Flattering the King

Anthony deMello an Indian Jesuit priest and psychotherapist Roman Catholic in the mold of that religion's social justice wing wrote a small parable I have often found inspiring.

He references the father of cynical philosophy Diogenes and demonstrates how individual integrity can be found in acting as a stoic. It reads,

"The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' Said Diogenes, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.'"

We are a country of lentil eaters who seek to flatter the King to improve our diet and we pretend this flattery somehow constitutes an enlightened philosophy.

My criticism comes as a reaction to the recent budget dispute in Washington and the support working men and women have towards the Republican party's rhetorical fear-mongering that casts government, rather than unchecked plutocratic Capitalism, as the source of their restricted diet.

My gorge does not rise because of the incompetence demonstrated by the politicians involved.

I think incompetence is the primary job description of those who truck in politics.

I am wasted by the popular opinion of my fellow citizens who somehow believe empowering policies that benefit the top 1% of wealth in this country translates to the best path towards integrity and a democracy for, of and by the people.

Roger Ebert has an excellent piece on his latest blog that demonstrates the by-product of our current financial ethics and the sheer stupidity of the former Middle Class, now the growing working poor, who deny our recent history in the hope of being excused from the lentil dinner they are forced to eat.

This kind of popular cowardice dressed up as ideological discipline is not new or unexpected.

Orwell wrote in 1942 when remembering his time in the Spanish Civil War, while fighting fascism for the sake of worker's rights, how conservative MPs cheered the bombing of British supply boats by Italian aircraft because these supplies would furnish aid and comfort to the Communist Russian forces looking to overthrow Franco (who had to be on the side of Capitalism because he opposed Socialism.)

History shows that the Communist Russian forces implicated in the pursuit of Franco never existed and were a bogeyman invented by Conservative politician rhetoric to furnish their industrialist base with perceptions of ethical integrity within their plutocracy and, when given the opportunity, Franco conspired with Adolph Hitler to bomb the shit out of England when he had the chance.

Orwell goes further and identifies how the primary desire of those that allow totalitarian rule is not individual freedom but mindless comfort when he rightly states,

" . . . the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' - well it never happened. If he says that two and two are five - well, two and two are five."

We are living in the aftermath of a conscious decision to maximize greed as a catalyst for growth. And we ignore the fuzzy math of our recent history because to question the games played in the stock-market with home mortgages would demand that we interrogate our Capitalist system. It is easier to pretend that our enemies are those that would challenge Capitalism rather than ask why it was necessary to eliminate financial regulations put in place to avoid the kind of unchecked speculation that atomized the Great Depression. Why was an allegiance to derivative math that could inspire exponential debt financing the best social policy? Or do we simply ignore this because trying to understand it takes some thinking power and it is better to invoke our collective risibility and believe 2+2=5.

But when this speculative greed had to face its losses those that drove the gambling fit, the Wall Street Bankers, were protected by casino bosses, our Federal Government, and given better suites and more chips while those that cheered them on at the craps table, the average Middle-Class home-owner, were bounced from the club.

Instead of recognizing the bullying eccentricities of this collusive elite, the Middle Class has queued up like perky titted cheer-leaders looking to win the affection of the handsome football star (who unbeknownst to the fecund bubble-head in this analogy wants nothing more than to slip a roofie into her coke and sodomize her to his heart's content).

And yet the loudest outcry comes from a chorus of Aristippuses who will embrace all manner of irrational flattery and invite rape so they can deny the lentils they are left.

Ebert states it well when he writes,

"What puzzles me is why there isn't more indignation. The Tea Party is the most indignant domestic political movement since Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, but its wrath is turned in the wrong direction. It favors policies that are favorable to corporations and unfavorable to individuals. Its opposition to Obamacare is a textbook example. Insurance companies and the health care industry finance a 'populist' movement that is manipulated to oppose its own interests. The billionaire Koch brothers payroll right wing front organizations that oppose labor unions and financial reform. The patriots wave their flags and don't realize they're being duped."

The self-interest we are succeeding in applauding serves the King well. I wish we would start trading lentil recipes and tear down his authority. I doubt it will happen. Imagined comfort is too tempting when realistic integrity needs facing.

Anything, Nothingness and Becoming

At the end of Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons" the Common Man who acts as narrator and audience-proxy assures us (with dripping irony) the nobility we opt for when we make our identity ulterior.

He says,

"It isn't difficult to keep alive, friends- just don't make trouble - or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that's expected."

In the Preface to the Vintage International edition of the play Bolt explains this theme by offering the idea that,

". . . we no longer have, as past societies have had, a picture of individual Man (Stoic Philosopher, Christian Religious, Rational Gentleman) by which to recognize ourselves and against which to measure ourselves; we are anything. But if anything, then nothing and it is not everyone who can live with that, though it is our true present position."

The themes of this play are relevant to me, probably because I am going through a mid-life crisis, while enjoying early fatherhood, and the worry I once carried about other people's impression of me fades in the face of my son's life and his smile.

The collision of these experiences have made me reconsider the necessity of basic values.

The world seems to invite each of us to be anything yet when this achievement is reckoned there is a nothingness about it.

Mark Erelli, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, summed our current social values (when commenting on the recent teacher demonization in Wisconsin) by observing that,

". . . the American Dream has taken quite a hit in recent years. We have 'American Idol' but there's no popular TV show called 'American Expert.' We deride the educated as 'elites,' preferring instead the sexier narrative that one event or contest could pluck anyone from obscurity and set them on a pedestal to be revered and worshiped."

There is a nothingness about a popularity that chases after notoriety for its own sake (as evidence of its value).

When faced with this nothingness, I've decided to take stock in my innate desires and consider what I am rather than what I do.

The adjustment has led to a joyful experience where the act of becoming has replaced a need to arrive.

Sir Thomas More says prior to the death sentence brought by his unwillingness to compromise his self and his values,

"You have your desire of me. What you have hunted me for is not my actions, but the thoughts of my heart. It is a long road you have opened. For first men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts."

As I face the second half of my life I hope I can strive for this sort of courage and if I discover unexpected trouble I won't make my heart ulterior as a condition for "living".

Happiness is not about looking cool

I've been unhappy of late.

The Chicago late winter will do that.

The tease of March's menagerie of lions and lambs makes Mother Nature an alcoholic parent you find pissing in the new baseball glove she just bought for your birthday.

I've also been unhappy because of a 3 month span of trying to sell myself to a profession I thought I left so I could accommodate my wife's hopes.

My wife is from the East Coast and with the birth of our son she has been hoping to be closer to family. Her sister lives in Boston so I looked for jobs there.

I've worked in what is known as "Account Planning" for 10 years and about 3 years ago landed a job in a medical marketing agency. I never thought I'd enjoy the B2B nature of this market but took the job due to the scarcity of our new economy and have loved it.

My love stems from the people I work with and the information we get to work with. We are geeks. A land of misfit toys.

• A cardiologist with a latex allergy who works deciphering clinical trials.
• A flinty former punk-queen who left journalism to be a scientific writer and now mines data for new opportunities.
• A PharmD who has a weather station on his condo roof as a hobby and prides himself on having followers in Japan who tune into his web-site to check the Uptown barometer.

We aren't cool but we annotate our data (we have to due to the multiple rounds of copy clearance we have to face).

The ideas we share seem intrinsic.

It is the secret of pharmaceutical marketing where you have clients who are Ph.Ds in things like bio-chemistry and therefore come to see what is real not by what is asserted with personality but proven with evidence.

It is a different type of selling and, although selling can suck, it doesn't suck as hard as my other 7 years in planning because it doesn't demand I pretend knowledge I don't have.

But my recent striving has been towards consumer agencies again and in my 3 years away much has changed and,in my mind, these changes are as illogical and disappointing as a Chicago March blizzard.

The driver of change is the multiple communication channels we have now. Various agencies sell themselves as prophets of the Interwebs with their trademarked social-media-strategic-models (usually using the term "friend" as a predicate) that are touted as the scriptural cure for a media agnostic environment.

The high priests of this religion are the Account Planners. I've written about the dangers of this clerical affiliation here and here.

And because I've been looking to be ordained again in the church of consumerism I've been unhappy.

I think the reason seems to be that the priest of this religion is so busy trying to convince himself (and his congregation) what it takes to be happy he has to live in the past, touting his agency's capabilities, or predict the future using selective information to confirm the bias towards his agency's capabilities; it just doesn't make the world a happy place.

Not surprisingly, I didn't make the cut at either agency. I think being a "Charlie in the Box" was not "Out of the Box" in the right way to properly anticipate I could offer the right kind of ulterior communion.

This reminded me of a New York Times Blog I read a few years back. It was written by philosophy professor Simon Critchley of The New School of Social Research.

(An aside - one of the ways I've tried to better work with the clinical data I have to communicate is by reading philosophy so I might spot logical fallacies and sharpen my critical thinking. This new interest seems like it may have been the cause to at least one of the reasons my reentry to the church of consumerism failed. It seems the "VP of Human Nature" at a big firm decided after a 30 minute conversation with me I wouldn't be a "doer" because I was too "philosophical" -- I would have loved to ask her what the attributes of "doer" are so I could fathom her antecedent arguments but . . . you get the point -- there is a pretense to the public intellectual about the Account Planning profession witnessed by this woman's job title which in reality doesn't operate as anything more than packaging).

The blog talks about happiness and the author hints that it is found in intrinsic experience when he writes,

"Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time."

Sadly, I think most consumer advertising misses this while asserting to be expert in it and I think it is why I'm glad I didn't make the cut.

I get to stay on the island of misfit toys and find intrinsic joy in the relationships I have rather than pretending I hold the secret to unlocking the happiness of future relationships with a "gameification" strategy (yes that is the latest trend title within the Account Planning world).

Jackie is supportive and understands that happiness wrought is an intimate thing and can't be created with pretense to biased interpretations of past success or self-centered assertions to future gains.

I'm glad we can get back to living in the moment rather than thinking that we need to position ourselves to be ride the next trend towards the future.

The Skeptic in the Room

Most people think I am an asshole due to my opinions and therefore this might be my new anthem.

H/T to PZ

Job Vs. Vocation

Is your job your vocation? Mine isn't.

I've worked for the past 10 years in advertising as an Account Planner. That's been my job.

The past year I've gotten back to my vocation, playwriting.

I've come to see the difference between a job and a vocation because even though my job title is a Group Planning Director; I now work in scientific communications and promote regulated science and therefore no longer need to entertain the idea that the pseudo-science driving most consumer advertising "insight" is real. I work more as a scientific communications strategist working within strict guidelines and the limits of science rather than the "science" of account planning. See this for an example of said account planning "science".

I've also gotten back to practicing my first vocation, playwriting, by becoming a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists Theater and understand the vast difference between creativity and advertising.

Creativity tries to solve cultural problems that seem apparent.

Consumer advertising (or branding, or changing the conversation, or motivating talk between brands and people, or disrupting category conventions) invents problems to motivate corporate profits.

The former demands introspection, intellectualism, an appreciation for others while concerning oneself with the history of great ideas.

The latter demands jargon often based on ill-defined portmanteau and a pair of hipster eye-glasses.

I was drawn to the field of planning because the guy I worked for during a survival job stint between theater gigs ten years ago at a big Chicago ad agency was smart and kind.

I thought that he represented a job that invited an opportunity for humanism in business.

What I didn't understand was that this boss is what marketing people would call an "outlier".

He offered support when I tired of auditioning and financed my MBA while talking to me of things like Shakespeare and the history of mathematics.

Subsequent planning jobs have put me into situations where similarly smart and humane people in the practice have often longed to do something else.

One boss who hired me primarily because I was a playwright told me during a particularly frustrating day that he was looking to deter his daughter from pursuing advertising and how he wished he still sold skis in Aspen.

Another boss said to me when she was leaving the ad agency where she hired me, "In theory, planning is interesting . . ." (she expressed to me that in reality she probably would enjoy being a Pilates instructor).

The person I know who projects an air of necessity within account planning (and seems to enjoy it in almost a manic way) has admitted to never reading anything other than Good Magazine and likes to collect non-traditional versions of marketing collateral. He also expresses chagrin with a hint of self-deprecating pride when people comment on his combo outfit made up of ironic t-shirts he buys from Target over button down dress shirts.

He also repositioned an agency around a "social media theory" based on what he admitted was bad math to validate his opinion that brands that make friends are successful. When I pointed out to him that his theory seems to enable the post-hoc fallacy (mistaking correlation for causation) he responded by sending me to his slide share deck (because sharing ideas is cool) but didn't realize that the content in the deck validated the reality he enjoys the post-hoc fallacy.

I'd suggest you check out any major ad agency web-site right now and ask yourself if the personalties projected there don't remind you of the Soma-stuffed idiots from Huxley's dystopian vision in "Brave New World" (for those band planners reading this, "Brave New World" is a novel written by a man named Aldous Huxley who looked to understand applied ethics using the genre of science fiction. A novel is a book which is sort of like a trend-report only longer with no pictures. And genre means a type of story, sort of like the intellect's version of an SKU.)

I'm grateful for my job and I like many of the people I work with now that I get to deal with real rather than invented science but have revisited the world of consumer advertising recently, by joining a couple of account planning groups on social media sites, and realize that the joy planners have with their fuzzy reality is something I think is unreal.

I can only hope that those who celebrate the efficacy of account planning will be made to validate their european eye-glasses and show how their trend mining into the social media eco-system actually leads to real results.

I have a feeling however that it will be exposed for the hucksterism it is and be regulated to the world of dousing and homeopathy.

I expect an ironic t-shirt coming to your nearest Target to announce this.

Reinforcing Taboos Worries Me

What makes "New Atheism" novel is not its atheism but its desire to hold religious truth assertions up to the same method of higher criticism we hold other truth assertions.

Sam Harris makes mention of this when he says,

"It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization."

It is the willingness to address taboo due to founded worry in the actions of believers that is "new" in "New Atheism". When I investigated Harris's arguments I recognized I agreed with this and wondered why I called myself religious.

Andrew Sullivan, a gay Roman Catholic political conservative (I wonder if the accidents of the Eucharist and material dualism of transubstantiation makes one proud of such incoherent titles), tries to make a case for the defense of faith as distinct from religion by linking to an Economist article decrying the British Humanist Society's campaign to get the non-religious to report with honesty their non-belief.

He seems to only reinforce the deep entrenchment of the taboo against religious criticism. The article seems to suggest that there is a form of bullying even in the most mild form of suggesting that non-belief in one's childhood religion is in reality non-belief. It isn't. It is an invitation to honesty and fact.

The fact that an atheist journalist would dismiss the distinction seems very much evidence of a need to reinforce taboos and It is worrying.

In a related article, the reason this type of acquiescence to taboo is troubling can be seen in the actions of the Republican party and their committed anti-science efforts with legislative power.

Not criticizing privileged myth encourages ignorance and pretending that religion and faith are somehow distinct is dishonest.

Tweeting, The Loss of Surprise, Modesty and Common Enterprise

My friend Lori shared a column yesterday by David Brooks entitled "The Modesty Manifesto".

Brooks's point is that our current social ills might be an effect caused by our inflated sense of our selves. I balked at this notion at first but changed my mind. I think Brooks is right.

My mind was changed when I considered his premise relative to another day within the advertising community and the adoration for the increase in unoriginal observation facilitated by Twitter and Facebook status updates.

I remember when being "followed" was a sign of paranoia or a federal investigation not a pretense to importance based on 140 characters.

Brooks writes,

"In short, there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me — to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion."

My sensitivities to this may be enhanced by the surfeit of pride exhibited by social media strategists who speak of consumer "eco-systems" in tones that can only honestly be defined as pseudo-intellectual. I mean when did "people-pleasing" become an avenue for insight into human nature? My survival job too often sacrifices intellectual rumination and deep thought to the acronym adorned altar of social media.

The providing philosophy of the industry is predicated on normalizing the self-erosion found in popularity contests.

Which of course is driven by the fallacy that everyone is an individual as long as everyone's individuality mirrors the individuality of everyone else.

It seems that the level of scrutiny that empowered the parachute pants rage in my teens is now the considered form of self and social reflection. Fads will always be a constant in our lives because we are social animals and our evolved survival instinct makes us want to be accepted by the herd but today the time horizon for fad adoption and rejection is measured in hours rather than months.

Does the lack of privacy we invite with every social experience we encounter lead us to a damaged sense of modesty which deprives us of the level of idiosyncratic joy that inspired the first parachute pants wearer to don his pseudo-military garb and "pop and lock" at the back-to-school dance?

I love social media and am addicted to Facebook and have a Twitter account (which I use as a news feed mostly) but think it might be healthy for our culture to investigate the encroachment on modesty and privacy these technologies have and how the instantaneous publishing possibilities they render keep us from paying attention when new ideas demand reflection rather than tweeting.

I was researching depression yesterday which led me to listen to Nirvana and that reminded me of their acoustic gig on MTV where Cobain finished the set with the Leadbelly tune "Where did you Sleep Last Night". I YouTubed the performance and watched it.

Two things struck me.

Everyone in the audience was staring at this grunge god croaking out a folk-song about murder (no one was tweeting) and the performance made me long for the time when an artist might make the "F-it" adjustment and share a real risk based in a long-held private love that informed his entertainment (but might have contradicted his expected brand image).

The former observation is simply a recognition of the innovation adoption curve with MTV as an artifact but the latter seems to me evidence of why I think instantaneous reach for everyone is troubling.

Cobain loved folk music and if you listen beneath the dropped D tunings and distortion peddles of his grunge hits you will hear the same melodious rumble that drives great story songs.

That love demands time, awe, and modesty enjoyed in a very private space where the inspiration for the affection can become personalized with rumination.

I don't think we have the same sense of slowness today but instead are addicted to the speed at which we can emoticon our every nano-second and somehow think this is allowing us an honest understanding of our selves.

My industry of course encourages this behavior because the shape of the flock and its density is all that matters when considering the price of bird-feed.

But the thing we are missing when chasing after all of our tweets is that true evolutionary adaptation happens at the local level.

Richard Dawkins speaks of this rather well in his book "The Greatest Show on Earth" using an example of starling flock behavior.

From the outside it looks like starling group flight is the work of a grand choreographer and the beauty of its design is rooted in the sameness of its constituents.

It isn't.

The flock only occurs because local biological laws within individual birds correspond to the environment in such a way to create the flock.

The real beauty is the individual adaptation made at the organism, even cellular level, not the product of these local laws.

The flock of starlings that offer grand geometric predictability is predicated on an individual bird's response mechanism to her immediate surroundings.

Cobain's passionate performance was predicated on his local response to his immediate surroundings.

Both adaptations take an appreciation of time working on individuals that seems ill-afforded in our current media space.

When I consider the emphasis we place on our personal uniqueness and desire to be followed I worry about our common good and the ideas we miss for the desire to be the first to announce how special we are.

Or as Brooks says,

"Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise."