When is enough enough?

January 26, 2009
Torrey Orton
In a world where almost no one agrees on what’s enough for themselves (though willing to specify the quanta for others) finding some shared standards for many aspects of life is beyond us as a society. Our varying commitments to tolerance and diversity encourage this. The push of the economy shapes us towards new choices of many useless (other than aesthetic and identity additives) or unproven novelty products. The principle influencing leverage arises from the twin pincers of social seduction by additives and social obligation to sustain the economy by spending up.

Among noteworthy exceptions are some ethically discretionary aspects of living like the right to choose your death or the surrogate mother of your child. Massive public majorities approve such rights while legislative progress is blocked by the over-representation of the remnant 20% in public places: commentary, elected roles, etc. In matters of basic life sustenance, the rules (read ‘research’) change annually if not weekly, as e.g. red wine is discovered, disowned, re-discovered, moderated with olive-oil and so on. See the progress of science in medicine – some wonders and continuing horrors as commercialisation pressures lead to dangerous early adoption of treatments (especially drugs) and over-prescription of the latest wonders (Prozac-like mood management, Viagra-like arousers…) as determinist assumptions flood the public airspace, meeting public needs for possible certainties to defend them against the rising tide of actual uncertainties.

In tandem with this disarray, we have a stunning set of excesses across the spectra of human interests. I recently listed 9 prominent ones in three minutes: executive salaries, information overload, hoons (various HSV8’s and Hummerlikes – Jeep, Land Rover and Chrysler 300), obesities, intoxications, sound, smell and sight pollutions, muscles (hairy and bare), extreme sports (from the mild like bungee jumping, to the scary like base diving; from challenging like iron person events to death-dealing like street racing), and house and contents explosions. These are immediately recognisable by anyone. How they view the excess is another matter. One person’s excess is another’s access.

People write books on this situation – Affluenza, Well & Good locally; Enough and a competing Affluenza in the UK and When more is not enough in USA since 2004. The St James Ethics centre (http://www.ethics.org.au/) has published at least 6 articles since 1995 on related topics. Various other Op-Eds and letters abound across the Anglosphere. Companionably, researchers in various places have revealed, again, that getting more beyond a certain level of possessions produces no increase in well-being or happiness. Commentators range from outraged at the waste to buoyed by the life-enhancing successes of capitalism (global shifts out of poverty, etc.).

Maybe this is because ‘enough’ is a confusing word. It has at least three meanings which if not carefully managed in speech and writing elicit distracting profusions of entanglements. These meanings are: ‘superfluity’, ‘intemperance’ and ‘over’ (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/excess). The materially befuddled may not see that they are over the limit because their intemperance pales in the glow of superfluous consumption. The informationally befuddled, like me, cannot tell with real confidence that these excesses actually exist in quantities or trends sufficient to warrant more than passing notice. In this sense, the excesses are creatures of publications in search of audiences. They just feel like they are real and worthy of notice.

At the moment, apart from evocations of traditional virtues (temperance, moderation, etc.) and pleas for public action to constrain executive salaries, and unearned bank bonuses, the main substantial case made for less of something is that it costs too much at current incident rates. There is probably a new role called ‘social-economic cost analyst’ (Certificate level 4, perhaps) now populating every kind of organisation to make its particular case in ‘lost dollar’ terms. In this respect the enough crisis is a net job creating one.

The public discourse on many of these excesses expresses a values dilemma. Notional social conservatives with traditional values are scandalised by the excesses but prohibited from regulating them out of preference for personal choice. Notional social liberals with well-being values (overlapping in this regard with traditional conservatives and similarly scandalised) opt for regulation with little regard for choice. Public action wallows back and forth around varying coalitions of narrow issue groupings.

Watch the current attack on late night drinking in Melbourne (indirect, at that, since the targets are two: bingeing and violence, each of which can exist handily without the other). The latest regulatory effort to constrict access and group gathering by narrowing licensing has the side effect of endangering the café and bistro heart of the city. For variety, watch the US Republican efforts to rein in Democrat economic interventions on grounds of their impure attachment to government intervention, and a couple of other fundamentalist economic principles.

The underlying values dilemma is how much nurture is required to produce self-regulating people, which, to go back to the beginning, we all agree others should be. Meanwhile we should be excused from the requirement on self-selected occasions and issues. This, overall, is a matter of prudence, not evil and good.

Finally, it seems quite hard to get much common ground on such matters – the determination of standards for, say, obesity. A start might include some moves like this - staying with obesities because they touch so many important contiguous human needs and values with little variation for cultures, times and places:
1) Provide commensurate figures for ‘normal’ in the area of excess under examination;
2) Have an articulated model of well-being within which the target issue(s) can be interpreted;
3) Have cultural / historical differentiated models of well-being;
4) The contexts considered should include local, regional and global comparisons; and,
5) An assertion of possible common ground across all discussants should be made as part of each contribution to the discussion (these might include shared facts, beliefs values and standards).
This approach also provides a starting place for reporting and discussion of most high impact public issues. Occasionally, the papers do a reasonable job of this, but not consistently or thoroughly. Nor do the liberated on-line presses from what I can see, though I look forward to correction.

A challenge to thorough contextualising and balancing of arguments is that success in balancing may tend to reduce member seeking from issue audiences. That is, if I’m bothering to write about something it is because I think something should be done about it. So, in seeking to attract others towards my action orientation I will choose ways of presenting it which may be attractive to some others. However, not many people are attracted to act by balance, while various gurus (and me, too) will tell us we should be. Another dilemma.

Anyway, maybe all this is a flurry of attention attracted by what is really nothing more than the spume rising from an onshore breeze’s touch of a swell of history. Maybe these excesses are just a slight rise in the level of human energies and compulsions which will sink naturally under the weight of boredom. Some would label this kind of observation ‘negative’, and an excess in its own right!

Neighbouring* subjects & issues: virtues, well-being theories, Global Reporting Initiative (www.globalreporting.org/), positive psychology, nutrition, http://www.enough.org.uk/ , sustainability, democracy…

*neighbouring = historical and conceptual factors which give perspective to the blog topic

Confidence amid calamity

Confidence amid calamity
Torrey Orton
170109

Confidence is a creature of capability and competence. Reading John Hewson (AFR 160109 – “Blind leading the blind”) and a plethora of other economic commentators, we could believe the reverse is the case: that confidence is the creator of competence. If only we could print it like money, then we could recover from our economic calamities. It is the dark energy in most commentators’, observers’ and bloggers’ understanding of our times.

Hewson finishes excoriating the economics crowd by asserting that “Economists are not really good at saying exactly what will make that happen.” - the confidence that is (while implicitly counting himself among them by not counting himself out). There’s a good reason for his judgment: because you can’t get there from here soon enough. Confidence is not a product nor is it an outcome. It’s a platform or a precursor to outcomes, which can be increased by success (especially against odds and difficulties). Confidence is, in brief, a mix of material predictability (the capacity to make ‘things’ happen) and intentional community (the desire to do it together).

The false confidence based on material predictability alone we’ve seen a lot in modern times. And some would argue that the dominant tendency to seek outcomes for self over others in the last few decades has eroded the will to community (and distorted the relationships though which the will could be expressed). If we seek confidence about and from the economy alone, as economists tend to, we cannot get the whole thing.

Self-esteem, happiness and other emotional assessments like confidence cannot be created by direct instruction. We cannot achieve them by trying to be them. We can only achieve them by living. Put another way, confidence and self-esteem and happiness, etc.) can only be had by successful learning and doing. These emotions tell us how we are doing along the way; they are not the doing itself. When we are doing OK, the feelings support our next steps into new learnings (unknown settings, new tasks, etc.).

Back to our calamitous times. In the short term (1-5 years, say), what can we do to re-create confidence? A starting place is to tell the truth of our declining confidence. First, it is increasingly unlikely we can have, or hope for, predictability in material matters. The world of material certainties is fading around us as a (perfect) storm of personally uncontrollable forces assail us. Not merely is it the economy stupid. It’s also the climate and the fluids (fuels and waters), the food and the pervasive speed of movement of them all., plus a gathering of insights and innovations which mark the growing edges of the sciences.

Second, we are engaging these forces from a weakened position in our fragmented relationships. And these weaknesses will be enhanced by the times which are the reasons for our worries in the first place. Making the effort for the longer term will be even more important as each day of its decline passes.

This, telling the truth, is something our leaders (especially, but not only, political) seem uniformly unable to do. One commentator (see Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, Sunday Jan. 11, ‘09 ) suggests that even those leaders who display occasional truth-telling tendencies (often appearing in unguarded ‘mis-spokes’ quickly reversed in appalling tangled circumlocutions prefaced with first name addressing of the interviewer and .. “Look,…”) are caught in a situational Catch 22: if they said they did not know what to do at this time, they would be turfed out and maybe the people would feel bad and hopeless. But the research on credibility shows the masses don’t believe them anyway, so I’m not sure who would be surprised. The exception is the credibility of perceived intentions or character of leaders for religious believers – even in the face of evidently incompetent pursuit of those intentions with flawed character. That is a kind of confidence.
I look forward to the first public utterance of these two truths by any government or corporate leader (commentators and not-for-profit leaders already do).

1. If I’m mad, why a diary?
   Torrey Orton 130109
   
   I realised many years ago that unsourceable angers occasionally seized me. More recently (10 years ago) I began to find the traces after having some small rages which obviously did not belong to their apparent objects. They were often inappropriate surges of frustration, especially at moments of bad or invasive commercial interactions (notably, not real long term commercial relationships like monthly for 35 years with my barber, or regularly visited local restaurants of similar duration, or the 20 years of daily paper delivery). Since then I have studied these phenomena with a view to getting a grip on myself, and most recently (last 5 years), to finding ways to work with others about them. I am still more in the grip than getting a grip, hence this blog.
   
   Recently I realised that I am not drawing on my anger as a motivation for my writing – not that I wasn’t motivated by it, but I didn’t honour the motivation and so did not extract full motivational potential from it. The most important potential is that the anger gives energy connected to a proven (to myself at least) sense of disconnect between many aspects of the world I inhabit and my need for truth (or justice, fairness, honesty, etc.) Pick your favourite feeling(s) and it (they) will tell you how the world is going for you and you are going with it.
   
   Angers and thinking
   These angers disclose developed lines of thinking on the anger eliciting events. For example, about 4 years ago I rediscovered a tool I had created 18 years ago for work with groups affected by traumatic change in organisations. At that time I was caught in a “merge-over”, as it was called internally, between two Melbourne banks arising from the Tricontinental affair (a bubble entity from the cowboy days of the late ‘80’s). It was represented by the banking and political authorities as certainly unlikely to be to anyone’s detriment in either of the merging entities. This, at the time (and now), was so palpably untrue and (consciously?) deceptive that my outrage bells clanged persistently. Anyone can see intuitively that two into one doesn’t go on almost any organisational level. This was, of course, not discussable at large in the banks, though in close quarters of immediate workmates it was (with an eye out for the management thought police). The subsequent pain for many staff of deception by their top leaders (including a state government premier and both banks’ CEOs) was intensified by the explicit threats against any who considered publicly doubting (e.g. – to the press) the deceptions. However, in times of great change, many new spaces open up and into them I introduced “Facing the Facts” - an intact workgroup event designed to increase the chances of engagement rather than flight, fight or fadeaway. About 500 staff in our bank went through an exploration of their perceptions of the changes, and their implications for themselves, in normal work groups – teams, departments, regions. The aim and outcome was acknowledgement publically that a single traumatic event could, and did, have very different but equally valid effects on those exposed to it. Once validated, other options began to appear. That’s another story.
   
   I carry that experience as a piece of my acquired professional wiring which is cued into action by any conditions of large scale change like the nows we are incontrovertibly in (see below for detail). Whatever adaptations, accommodations, or avoidances of these nows we undertake will be done under the major influence of traumatic change on individual, group and organisational life – feelings which both provide energy and distort relationships and thinking. Anger is but one of these. Others may include a range from euphoria at being released by chance from unwanted work settings to sadness at loss of colleagues and anger at injustices in the process, all enveloped in a fog of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety, pierced by varyingly attractive and recuperative glimmers of hope and anticipation.
   
   ‘Negative’ feeling is central…
   As psychologist I am aware that what I feel is central to what I think (which contents get into my awareness with what affective tones), how I think (the degree of flexibility in my concepts) and how likely I am to act ( my motivation) and in what manner (passive-assertive-aggressive). Our times are ones with immense, persistent and personally salient subliminal stressors, with an array of overarching and forward projecting ones which are seriously challenging (scary, terrifying, mystifying….). Their effects are hard to correctly source, and so they are often missed, assumed to be personal foibles and so not discussable (only to be quibbled) and consequently, unvalidatable. This tends to increase distance between people and pressure for holding them together is achieved by calls for joining a jihad of some description against some bad guys of variously composed differences from ‘us’. This is the process of fundamentalising thinking in a context of fragmented relationships. It is difficult to avoid and hard to counter.
   
   Mostly here I will focus on the notionally ‘negative’ end of the feelings spectra. This is recommended by the pervasive scale, intensity and persistence of threatening nows. It is also recommended because there is a natural tendency to avoid fear, anger, sadness…because they are distressing. Some pop socio-psychological trends have all but eradicated open discussion or use of these feelings – these are the “positive” sciences and their happiness minions. In as much as they dismiss the ‘negative’ they reduce access to data which is most necessary when we (culturally) do not know what we are doing. This fact, our failing socio-econo-politico know-how, is the heart of the nows we are in. As yet, no public political figure has acknowledged what most competent public intellectuals and commentators have – that we do not know what we are doing, nor could we.
   
   Nows we are in…
   As I begin again to write my perceptions of what I call the ‘nows we are in’, my intentions are not fully clear to me. They presently include: i) clearing my own internal processes by ordering the contents a bit (to reduce the stress of confusion); ii) developing a more complete picture of the nows are in, with emphasis on their effects on personal engagement and commitment (to increase the energy of purpose and potential competence by creating a field of action(s)); and, iii) developing a natural language manner of dealing with matters which are now so clouded by spinmeistery and weasel words as to be almost empty of tangible meaning (to counter the loss which generates some of my anger and sadness). I am also very aware that part of this project will be a struggle to (iv) clarify and separate anger based in my own historical personal issues from that which can be tied to some objective (external and internal) realities (though I doubt that is ever fully attainable, nor should it be); and, v) finally, understanding how appropriate anger (and other feelings) can be relevantly converted into productive effects (or, at least, efforts).
   
   My earlier researches on little violences, and more recently on the nows we are in (big violences), disclose clear perceptions that I am being assaulted by many little violences (30 or more) which have a strong impact in five valued aspects of my life:
   
   
   
   
   Public civility - e.g. not standing in line, using two car parks, driving without regard for others convenience…
   Public trust - e.g. government & corporate lying, dissimulation, denial of exposed faults (the financial meltdown), unaccountability of leaders,….
   Personal taste - e.g. too much perfume / aftershave, getting smoked out, noised out….
   Personal space - e.g. too close, marketing calls at night, no access to persons at bank, etc.
   Personal risk – road & other rages, disease (SARS, bird flu), crime, etc.
   
   Of these, my sense is that the key anger drivers are # 2 and #4, based on what incidents I consciously have a threat spectrum response to. #2 stands out far and above #4 and the others. In what follows I am assuming that this assessment applies pretty much throughout the original Anglosphere, and significant parts of the EU. Some elements can also be found in the three Asian giants (China, India and Japan) and their satellites. My professional association has recently published an exploration of these matters (see http://www.psychology.org.au/Assets/Files/NPW_FactSheet_1108.pdf ). This somewhat validates items in my lists, but more importantly suggests there are many others having the same experience, though their most salient domains may be different from mine and each others’.
   
   Big violences…
   However, over those years the big violences have become much more prominent – e.g. there are four or five working at once now globally: for example, (a) speed of change, (b) fluid (fuels and water) shortages, (c) food vulnerability and shortages (GM crops, directing food crops to fuel alleviation, drought and urbanization, etc.), (d) finance (and general economic) insecurity (leading to job uncertainty, housing uncertainty, rapid price fluctuations, etc.) and (e) climate change. You may have a list of your own that are real, ‘big’ and affecting you directly in your view. Three (a, b and e) of these have been working away on us for some years, only recently achieving general recognition that they are inextricably related in various ways. They appear as a tangle of perceptual inputs which are constant, intense, fast and beyond my control, unless I focus on one part of one of them – for instance the right to die as a facet of the endless human conversations about the boundaries of living. Such pathways are already laid in the myriad of single subject, single issue, pressure groups whose impact on the general passage of discussion is to increase both fragmentation of civic relationships and fundamentalising of thought in one strike. They also get more attention than their numbers warrant because they are fearlessly raucous in putting their cases.
   
   Anger strength
   The strength of my anger(s) comes from my sense that one effect of the last 20-30 years has been (and continues daily to be) the undermining and conscious degradation of our public infrastructures. The state of much physical infrastructure (or the simple failure to build it) is a concern, but not primary here. Much more hurtful for me is the loss of interpersonal, social, and political infrastructures. At one level these are the core materials of cultures: languages, values and standards, and systems of relationships. Their degradation has been achieved, in part, by abuse of the social systems of their delivery – health, education, transport, governance. The means and manner, and counter-measures where possible, of the abuse will be the subject of many entries in this blog. The reality of these losses can be seen in various facts accepted as valid across political spectra -
   1- The debasement of post-modern public language has been remarked occasionally (see Unspeak; Wordwatch, and in various Op Eds around the world as an addendum to other discussions) and systematically (see e.g. Don Anderson’s Weasel Words; Death Sentence; George Lakoff’s Don’t think of an elephant , etc.) for 10 years; and the loss of shared markers for factual integrity are evident in the public discourse / debates which engage the same issues from different interpretative and data frames.
   2- The decline in family structure reliability, and in connectedness to friends, neighbours and workmates are also widely remarked at both anecdotal and systemic levels (see Richard Sennett’s Corrosion of Character and Respect; Michael Pusey’s The Experience of Middle Australia, etc.).
   3- Participation rates in major elections in the US have been below 60% approx. for decades (and similar in UK and EU; see “I will not vote…” here newmatilda.com/2007/11/14/i-will-not-vote.); declining everyday social civility (situations of contact with unknown others in public) is a commonplace of news – the more exaggerated forms of ‘rage’ attracting louder reports. The public esteem of highly placed and paid leaders in many areas of life could hardly be lower – particularly where these leaders sit on top of foundational structures – government, law, accounting, nation-scale corporations… .
   4- The widely researched matter of comparative happiness across economies and ethnicities reveals we ( the first world) have gained next to nothing in the happiness stakes over the 3-4 decades of our abundance – more or less constantly increasing consumption with flat perceived improvement of living (life style, yes; living, no).
   This is a sketch of the project of defining and delineating the abuses, without which the steps to any futures will be clouded by the continuing abuse – as happens in family abuse, bullying and so on – since the abusive attitudes, values and behaviours are systemic and cultural, not just occasional and individual. Some alternatives will be proposed, too!
   
   A personal indulgence?
   However, there is something potentially (actually?) self-indulgent about starting from and continuing with my personal emotional attachments and events as a thought grounder and direction finder. And yet, it seems appropriate (apart from being motivationally necessary) for me at this time in my life and this place of my existence (Australia). My argument for the indulgence is that it is a necessary corrective to the linguistic and social distancing which characterises public discourse and, by socio-cultural colonization, private talk, too. Beneath this discussion surface lurks the challenge of the unknowability of the world we are in.
   
   I am also aware that my writing is, and will continue to be, constantly hedged by contingencies, doubts, and wonders, expressed, as just here, by over-expression and over- specification of the fact that contingency is the context of the nows we are in (just what the constructivist and relativist (post-modernist?) intellectual project was telling us, only now we are forced to be in that flux much of the time rather than some!). An attenuating side-effect for me is that I am constantly aware of what I don’t know in the same breath that I call up what I think I do – the breath which animates this enterprise. This should moderate my excesses of certainty and definitiveness.
   
   A somewhat larger scale perspective: I was wondering a while ago what my parents (born in the first war period (1910-20) thought about their world towards the end of their lives. This question arose from observing that generations tend to throw up clouds and occasional storms (I think Socrates died in one of these) of objections, disappointments and disputes with the emerging world which their lives had helped to build but wasn’t what they thought they were building – or even if they had actively opposed it along the way. I know there’s a reasonable amount of that in domains of serious concern to me. So, maybe my angers are supported by a quantum of intergenerational meanness or curmudgeonly disregard for new forms of humanity.
   
   Perhaps this is all an expression of three facts about me: one, I am temperamentally drawn to the notional ‘left’ – I’m a helper by life-time choice (teacher, psychotherapist, executive coach, trainer….) with an ear / eye for the less privileged; two, I’m a natural sceptic, always able to look at the side I’m attracted to naturally and see that it is not the whole picture of anything; and, three, I am an intuitive information handler (I see what’s happening) with an intensely logical decision style (I present the intuitions in logical arrays, argued with definition and conviction. This is actually quite a good combination for a helper. It prevents me falling into the world(s) of my clients, patients, students. Thus, I do listening well, and joining badly. And, I know I have insight that’s worth attention (while always being doubtable!) so I can supply structure, content and direction where it is needed with testably appropriate levels of certainty (from ‘I guess’, ‘I suppose’.. to.. ‘I think’, ‘I know’…to ..’I’m sure’,. ‘I recommend’, etc.). In addition, I am more pessimist than optimist and a bit cowardly about conflict (though I won’t stand bullying).
   
   Learning to write…
   To have a humane view of other people requires understanding them roundedly, multi-dimensionally. City neighbourhoods, country towns and small workplaces are settings offering best opportunities for close understanding of others. The distance(s) across which much contemporary discourse occurs about major issues is exactly the condition for automatic demonising or idolising of others. It supports the contextually driven fundamentalising of thought. So, one challenge for my work is to write so as to reduce the opportunity for distanced, two-dimensional perceptions of others and their issues. I hope to achieve some wholeness of description and judgment in every piece I create. Unfortunately, I cannot now say I know how to do that consistently and adequately. Bear with me or, preferably, tell me off, please.
   
   I believe, for the moment, that my excursions here will arise from 5 main sources, expressed through all manner of substantive topics. The sources are: outrages and irritations (a thicket of which can drive an outrage), puzzles and dilemmas (being puzzles without solutions), and reflections on the whole process encouraged by unpredictable mixtures of the first four sources. Some of the topics I expect to visit over time include:
   what is enough of anything in life (but especially enough material goods)?;
   moral and ethical confusions in everyday life (e.g. in Oz the belief in a right to public funding for private schooling );
   imbalances between individual and group focus in public policy and private practice;
   challenges of cultural differences
   workable truth – how can we know what we can believe about everyday matters in health, education, politics or personal commitments…?;
   correctable language in public life – concreteness over abstraction (e.g. dead for passed away or deceased; changed for backflip; lost or reduced for smashed, slammed, and so on).
   Where possible (when I can think of something) I’ll include suggestions for actions to be taken at various levels (personal, group, organisational) about the subject discussed. I will try to identify the source(s) of the feeling(s) giving rise to the piece, and point at the contiguous and tangential domains within which the subject is set.
   
   I invite your comment, especially expanding or challenging comment. I will probably not respond directly, but a specific request or proposal will be considered, especially where some course(s) of action is in question…or should be!