challenged this interpretation on both grounds of the scientific methods used and misinterpretation of the cognitive neuroscience (see manuscript at www.ac-psych.org/download.php?id=84).

In this new study, Masayoshi Murakami and colleagues in Portugal, this electrical marker of decision-making was studied in rats in a different paradigm. Highly thirsty rats were trained to wait in place after hearing a sound cue until a second sound, a "go-for-it" sound was heard that would give them access to water. If the rats showed the required restraint, they received a larger water reward.

As the rats waited, the electrical "decision-making indicator" grew in magnitude and reached a threshold at the point where rats lost patience and went for the reward. The progressive increase in neural firing is interpreted as a well-known "integrate-and-fire" mechanism, wherein activity grows until a threshold for action is reached.

But they also found a second class of neurons whose firing could predict the rate at which the integrating neurons added up toward threshold. This observation of preceding regulatory control enabled a new interpretation of the original free will experiments on illusory free will. The "integrate-and-fire" population of neurons may not be making the actual decision, but rather reflecting an earlier decision-making processes elsewhere that regulate the integration toward action threshold.

Decision-making is complicated, even when it just involves pressing a button. I try to explain all this in my new book from Prometheus, "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate."

Source:

Murakami M, Vicente MI, Costa GM, & Mainen ZF. (2014) Neural antecedents of self-initiated actions in secondary motor cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 17(11), 1574-82. PMID: 25262496