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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

Why We Hate to Accept Blame

Why is it so hard to take responsibility for our errors? Of course, the obvious and somewhat glib answer is that our ego gets in the way. But there is more to it than that. Recent experiments show that one undiscovered basic cause involves our sense of agency, that is, our sense of being responsible for what we choose to do (1).

Only recently have scientists started to spend much effort on understanding human agency (2). I discovered this to my dismay when recently asked to write a book chapter on the subject. It is hard to write knowingly on any subject when not much is known. Of course agency and sense of agency are two different things, and here we are concerned with how people perceive how much control they have over their lives. Given the growing dependency on government in this country, a likely prediction is that more and more people will surrender to the belief that they can’t do much about their lives. Research has shown that a person’s sense of agency depends on how many options they have to choose from (3). Options shrink when government or anything else constrains your range of choices. Moreover, another study showed that people believe that they have more self-control than others (4), which might explain why so many politicians treat the public as helpless and in need for a government nanny.

Anyway, on the point of accepting blame for one’s failings or mistakes, it seems that people claim ownership of their actions more readily when the outcomes are positive. Negative outcomes from their deeds are associated with less ownership and sense of responsibility. The most recent experiments had a primary focus on our sense of time in association with voluntary actions. The experimental design was based on prior evidence that the perceived estimate of time lag between when we do something and when we think we did it is an implicit index of our sense of ownership. Investigators asked people to press a key, which was followed a quarter of a second later by negative sounds of fear or disgust, positive sounds of achievement or amusement, or neutral sounds. The subjects were then asked to estimate when they had made the action and when they heard the sound. Timing estimation errors were easily measured by computer.

Subjects sensed a longer time lag between their actions and the consequences when the outcome (the sound) was negative than when it was positive. The interpretation is that with positive outcomes, the subjects sensed a more direct connection between what they did and their action of button pressing. With negative outcomes, subjects wanted to put more distance (time in this case) between what they did and the outcome. This seems like a rather indirect way to assess sense of agency, but we must await a cleverer and more direct way to measure it.

In any case, such experiments support our intuition that ownership of what we do can be affected by whether or not things turn out well. In other words, we have a self-serving bias to take more credit for when things turn out well than when they don’t. When they turn out badly, we want to insulate ourselves from responsibility and put blame elsewhere. Of course, we probably already knew that, but now we have objective experimental ways to study and perhaps manipulate sense of agency. Parents and social pressures don’t always succeed in teaching people to accept blame when it is due. This problem is likely to continue to get worse as more and more children lack responsible parents or even a father and a stay-at-home mom in the home. Maybe there are more systematic ways to train people to recognize how the consequences of their deeds affect their sense of responsibility.

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1.Yoshie, et al. (2013). Negative emotional outcomes attenuate sense of agency over voluntary actions. Current Biology. Dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub2013.08.034

2.  David, N. (2012)/ New frontiers in the neuroscience of the sense of agency. NCBI. Retrieved Oct. 2, 2013 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3365279.

3. Barlas, Z., and Obhi, S. S. (2013). Freedom, choice, and the sense of agency. Frontiers in Human Neurosience. August 29. Doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00514

4. Pronin, E, and Kugler, M. B. (2010). People believe they have more free will than others. PNAS. 107 (52), 22469-22474.

Politically Correct Science

It’s not just climate scientists and their global warming. Behavioral scientists have their own biases. The August 30, 2013 issue of the premier journal, Science, has a research report claiming that poor people stay poor because being poor “impairs their cognitive capacity.”[1] That is, being poor is so challenging and stressful that poor people have exhausted their mental capacity to regulate their impulses and make wise choices. The research was deemed so impeccable by the editors that they also ran a companion news story to publicize the findings to lay audiences.

The research yielded two basic, independent findings:

1. In one group of ordinary people sampled at a shopping mall, inducing negative thoughts about finances impaired function on two thinking tests in poor but not well-off participants. The median incomes per household varied from $20,000-$70,000 per year.
2. Testing of farmers at two stages of the harvest cycle showed that thinking performance before the harvest, when they were relatively poor, was impaired relative to performance afterwards, when they were relatively rich.

The conclusion was that people do not choose to be poor and that they become trapped in poverty because being poor impairs their thinking and decision-making. Blame for people being poor is put on their state of being poor. Nowhere, not in the research report nor its news summary, did anybody consider an alternate explanation for poverty in the U.S.:

Poverty of able-bodied, normal people can be a choice.

In terms of social policy, the implication of the politically correct is that you can help lift people out of poverty if you make them less poor through gifts, exempting them from taxation, and providing subsidies. Interestingly, the writers avoided this obvious inference, no doubt because it would irritate people who believe in the importance of personal responsibility. Rather, the writers focused on the need of government to ease mental challenges of poor people to a level commensurate with their impaired thinking capacity. For example, the authors suggested that government should reduce “cognitive taxes” in addition to monetary taxes for the poor. Specific policy suggestions included providing help in “filling out forms, planning, and reminders” to help the poor access government services and welfare.

Not mentioned is the current U.S. policy of spending $67 million for “navigators” to help poor people sign up for the Affordable Care Act. Who knows, that idea may well have come from these authors, two of whom were high-status Ivy League professors.

But I have to ask, wouldn’t these millions of dollars be better spent helping the poor get a work ethic and make better life choices? Instead, our government gives welfare payments and subsidies worth more than the poor can earn by working. And the poor don’t have to work to get the welfare. At the same time, politicians and bureaucrats push for an amnesty program for illegal aliens who are willing to do the work that our poor citizens refuse to do. Tell me, how is a government policy of promoting more dependency going to help anybody? If such government policy were not so deliberate, it would be insane.

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[1] Mani, A. et al. (2013) Poverty impedes cognitive function. Science. 341: 976-980.

Former Smokers Earn More. Know Why?

Former smokers have better-paying jobs than smokers and even workers who never smoked. This surprising fact emerged from the U.S. Census Bureau survey over the period 1992 to 2011 which was funded by the Tobacco Use Supplement. How can this be?

The fact is that smokers get paid on average 20% less, presumably because they are worth less. There is no evidence that smoking as such interferes with work performance. In fact, the nicotine in cigarettes is a mental stimulant and there is plenty of scientific research evidence that it enhances brain function. So what does that suggest?

Non-smokers and former smokers, the survey found, tend to have more education than smokers. They are also more likely to have non-smoking spouses. So, now we have another question: why do non-smokers have more education?

One of the economists who conducted the study, Melinda Pitts, offered this explanation: “It takes a special person to quit an addictive behavior.” I would add that nicotine is one of the most powerful addictive substances known, and it takes enormous will power to quit, even with today’s modern medical treatments. People who can quit a smoking addiction either have a better initial level of self-discipline than others that enables them to quit, or they develop it in the process of succeeding at quitting. The evidence for acquiring more discipline in the process of quitting is consistent with other situations, such as military boot camp, where people learn to shape up and be more disciplined than before.

As for former smokers having more education, it is noteworthy that for many smokers, formal education is completed before they finally quit. In my own case as a former smoker, I quit many times but only finally after 18 years of trying, some six years after I finished formal education. Thus, though the level of self-discipline might have been sufficient to help smokers persist in their education, they probably learn a new level of self-discipline by the experience of successfully overcoming nicotine addiction. So, the “specialness” of former smokers is that they have learned a level of self-discipline that probably is what makes them more valuable in the workplace.

I don’t, however, recommend that you take up smoking just so you can develop more character by quitting. There are easier ways to do that—maybe even military boot camp.

Source:

Safdar, Khadeeja. Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2013., p. A3

For strategies and tactics to succeed in your quest for more self-discipline, see my book, Blame Game. How To Win It, endorsed by celebrity psychologist, Dr. Laura Schlessinger and theologian Dr. Robert Schuller.

Free Will and Personal Responsibility

The issue about free will is not so much whether we have any, but whether we exercise the free will we do have. Philosopher Immanuel Kant argues that we are essentially free and fail to live up to the promise of such freedom if we allow biology and external forces to rule us. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, despite all the flaws of his irreligious and political beliefs, had it right in his existentialist arguments that humans do not have a fixed nature handed out from biology. Humans make their own nature out of the freedom to do so in the environment in which they exist. Humans are regarded, in existential philosophy, as independently acting and responsible conscious beings.  Each individual brain is uniquely constructed from life experience, and much of that is self-constructed by willful choices. Science does not hold that the conscious mind is independent of genetics or environmental programming. But each mind is an independent being, acting in the world as a distinct entity, not as some Borg-like unit in a collective.

In terms of religion, Christianity is uniquely individualistic and demands personal responsibility and accountability. It is no accident that many of those who think free will is illusory are also atheists. Kierkegaard railed against growing collectivism, including that of organized religion. His emphasis was on the responsibility of individuals to be true to Christian ideals.

The conscious mind that believes in its power to choose also must believe that it can exert some control over the automatic purposes of its unconscious mind. No doubt, conscious mind has its own automatic purposes, which likewise are subject to veto or modification via free will. Such minds believe they can train and discipline their minds, bending them to freely willed purposes. Such minds say to themselves, “I can quit smoking.” “I can make myself learn how to be an engineer.” I will make this marriage work.” “I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” And so on.

Now it is true that all of us commonly surrender our decision-making autonomy to our baser instincts and compulsions. Much of our behavior is unthinking, knee-jerk responsiveness. Our capacity for free will is limited to our willingness to claim and exert it.

People who believe that humans have no free will are hard-pressed to explain why no one is responsible for their choices and actions. What is it that compels foolish or deviant behavior? Are we compelled to believe in God or to be an atheist? What compels us to accept one moral code over any other? Are we compelled to become a certain kind of person, with no option to “improve” in any self-determined way? Are we compelled in our choices of learning experiences? If so, what or who does the compelling? Are we inevitable victims of genetics and experience or even a robotic unconscious mind?

It seems to me that current debates about determinism and free will tend to obscure the important matters of our humanness. The door to understanding what is really going on is slammed shut by assertions that value choices and the decisions that flow from them cannot be free because they are caused by neural circuit impulse patterns. Free will debates distract us from a proper framing of the issues about human choices and personal responsibility.

While it is true that brain circuitry is programmed by genetics and experience, conscious mind makes choices about who to interact with and what experiences to value, promote, and allow. Conscious mind can insist that some lessons of experience need to be remembered and valued while others are not. In short, the mind gets to help shape what it becomes.

The free-will issue is more than an arcane scholarly argument. Positions become politicized. In a robotocist world, people are more likely to be victims and less able to change maladaptive attitudes and behaviors. Thus, society and government must help people do what they cannot do for themselves. Robotocists don’t seem to ask this question: is our decision to help fellow robotocists likewise a robotocist choice?

If we can’t make conscious choices, then there is not much we can do to improve ourselves or our plight in life. Or even if there are things that can be done to change us and our situations, the approach will surely have to be different if we can’t initiate the change by force of our free will. Without free will, the government or schools or some other outside force must program our unconscious. That, of course, is a driving force behind moves to increase the size and power of government.

If there is no "I" in charge, then there is no reason to demand or expect personal responsibility. All manner of bad brains and bad behavior can be excused. If we believe there is no free will, how can we justify our criminal justice system? If people cannot make choices freely, and if all their decisions emanate from unconscious processes, how can we hold them responsible for unacceptable morals or behavior? All crime should be tolerated or at least excused, because the criminal could not help it. The human robot committed the crime. This would mean that we should reform the criminal justice system so that no criminal would be jailed or punished. If criminals can’t stop themselves from bad acts, it is inhumane to punish criminals or even terrorists. Indeed, the only justification for locking anybody up for misdeeds would be to protect society from further crime or terrorism. Capital punishment has to be banned, as indeed it is in many parts of the world. In the minds of some, criminals are victims.

To believe in the absence of free will creates an intolerable social nihilism. Many defense lawyers increasingly use neuroscience inappropriately to convince jurors that the defendant was not responsible for the evil deeds. They even have a name for this kind of defense: “diminished capacity.” Indeed, to them the whole notion of evil might seem inappropriate. Lawyers are adept at stressing mitigating circumstances where criminal behavior was caused, they say, by a terrible upbringing, poverty, social discrimination, or brain injury. To be sure, most murderers have been found to have a standard profile that includes childhood abuse and some kind of neurological or psychiatric disorder. But many non-murderers have a similar profile. How can lack of free will explain such difference? The reality is that most people have brains that can learn social norms and choose socially appropriate behavior. Ignoring those norms is a choice.

A most disturbing book, written by Laurence Tancredi,^[1] uncritically accepts the notion that free-will is an illusion. He argues that human morals are “hard-wired,” with the “wiring” created by genetics and molded by uncontrollable forces in life experiences. Tancredi, is a lawyer and practicing psychiatrist. Not surprisingly, the poster boy for his arguments was a psychopathic serial killer, Ricky Green, who was abused as a child and had relatives with serious mental problems. Thus, Tancredi stresses that bad genes and bad treatment as a child made Green become a “biologically driven” murderer. Yet, in recounting the case history, it became clear that Green was not insane. He was fully aware of his childhood past, and was fully aware of, even remorseful over, his murders. He was also aware that his out-of-control episodes were triggered by the combination of sex and alcohol. So, it was clear, even to Green, that his crimes could have been prevented by avoiding alcohol. He apparently was not an alcoholic who had no control over drinking. Even if we give the benefit of doubt to the conclusion that Green could not control himself, it is a stretch to argue that the uncontrollability of psychopaths applies to everybody else. One would have to argue that normal people are only normal because they got good genes and had a childhood in which their mental health was not damaged. Virtue would be an illusion.

Interestingly, Tancredi acknowledges the brain is changeable if skilled therapists provide structured rehabilitation for dysfunctional thinking. But the general tenor of his argument is that the individual is powerless to produce such changes. It has to come from others. Because dysfunctional people are victims who seemingly can’t help themselves, it is the duty of psychiatrists and government to mold the brains of people so they overcome bad genes and whatever bad experiences life has thrust upon them. People, robots that they supposedly are, do not have the power to nurture their brain. Thus, government must create a cultural and educational environment in which humans are molded to conform to some pre-defined state of normality.  Does this remind you of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

Also not considered by Tancredi and his crowd, is that dysfunctional people might have become that way through their own freely determined bad choices along their life’s journey. Those bad choices may have even sculpted maladaptive changes in their brain function. Arguing that the brain is modifiable by experience is a two-edged sword. While one edge slashes the idea that a person can’t change his brain, the other edge slashes the idea that people can’t be changed by the influence of others or by their own conscious decisions.

A major function of consciousness, as I have argued, is to program the brain, which inevitably causes lasting changes in its structure and functions. If consciousness provides capability for freely chosen intentions, choices, and decisions, then people are responsible for how those powers are deployed.

Tancredi acknowledges that many people have bad genes and very traumatic childhoods, yet overcome it. Sexually abused children do not necessarily become sexual predators as adults and may, in fact, become crusaders to protect children from abuse. But they don’t get any credit for a freely chosen decision to live a wholesome and helpful life. Their virtue is attributed to necessity, not to anything they voluntarily chose to do. How then do we account for the effect of schools and religious teachings? Do we conclude that it is the inner robot that decides which ideas and beliefs to accept and which to reject? If so, why do some brains accept the teachings and others reject them?

It is true that brain scans, for example, can sometimes predict that certain people will commit crimes or other antisocial behaviors. But nobody seems to consider the alternative to a “bad brain” cause of misbehavior: namely, that what people freely choose to do changes the brain in ways that make more likely that similar behavior will be repeated. People who voluntarily indulge mind-altering experiences, such as unsavory friends, drugs, or destructive ideologies and lifestyles, have nobody else to blame for those choices.

The evidence for brain plasticity, for good or bad, is overwhelming. Yet, this evidence tends to get ignored when excuses are sought for inappropriate behavior. It is true, of course, that children usually have little control over their circumstance and rising above it is surely hard, but they still have a human capacity to overcome as adults. Many millions have done just that. To deny that people have such capacity is dehumanizing.

Bad brains can surely cause bad behavior. But it is equally true that bad behavior can cause bad brains. What you choose to experience, think, and do sculpts brain function and anatomy to shape what you will become.

We are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit —Aristotle

The corollary is, in my view:

I will become what I repeatedly do.

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[1] Tancredi, L. 2005. Harwired Behavior.  What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality. Cambridge U. Press, N.Y., N.Y.

Getting Out of a Rut

Why is it so hard to change behavior, or attitudes, or personality? I’ll tell you why. These things are habits. Habits are well learned and they persist from mindlessness.

Our behavior, attitudes, and personality are predisposed by genetics but also ingrained by repeating and reinforcing them over long periods. Thus, the older you get the more inflexible you get. But I see teenagers stuck in ruts too, and they are less likely to have the fronto-parietal cortex executive control to impose changes on themselves.

Regardless of age, being in a rut comes from learning to the point of creating a habit. Habits are really hard to change. Wendy Wood, in her review of the recent book, The Power of Habit, points out that contextual cues trigger habitual behavior. In other words, when you are in a rut, you have mindlessly outsourced your brain’s executive control to these cues. You run on auto-pilot. It is easier to respond to such cues reflexively than think about it and do something else.

Cures for reforming habits require attention to the triggering cues as the core of self-control strategies. When an unwanted response is activated from memory, it needs to be inhibited. Bad habits, unlike responses to temptations, are controlled most effectively through spontaneous introspective awareness and executive control (“Why am I doing this?”…“I don’t want to be doing this”… “don’t do it”… “am I backsliding?”) Vigilant self-awareness and monitoring apparently do not change the strength of the habit memory but are effective because they enhance executive control processes. Wood suggests that the most promising way to break a habit is to “disrupting habit cues so that the old response is not brought to mind and new habits can be learned.”

Some examples of cue awareness and disruption include:

1.    If you over-eat, use smaller plates or put smaller helpings on the plate.

2.    If you can’t focus and your mind wanders, notice distractions for what they are. Practice meditation.

3.    If you are hyper-critical or argumentative, recognize the instant you disagree.

4.    If you are lazy, be aware of your environment when you aren’t doing anything.

5.    If you are boastful, notice the situation that makes you want to boast.

If you want to get out of a rut, another important aid is to substitute a new and more desirable habit. I learned this years ago when I tried to quit smoking. I succeeded many times—in other words, I failed to really quit. Only when I decided to take up jogging and forced myself to do it persistently, was I able to substitute the positive reinforcement of nicotine with the positive reinforcement of the endorphins that are released during jogging.

To substitute a better habit, you must pick something that is likewise reinforcing and repeat it enough for it to become a habit. It also helps to simultaneously remove the cues that trigger the old bad habit. For example, when I finally quit smoking, I made myself go jog when I had a strong urge to smoke. Even though I had an urge to smoke many times a day yet only jogged once daily, this single substitution act seemed sufficiently helpful.

Some examples of habit substitution include:

1.    If you eat more meat than you want, find tasty vegetarian menus.

2.    If you gossip, restrict all gossip to praise talk.

3.    If you procrastinate, create a habit of doing the hard things first.

4.    If you whine, make yourself provide positive interpretations.

5.    If you associate with people who are dragging you down, spend more time with new associates who can lift you up.

Finally, we have to stop making excuses. Our usual attempts to blame things on “bad genes,” are misleading. In recent years, scientists have discovered that most of our DNA does not have a coding function. They used to call it “junk” DNA, presumably just carried along as useless sludge in the stream of evolution. Now they discover that “junk DNA” actually controls the expression of the coding genes. New discoveries in the field of “epigenetics” are showing that what we think and do influence if and when many of our coding genes are expressed.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2008) Blame Game. How to Win It. Bryan, Tx: Benecton Press.

Quinn, J. M., Pascoe, A., Wood, Wendy, and Neal, D. T. (2010) Can’t control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 36(4); 499-511 doi: 10.1177/0146167209360665

Wood, Wendy (2013) On ruts and getting out of them. Science. 336: 980-981

Just Do It

If you can do it, should do it, and want to do it, what are you waiting for? Many things in life that we excuse or misplace blame for are not created by what we do but by what we fail to do. Maybe we just procrastinate and just don’t get around to action. Or maybe it’s just a thought, something that we think would be nice to do, but we just aren’t serious about it.

What keeps us from action? Can, should, and want ought to be pretty compelling. I was recently asked by a group of editors to write a chapter on the “Neurobiology of Agency,” for a scholarly book. Don’t worry. I won’t burden you here with what I am writing for the book chapter. But that task has caused me to reflect on agency from the perspective of  the everyday issues of what we do and fail to do.

Some possible answers come from my own experience. One excuse is that we just can’t seem to find the time. That won’t wash. Whatever we do in life, we have found or made time for. Final choices are matters of priority, and sometimes we don’t prioritize well.

Fear is an obvious cause. There are many kinds of fear that cause inaction. There is:

•        Fear of failure.
•        Fear of being different or out-of-step.
•        Fear of rejection.
•        Even fear of success.  

Fear of failure arises from self-doubt. We may think we don’t know enough, don’t have enough time or energy, or lack ability, resources, and help. The cure for such fear is to learn what is needed, make the time, pump ourselves up emotionally so we will have the energy, hone our relevant skill set, and hustle for resources and help. These things can be demanding. It is no wonder there are so many things we can, should, and want to do but don’t do.

All our life, beginning with school, we are conditioned to consider failure as a bad thing. But failure is often a good, even necessary, thing. The ratio between failures and successes for any given person is rather stable. Thus, if you want more successes, you need to make more failures. Even the corporate world recognizes this principle, and the most innovative companies practice it. Jeff Dyer, in his book The Innovator’s DNA, says the key to business success is to “fail often, fail fast, fail cheap.” It’s o.k. to fail, as long as you learn from it. Our mantra should be: “Keep tweaking until it works.” This is exactly how Edison invented the light bulb. Most other inventors and creative people in general have operated with the same mantra.

Fear of being different leads to social pathology. It can cause people to join groups, causes, and lifestyles that are not be good for them or even harmful. The corollary is that bad social commitments make it harder to experience better alternatives. Not everyone can be a leader, who by definition is different from the crowd. But all of us are better off when we are our own person, march to our own drummer, become “captain of our own soul.”

Fear of being different often arises from personal insecurity and lack of confidence. These are crippling emotions and one’s life can never be fully actualized until they are overcome. This comes to the matter of self-esteem. One thing many people don’t realize is that self-esteem has two quite distinct components: self-worth and self-confidence. Self-worth is given (by being valued and loved by others, by God). Self-confidence cannot be given−it has to be earned. People who lack the confidence to “put themselves on the line” deny themselves opportunities to enjoy the fruits of success. Their life becomes a vicious cycle that begins with lack of confidence, lack of agency, lack of success, and increased justification not to be confident.

If we are different, the in-crowd may reject us. Rejection is certainly depressing. Nobody in his right mind wants to be depressed. But no life can be fulfilling when it is lived to satisfy the opinions others may have of us. We need to be true to ourselves, to trust in our values and standards. If who we are is not worthy of such trust, we can certainly fix that. This dictum lies at the heart of Socrates’ great admonition: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Fear of success is often learned by watching how others have failed to adjust to success. Witness the entertainment celebrities who end up committing suicide. Most of us probably know personally some people who have become conceited, aloof, condescending, arrogant, or otherwise unlikable as a result of their success. We don’t want that to happen to us. When we surrender to our fear of success, we affirm our lack of trust in ourselves. Do we really need to reinforce such lack of self-trust?

So, when life offers you the chance to do something you can, should, and want to do, just DO IT!

More on the matter of excuses and blame can be found in Dr. Klemm’s book, Blame Game. How To Win It, available at Amazon and bookstores.

Victims or Just Damn Lucky?

The nature versus nurture argument has been around since at least ancient Egyptian times. Both our genetic inheritance and what we experience shape the development of self, according to the deceptively thorough book by psychologist and science author, Robert Ornstein. I say deceptive, because Ornstein provides no recognition, much less discussion, that we humans can choose many of the experiences that determine what we become. Moreover, at the time of his book’s publishing, the scientific world did not know that even the nature side of the argument was historically flawed. Geneticists are now learning that our choices of experiences regulate how our genetic endowment is expressed.

Ornstein argues persuasively, but with little objective evidence, that for any key dimension of person-hood or behavior, everybody operates around an immutable set point. He fails to recognize that a person can change the set point. Though it is not easy, people can change their set point dramatically: witness the reformed addict, the religious convert, or the ner-do-well who becomes a tycoon.

Ornstein’s thinking blind spot is typical of the age we live in. People who struggle with life are regarded as victims, while people who achieve are just damn lucky. From this perspective, people shoulder no blame or guilt for being dysfunctional nor credit for being successful.

The bias against personal accountability is enshrined in the current notion among scientists and social scholars that even when people make choices, they do not choose freely. What we choose to do is driven by unconscious drives arising from biology or the programming imposed by life experience. People are biological robots. I argue against this view in my recent book, Atoms of Mind.

The biological robot bias is revealed in a recent research report in a premier science journal. The authors conducted economic game experiments to explain what causes people in conditions of scarcity to make poor decisions. The reality behind this study is that people in poverty generally do make bad choices that perpetuate their poverty. They play the lottery, borrow too much, are unwilling to pay for preventive health services or education,  or save for specific future needs, and may even fail to enroll in government assistance programs. The usual explanation is that such maladaptive behavior is caused by the circumstances of poverty, such as poor health, lack of education, and the like.

The authors, from the School of Business at the University of Chicago, tested the idea that it is scarcity itself that drives poor choices. Their experiments were based on giving varying spending “rich” or “poor” allowances for experimental subjects to allocate in common TV game-show formats such as Wheel of Fortune or video games.  The allowances were distributed as “paychecks” across multiple rounds of the games. Games were structured so that players could sometimes borrow against future earnings or save for future rounds. In one experiment, participants were allocated a certain number of guesses in word puzzles (84 for the poor; 280 for the rich), The poor engaged more deeply in the game and borrowed more. Subsequent cognitive tests showed they were more mentally fatigued despite spending less time in the game. Another experiment used a video game in which participants had a fixed number of shots from a slingshot (30 for poor, 150 for rich). The poor spent more time aiming each shot and borrowed more when the game allowed it (actually the rich never accumulated a debt).

The results were interpreted to show that scarcity produces a focusing effect. The poor pay more attention to the options and become more mentally exhausted. Scarcity clearly promoted borrowing, which proved to be counter-productive. The poor did not adjust their borrowing as they accumulated debt, but as their budgets shrunk, they gradually increased borrowing relative to their remaining budget. The poor were more likely to neglect the opportunities of future rounds and borrow away from them. The poor performed better when they could not borrow.

In sum, scarcity changed behavior for the worse. The poor were more intensely engaged in the games but the focus on some issues came at the expense of neglecting others, such as ignoring the real cost of borrowing.

Thus, the researchers implicitly concluded that the poor in the real world are victims of their state of scarcity. Scarcity drives the poor to make unwise choices that keep them trapped in poverty. The possibility that the poor have the power to change their behavior was never considered. The authors conclude that the poor cannot change their poor choices.

The solution advocated is wise government policy that manipulates the poor in ways that limit the opportunity to make bad choices. For example, policy should aim at reducing the number of decisions the poor have to make by simplifying their economic choices, enrolling them in savings programs by default, making it more difficult to borrow, advertising to get them to sign up for relief programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and the like. The nanny state needs not only to provide for the poor, but also to intercede so the poor are not allowed to make so many bad choices.

Of course, we have known of government solutions to poverty for a long time. There is Marxism, which says take from the rich to give to the poor and its near-relative, Socialism, which re-distribute wealth and make everybody equally poor by not allowing anybody to get rich from ownership of business. There is Fascism, in which dictators decide which companies can prosper and limit the number of rich to those who are lackeys of the government. There is U.S. “state-ism” which employs some measure of all the others, but in less draconian ways.

Regardless of which government “isms” exist, we seem to live in a world in which personal responsibility no longer matters. It isn’t expected, and we don’t get much of it as a result. If you are poor, it is not your fault, but the fault of your genes or bad luck or exploitation by the rich. Only government can save us from ourselves. But who saves us from government?

Who wants to be saved from government? Around the world, and now in the U.S., more people want more government, not less. Government can protect us from ourselves. We no longer shoulder the burden of being “masters of our fate, Captains of our destiny.” The corollary is that we may have less opportunity to benefit from being our own Captain.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. 2010. Atoms of Mind. New York: Springer Publishing.

Ornstein, Robert. 1995. The Roots of the Self. New York: Harper Collins.

Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., and Shafir, E. 2012. Some consequences of having too little. Science. 338: 682-685.

Gene Research Shows the Truth of Proverbs 23:7

“Don’t blame me. I got my meanness from your side of the family.” …
“I got my stubbornness from Uncle Joe.” … 
“I can’t help it; that’s just the way I am.”

Blaming your genes can make a handy excuse. It is also highly misleading. A decade-long international research collaboration involving 442 scientists in 32 worldwide institutions now makes obsolete the original scientific views about DNA and genes. This research initiative, called ENCODE, was initiated and largely funded by the Genome Research Institute of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Just this week, some 30 groundbreaking publications have appeared in premier journals such as Nature and Science.

This accumulated mountain of data unequivocally demonstrates that most of our genes do not code for RNA that translates into proteins used by the body. True, the ENCODE project confirmed that there are about 21,000 traditional protein-coding genes, but they constitute only about 3% of the human genome. Until now, all the other DNA was thought to be “junk DNA,” presumably left over from ancient ancestors with no function in today’s evolved species.

ENCODE scientists have discovered that about 80% of the human genome does have function, but that DNA transcribes RNA as end  products that regulate the expression of protein-coding genes. When a protein-coding gene is expressed, its double helix strands of DNA become unzipped to expose the coding nucleotides so they can translate the code into the RNA that will then translate the code into the various proteins used by the body. Most of the DNA previously thought to be “junk” has now been revealed to regulate gene expression by way of enhancing or suppressing gene expression or shielding protein-coding DNA.

Over 18,000 species of regulatory RNA have been described. Clusters of regulatory genes are found throughout the chromosomes, and they very often regulate non-adjacent genes, often working with other regulatory genes as a team.

These new findings cause some scientists to assert a need to redefine what a gene is. The basic unit of heredity, they say, is not DNA, but rather its RNA transcripts. Why is this new view important? Production of regulatory RNA is governed by the environment, not your biological inheritance. These “epigenetic” influences include things like what you eat, your bodily activities, what you think, and the feedback from how you behave. For example, a muscle body builder, through intense exercise, causes expression of genes to make extraordinary muscle mass. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger before, during, and after his body building career. He had the same protein coding genes all along, but their expression changed by what he chose to do.

What this says is that you can control the expression of your genes by the choices you make and by what you think and do. Most of us are born with a genome that can generate a happy and productive life. Whether that happens or not depends on how our choices and actions affect gene expression.

So, next time you are tempted to blame your genes for a bad outcome, consider what role you played in the expression of those genes. Science is showing the truth of Proverbs  (chapter 23 verse 7),

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

Source:

Pennizi, Elizabeth (2012). ENCODE project write eulogy for junk DNA. Science. 337: 1159-1161.