Kyle Roth

feelings over judgments permalink To communicate nonviolently, we need to clearly communicate our feelings, rather than our judgments. Maturity means differentiating our feelings and experiences into as many parts and distinctions as a well-trained orchestral listener. “I feel that” or “I feel when” is expressing an opinion, rather than a feeling. Even “I feel inadequate” would be better expressed as “I feel disappointed with my performance…” “I feel good about …” is not specific enough.

A system is something that is composed of parts that have interrelations between them. Each system has purposes, and those purposes may have nothing to do with stated goals. For example, if a government says it wants to protect the environment but allocates few resources to that goal, its purpose is not to protect the environment, but something else. A university may have the purpose of teaching students, while the components of the university have different goals: the student is trying to get good grades, the professor is trying to produce good research, and the administrator is trying to balance the budget.

the trends permalink politics: There is now more money in politics, and less individual involvement. There are more total associations, but they look more like the AARP and Greenpeace, instead of unions, churches, bridge clubs, rotary. religion: Attendance has definitely gone down in the last 40 years, even if the number of people who profess stays nearly the same. (This has changed since the book was published on January 1, 2000.) The 60s and 70s saw people make their religion more private, more personal, making people less concerned with the communal support of a shared faith. Fundamentalist religion (including evangelical) results in more service and giving, but primarily within the church community. So as the mainline middle falls out, religion is becoming a less helpful societal lubricant overall, despite the fact that religiosity has generally meant more volunteerism and giving. workplace: Unionization has declined, and people primarily see the union as a means for collective bargaining rather than a social movement. People are likely to have friends at work, but those friendships are not usually intimate and they don’t form the center of one’s social life. And now all jobs are more contingent; people are less likely to spend many years at a single job. Job precarity leads to anxiety, and less rootedness in one’s financial and community situation. People are less satisfied with their work time. At the end of the day, employers have control over work time and communications, especially with modern monitoring. personal social connections: Informal social connection is just as important. Informality peaks in young and old adulthood, and formality in middle age. People thought urbanization would destroy social life, but instead of a city fostering a single social community, it fosters many smaller dispersed networks. You don’t know your neighbors though.But is this due to the lack of third spaces at a scale that makes it easy to meet your neighbors? My high-rise complex in Montreal provides an area with tables and chairs, grills, basic outdoor exercise equipment, and water fountains that kids can splash in. But the complex is large enough that this feels like a public place, like a park. If there were common spaces on the scale of a single building or even a single floor, I would probably know my neighbors. I think a lot of this comes down to some missing priorities in 20th century urban design. But hanging out with friends has really dropped off for average Americans, as has going out to sit-down restaurants. People spend 2/3 as much time in informal social activities as we used to, even while people are having fewer kids and are more educated (which in the past have been associated with greater social capital). Watching sports, going to museums, observing is up, and playing sports, creating music, and doing is down. altruism/philanthropy: Donating and volunteering are predicted by one’s social connectedness, rather than defining connectedness itself. Joiners of any organization give ten times more philanthropy. We’re making more now than our parents did, but giving has not kept up. Volunteering is reported more frequently, but community service is reported less, meaning the volunteer work we do is more one-on-one, probably partly because people are not doing it through church as often. Volunteering has been propped up by the Silent generation doing more in old age. trustworthiness: When we trust each other we can get more done because transaction costs are lower. Thick trust is when you’re on a first name basis, thin trust is the kind of trust you have in the anonymous other. Cities are less trusting, but more free. Thin trust peaked in the early 60s and has declined since. People are becoming angrier drivers, and hitchhiking is gone. Spending on lawyers, police, security, etc. have gone up. The increase in lawyers has mostly come from preventative efforts, where we “get it in writing” to establish a cool trust dependent on contracts. grassroots movements: Political activism has turned from the “ground-based” Civil Rights Movement to “air-based” Greenpeace et al., due to the destruction of social capital. Meanwhile, evangelical, right-leaning political movements have managed to remain based in social capital and become a big political force. Evangelicals are 3-4 times more politically active than average. telecommunications: People call a lot and keep up with distant friends by voice instead of by writing now. The social impact of the telephone was hard to judge, but was probably mostly positive for families and personal relationships, but reduced the creation of new friendships and the existence of personal relationships in public space. I’d be interested to see what he would report in 2023 about the internet. His ideas about it at time of writing were actually pretty reasonable. “Most online groups have the structure of either an anarchy, if unmoderated, or a dictatorship, if moderated.” (I wonder if we could design an algorithm to allow participants to represent the natural discomfort/dislike people feel with someone and then act accordingly.) Internet communication removes a lot of information necessary for social capital formation. In-person dialog allows speakers to constantly mediate their statements as they get facial feedback from listeners. This section was quite prescient: Experiments that compare face-to-face and computer-mediated communication confirm that the richer the medium of communication the more sociable, personal, trusting, and friendly the encounter. Computer-mediated communication is, to be sure, more egalitarian, frank, and task-oriented than face-to-face communication. Participants in computer-based groups often come up with a wider range of alternatives. However, because of the paucity of social cues and social communication, participants in computer-based groups find it harder to reach consensus and feel less solidarity with one another. They develop a sense of “depersonalization”, and are less satisfied with the groups accomplishments. Computer-based groups are quicker to reach an intellectual understanding of their shared problems—probably because they are less distracted by extraneous social communication—but they are much worse at generating the trust and reciprocity necessary to implement that understanding. Cheating and reneging are more common in computer-mediated communication, where misrepresentation and misunderstanding are easier. Participants in computer-based settings are less inhibited by social niceties and quicker to resort to extreme language and invective. “Flaming” is the commonly-used term among cybernauts; the compelling image of communication is hand-to-hand combat with flamethrowers. Computer-mediated communication is good for sharing information, gathering opinions, and debating alternatives, but building trust and goodwill is not easy in cyberspace. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid point out that “interactions over the Net, financial or social, will be as secure not as its digital encryption, which is a relatively cheap fix, but as the infrastructure—social as well as technical—encompassing that interaction.” For these reasons, Nohria and Eccles suggest, widespread use of computer-mediated communication will actually require more frequent face-to-face encounters: “an extensive, deep, robust social infrastructure of relationships must exist so that those using the electronic media will truly understand what others are communicating to them.” (pp. 176-177) He wondered whether the internet would become the next telephone, or the next TV. Very interesting, because it’s kind of been both, although I would say it definitely has fallen more on the side of TV even though it connects people somewhat intimately across long distances, and allowed important modern communities to flourish in a way they couldn’t have before.

The “refrigerator sheet” found here has a nice summary of the 12 strategies presented in this book. This was a great book full of really insightful strategies to approaching mental integration. My only complaint is that they claim the strategies are neuroscientific, when in fact what they’re doing is using brain metaphors to teach real concepts. The left- and right-brain metaphor is taken too far in popular culture, and I think this book over-emphasizes the importance of these metaphors in order to argue for the parenting strategies here. I was especially bothered by how they used the concept of mirror neurons to argue for the sociality of the brain, as if that alone were a sufficient argument that we should teach kids to think about other people. The recommended strategies for teaching kids to see others are “enjoy each other” and “connect through conflict” which, while probably useful, do not depend on mirror neurons in any particular way.

The main text below is my summary of the points in the book, and I’ve put my commentary in sidenotes. If you want a Marxist, postmodern response to these ideas from the devil himself, check out Jordan Peterson & the meaning of life by Philosophy Tube. Reason and moral purpose come from Athens and Jerusalem, and without those things the West would not be where it is today. Socialism means taking handouts from the nanny state, and while our society continues to function with capitalism bearing the weight of socialist programs, it’s in the process of crumbling. People on the left like to blame institutions and systems for current woes, when in reality this is the freest, most egalitarian society that has ever existed. That’s why we see the conflict over political divides strengthening in America. The West is losing its attachment to reason and moral purpose, instead shifting to intersectionality, hedonism, and scientific materialism. Happiness is built on a sense of moral purpose, and is achieved by maximizing individuals’ ability to pursue that happiness. Scientific materialism and atheism are problematic because they take away that moral purpose.