Back Up And Tell It Right

How Much Is A Policy On Bad Logic?

May 312012

The Setup

My recent trip to the White House has gotten me all fired up politically. Okay, not really, but it reminded me of this deeply irritating failure of logic in the soon-to-be decided (or maybe already-decided-but-soon-to-be-revealed) Supreme Court health care case which, as a citizen who went through 10 layers of security before eating two squares of what I believe was Pepperidge Farms Coconut Cream Cake (albeit on a silver tray), I now feel compelled to point out.

What Health Care Haytas Say

The Affordable Care Act penalizes people for not purchasing something – in this case health care – and that is beyond the bounds of what the Constitution allows.

Incorrect.

When you are purchasing any kind of insurance – health, auto, life, your chest hair if you’re Tom Jones – the product of the transaction is not the tangible policy but rather the intangible, immaterial consequence of the policy. In the same way when you play blackjack, you’re not purchasing chips but rather “opportunity,” the purchase you are making when you buy insurance is “peace of mind” and not “piece of paper.” When you buy auto insurance, for example, you are purchasing a certainty of a maximum outlay in the event of an accident, i.e. worst case scenario, I pay my deductible and the insurance company is responsible for everything else (within the limits of my particular policy).

Here is why the “you’re charging people for not purchasing something” shizz is completely wrong. Because Congress has mandated that all hospitals must treat all Americans regardless of ability to pay, we all ARE, in fact, getting precisely what insurance provides – peace of mind. We know that in the event of any kind of health crisis, we will always get treatment. Therefore, the Affordable Care Act, far from charging people for not purchasing something, is simply making the billing transparent on something we’re all getting anyway.

Far from one Justice’s assertion that the Affordable Care Act created a market in order to regulate it, we, in fact, created the peace-of-mind market years ago when we insisted on putting a primacy on human life and pain above mere money by forcing hospitals to treat people regardless of their ability to pay. The only people who could really make an argument for not having to pay the penalty for not having insurance are Christian Scientists for whom “peace of mind” is purchased by their faith.

In order for the “charging people for not purchasing something” argument to work, Congress would need to repeal the law insisting that hospitals provide care regardless of ability to pay, i.e. it would need to give us a choice to have peace of mind or not, a choice we do not currently have. Here’s what the world in which we have that choice – the one where the “charging people for not purchasing something” logic would work – would look like: In a parallel to the auto insurance market where drivers can weigh the risk of not having insurance – a totalled car which they can’t afford to replace – versus the cost of having it, so would we all be able to weigh the risk of collapsing in the street and being left to die there for lack of funds or having broken bones and screaming outside of hospital doors because of an inability to pay versus purchasing peace of mind by getting insurance.

Until Congress chooses to place us in that world, all Americans are getting precisely what insurance provides, so the argument against all of us paying for the peace of mind we’re getting anyway is what again? Here’s hoping logic prevails…

You Are Why You Say What You Like

Back Up And Tell It Right, Books, John Connolly 4 Responses »

Apr 142012

The Setup

My ~~good~~ friend and bestselling mystery writer John Connolly wrote a blog post about a discussion the two of us had the other day about a book he’d recommended. John, per usual, turned out to be completely wrong, but, in terms of Backup And Tell It Right, it got me thinking about the ways we use culture to reveal pieces of ourselves to each other.

What John Says

“Read this book!”

Back Up And Tell It Right

Mmm hmm. See the thing John failed to do – and which I sweetly pointed out to him in a subsequent email – was articulate WHY he was recommending the book. That articulation, that translation of an internal state into an external statement, is connection, is the way we use culture as a means of expressing who we are, c.f. the reason we all keep using Facebook despite the fact that it epitomizes the worst of coporate money-grubbing abusive nastiness. So despite his completely wrong opinion, I’m delighted that John ultimately decided to share a piece of himself, no matter how boneheaded, as that piece of himself has ultimately served to bond us closer together.

A few years ago, I sent John some book recommendations. Not that I’m saying mine are better than his or that I’m practicing what I’m preaching (insert throat clearing sound here), but I thought I’d demonstrate by doing and use culture, translated through my own personal filters, to connect with you:

The Bone People – Keri Hulme
I found this book really hard to get into – the first 22 pages were literally incomprehensible to me as in I had no idea what was going on. What I ultimately realized is that you’re thrown right into the main character’s head and you kind of have to learn her thought process. Once you do, this book is incredible – unbelieveably moving.

The Quincunx – Charles Palliser
Genius. Out-Dickens Dickens (and I hate Dickens). To quote people magazine, “the best Victorian novel of 1989.” A big, fat complicated story. Really great.

Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien
This book is awesome and I had absolutely no interest in it when I picked it up – the Vietnam war? Come on! Boooring. I was totally wrong. It’s hilarious and really moving.

The Spectator Bird – Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner is a great writer. This book contains one of my favorite quotes of all time. The main character is a 70-ish year old guy looking back to the one time, 20 years ago, when he felt truly alive. He says his current, day-to-day existence makes him feel like “I’ve walked through the great kitchen of life and arrived at the back door hungry.” If you like the quote, you’ll like the book.

Foreign Affairs – Alison Lurie
I love Alison Lurie. I loved everything about this book. It’s really funny but really moving too. If you like this book you’ll probably end up reading everything by her.

White Man’s Grave – Richard Dooling
Wow. Brilliant. Unfortunately, it’s his only good book – the other ones he wrote aren’t bad, but nothing measured up to this.

Green River Rising - Tim Willocks
This is a prison break novel that’s phenomenal. If you start it, don’t plan on leaving your home until you’re done. It was one of this author’s other books that spurred the whole thing with John! That aside, Tim Willocks is pretty amazing.

The Custom Of The Country – Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton always seemed like medicine to me. I was wrong. This book is basically about a turn-of-the-century female scarface named Undine Spragg and how she claws her way to the top of the New York social ladder. It’s vicious and great.

Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
I LOVED FINGERSMITH!!! It’s set in Victorian England and is about a con within a con within a con – think George Eliot meets HOUSE OF GAMES. There are genius twists in it plus the writing is great plus you get to tell yourself that reading something classier than just a big juicy mystery novel.

Marjorie Morningstar – Herman Wouk
OMFG. A big fat potboiler set in NYC and a theater camp in the 30s. First recommended to me by my friends Moira and Sheila (culture as connective gesture!). Their totally accurate description of Herman Wouk’s writing is that it’s like gabbing on the phone with your BFF a la “What’d you wear to the party last night. Uh uh. How was it? Ohmigod. Who else was there? What were they wearing?” Seriously great book.

Geek Love – Katherine Dunn
It starts out with a hardboiled crime fiction radio show told from the point of view of a pit mite caught in the pubic hair of Los Angeles police detective, all of which is narrated by an albino dwarf. Need I say anything more? Great and moving.

BTW, mercifully John doesn’t write the kind of books he recommends; he writes the ultimate Trojan Horse crime novels – literate writing and complex characters and story all wrapped up in the guise of a driving thriller: John Connolly’s Amazon Page.

So John, I eagerly await your next revelation-of-self aka your next book recommendation…

How HR Is Killing The Corporate Gene Pool And What To Do About It

Back Up And Tell It Right, HR, Redacting the News 3 Responses »

Mar 022012

The Setup

GOSSIP GIRL sucked this week so I decided to write an article on one of my many pet peeves, Human Resources. In case you don’t know, I have a corporate consultancy as well (SLI Advisors), and I’ve watched as the hiring arm of Human Resources, aka “Recruitment,” has slowly but surely drained all life from the companies they ostensibly service. It’s not as if the people in HR are somehow fools or anything like that. Rather, they’re trapped, the way much of corporate America is trapped, by a system that claims to want outside-the-box thinkers while simultaneously being very clear that the only way to remain blameless and unpunished oneself is to do things EXACTLY the way they’ve always been done.

This can all best be seen in HR’s current, ubiquitous, and total failure of a recruitment strategy, the computer. Much like it doesn’t work in online dating (a subject covered elsewhere on this site (my Online Dating Guide, Dating Nancy P)), the computer doesn’t work in job placement either. Why some people think a computer is better suited to understand a human than a human is beyond me, but recruiters seem to love them. In any event, I think it’s worth understanding how the hiring system became this calcified so if you’re someone looking for a job you can work it better and if you’re in HR or running a company you can get some ideas for changing it.

What HR Says

We’re hiring the best and most qualified people for the job! For real!

Back Up And Tell It Right

Let’s time travel a little bit here back to the gogo years of the early ‘00s when online applications, emailed resumes, and the like first started becoming prevalent, when HR people could dream of a future where, while the total number of overall applicants, many unqualified, would increase due to the ease of clicking “send,” the upside would be a maximization of both recruiter time and candidate quality, since the computer would do the tedious sorting and filtering and only deliver the most-qualified candidates to the recruiters. The best! The brightest! And all so easy!

[insert sound of record scratch here]

The thesis that computers would reduce recruiter workload and increase recruiter efficiency was not only untested but, as it turned out for reasons described below, incorrect. Additionally, even if that first thesis proved to be true, the staffing mission of HR has nothing to do with making recruiters’ lives easier but rather with finding the best candidate for a particular job, and the computer, as you’ll see, has actually served to undermine HR’s mission rather than enhance it. Even worse, the problems that have always been present in online staffing have been magnified in today’s world due to the sheer number of people looking for work.

The goal of recruitment isn’t to eliminate people; it’s to find them, yet the computer has ensured that the system is significantly better at keeping people out than letting them in. This happens in two basic ways.

Blairenda! Serblanda! Dasebla! I.E. Dan And Blair Make Out And Serena Sees Everything!

Back Up And Tell It Right, Gossip Girl, TV No Responses »

Feb 152012

The Setup

On this week’s GOSSIP GIRL, Dan finally makes a move on former-nemesis-now-unrequited-love-interest Blair, which, despite her skinny-pregnancy, extremely complicated (and weirdly easily attainable) pre-nup, and looming problems with bruised and vengeful former boyfriend Chuck, Blair responds to. But then multi-hyphenate Serena (the multihyphenataion being Blair’s-best-friend-and-Dan’s-high-school-girlfriend-but-they-broke-up-and-got-back-together-a-bunch-of-times-and-now-Serena’s-into-him-again-but-Dan-isn’t-into-her) sees it all and uh oh!

What Serena Says

My BFF stole my not-BF – how could she?!?!

Back Up And Tell It Right

Whoa girl. Serena has a common view shared by many of us when strong feelings are involved, which is that we tend to view people as possessions and other people’s intrusions on those feelings as theft. But this sense of having had something stolen is a trap and here’s why. From Serena’s point of view, Blair has stolen from her since Blair knows about Serena’s feelings for Dan and, as a friend, should allow Serena’s feelings to take precedence. Serena’s trap – and one, I might add, that she falls into ALL THE TIME – is that of assuming her expectations of Blair’s behavior are valid. For example, Blair could make the equally logical argument that Serena knows she’s trapped in a loveless marriage (to a prince for a year, there was a video involved and some weird thing with a dowry – I can’t go into it right now) and that Dan’s been there for her so it’s Serena who needs to respect her need to reach for happiness and not the other way around.

In the same way that crime requires “mens rea” (a guilty mind), so does betrayal need an intent to betray. In the absence of that, there’s just your needs conflicting with someone else’s needs. A friend simply wanting the same thing you want is not a betrayal regardless of what your friend knows about your feelings. Instead of focusing on what you think the other person did to you and potentially destroying a strong friendship, focus on whether your exepctations of that person’s behavior was either fair or realistic, and, if not, work on your own feelings of sadness or disappointment. It may not feel good to have a friend chasing a guy you’re into, but it’s also not a stab in the back.

Which isn’t to say a lot of backstabbing isn’t exactly what I’m hoping for for Seblada in the upcoming months…

No Logic Or Self-Worth Attached

Back Up And Tell It Right, Film, No Strings Attached No Responses »

Feb 072012

The Setup

I made the terrible mistake of Netflixing NO STRINGS ATTACHED (the Natalie Portman/Ashton Kutcher eff buddies movie (wasn’t there another one too?)) the other day, and, in addition to having my soul crushed for two hours, I also got to witness an almost pathological amount of self-degradation, the kind that oftens crops up in real (equally soul crushing) relationships.

What Emma Says

Natalie’s character, Emma (who rooms with a band of three inexplicably wacky surgical interns), keeps randomly running into Ashton’s character, Adam, and decides they should have sex while, for reasons unstated, avoiding any emotional attachment.

Back Up And Tell It Right

I’m not sure what’s weirder: the conceit that you can somehow avoid emotional attachment to other people or the notion that you’d want to. First off, if you’re doing anything regularly with another person, you’re in a relationship, no matter what lie you’re telling yourself. Second, if the goal of your relationship is to not have one, then you’re likely best off alone until you work through your issues. And FYI, Emma, sex isn’t something you can separate from feelings because that connection isn’t under your conscious control; in other words, you’re either having sex with someone and not feeling anything for them or you’re having sex with someone and developing feelings but in either case it’s not something you can decide upfront. Having a predetermined goal of numbing out or repressing your emotions in case they accidentally crop up is not a great way to enter into any kind of connection. Instead, check in with yourself to see if you’re emotionally ready for a relationship, then go connect in whatever form you like and be open to seeing what happens. Because otherwise the primary emotional attachment you’re avoiding is the one with yourself.

Though I’ve got to admit, despite it obviously being for nudity rider reasons, watching someone roll around having sweaty, intense, breathless, unattached sex while ALWAYS wearing either a T-shirt or tank top becomes, after two hours, kind of intriguingly kinky…

New Game: Spot the Kodependency

Back Up And Tell It Right, Kardashians, TV No Responses »

Jan 262012

The Setup

After Kourtney’s babydaddy Scott punches his fist through a mirror right after a fight with Kourtney, Kourtney decides it’s time to put up some boundaries and move on… ish.

What Kourtney Says

I’ll let Kourtney speak for herself.

Back Up And Tell It Right

Here’s the game. There are two video clips, each of which contains moments of pure, unadulterated codependency. Can you spot them? Click the down arrow (

) below each video to see the ones I spotted.

Clip Setup: A day or so later, Scott tells Kourtney that he’s going to need surgery for his mirror-punching hand and that he’s all alone in Miami and would really like her to be there when he wakes up from surgery – not that he’s trying to guilt her into it or anything (heh heh) because, he says, he knows he’s totally blown it with her, that their relationship is over, and that he has no right to expect anything. After lots of assertive conversations about how she won’t be seeing Scott until he’s gotten help for himself (meaning rehab) because she has to put her baby, Mason, first, Kourtney flip-flops the morning of Scott’s surgery and heads out the door to visit him, telling sis Kim that she doesn’t want to hear any arguments about it, that this what she’s doing. Kim says fine but insists on coming along:

Oh Kourtney (sigh)

I’m going on record: Kim actually makes sense here. The fact that Scott doesn’t have anyone else isn’t Kourtney’s problem to resolve. However, like with much codependency, it’s easily justifiable and the logic sounds so reasonable. “I mean, sure, he’s been leaving me alone with the baby and partying until 6am and then, when I called him on it, he had a rage-out and punched his hand through a mirror – but come on, leaving him alone after surgery is WAY too cruel – that’s just taking things too far!”

The real issue here has nothing to do with whether or not Kourtney should forgive Scott or how she should treat him. Rather, it has to do with the fact that managing Scott’s feelings is the way she manages her own, as if she can’t feel good about herself in absence of making him feel good about himself. Her need to resolve Scott’s issues for him, in this case healing their rift rather than leaving it for him to heal, is, basically, the reason she got a spinoff.

Clip Setup: Though perhaps Kourtney’s codependency issues are more forgiveable in light of seeing their monstrous one-codpendency-to-rule-them-all source, momager Kris Kardashian. Kim flies home to LA and tells Kris bits and pieces of what went down with Kourtney and Scott, at which point Kris wings out to Miami, tells Kourtney how upset she is and all the things Kourtney needs to do (without actually bothering to ask Kourtney how she feels or what decisions she’s made), and then, behind Kourtney’s back, does the following in stripes and with men’s jacket button epaulets on her shoulders:

Show Me Kris' Kodependency

Aside from being both controlling AND kontrolling, Kris is super codependent as well – only with Kourtney, not with Scott. While the actual dialogue is with Scott, the real dialogue, the one that makes her the mother of all Kardashians and codependents (and there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference), is that this drama, these emotions, are her way of connecting with Kourtney. “Facts about the situation be damned (the primary fact being that the two of you seem to be working out your lives just fine without me) – I have feelings! If it’s painful for you, it’s even more painful for me. I’m you; you’re me! Mostly me! The way you’ll know I love you is by how much I feeeeeeeeeeel! I’m doing this for you, Kourtney (and I’m going to tell you all about it later so you’ll know how much I care).”

Non-codependent behavior would be, oh, expressing support for her daughter and letting her daughter feel her own feelings instead of joining in and subsuming them.

If you find yourself taking care of (read: controlling) the emotional issues of an adult in your life, if you can’t feel okay unless you’ve taken action to “make them feel” okay, you are likely in a codependent relationship with that person. The process from codependent to independent is ceasing taking action on behalf of that person’s bad feelings (Kourtney) and feeling good about yourself regardless of how that other person feels (Kris).

And to think, people have accused the Kardashians of being vapid time-wasters who offered nothing to the universe…

Hey Khloe, Why You All Up In Your Sister’s Relationship Kjunk?

Back Up And Tell It Right, Kardashians, TV No Responses »

Jan 232012

The Setup

On KEEPING UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS (of whatever season or spinoff I’m currently watching), Khloe sure hates Scott.

What Khloe Says

He’s bad for my sister QED I hate him.

Back Up And Tell It Right

This is actually very typical. Someone you love winds up in a relationship with someone you hate primarily because you hate how miserable they seem to make the person you love, and, by extension, you. You hate them so much you don’t want to see them or talk to them. You can’t be in the same room with them. You can barely be polite to them. Here’s the deal: that outside hateful person – Scott in this case – isn’t the problem; rather, that person is merely a reflection of two other problems.

First problem: Pretend Khloe’s right for a moment (and, remember, you can never judge a relationship from the outside, even one you’re watching 24/7 on E!) and that Scott is a hateful, volatile, unreliable, destructive cow who’s pulling Kourtney away from her family. Even so, making Scott go away won’t solve the problem since the problem (if there is one) lies with Kourtney and not Scott. After all, she’s the one making the choice.

Second problem: When we get as upset about someone as Khloe gets about Scott, that’s generally because that person is reflecting something within ourselves that we dislike. Perhaps Khloe recognizes hateful pieces of herself within Scott and lashes out at him for having those characteristics she dislikes. Or perhaps she views Kourtney’s response to Scott as a horrible weakness because that’s how she would feel if she found herself staying in a relationship with someone who was volatile or self-centered. Or perhaps her father’s death felt like an abandonment and she’s mushing that in with Scott’s seeming unreliability toward her sister. Or whatever.

In other words, Khloe’s big angry feelings are hers, and their resolution doesn’t lie with Kourtney or Scott but rather with figuring out what that relationship is triggering within her and resolving that core issue instead.

Hey, Khloe, here’s hoping you work it by the time I get to Season Six…

Yeah, Copyright Whatev – What About My Rights?

Back Up And Tell It Right, Corporations, Redacting the News No Responses »

Nov 182011

The Setup

I guess I’m on a corporate rant! There’s a bill before Congress (called SOPA in the House and Protect IP in the Senate) that is designed to protect copyright at the expense of speech.

What Hollywood Says

We need these bills because we’re losing jobs and money to piracy.

Back Up And Tell It Right

Once again, we’re in that strange world where Congress is putting human principles behind corporate desires.

For the most part, no one cares about copyright and for good reason because, unless you’re in the arts or software design, copyright isn’t something that really affects you. However, we now all have one major reason to be concerned about copyright: the pipeline for free speech and the pipeline for copyright are now one and the same – the internet. Hollywood, because it makes all its money off of copyright, has designed a bill that is a “guilty ‘til proven innocent” approach where a mere accusation that a website contains infringing content will result in that website being taken down by the government, essentially transformng the US government into repressive regimes like Egypt, China, and Iran, all for the sake of… a few corporations.

For me, it’s always humans first, and it’s interesting – and kinda frightening! – to see how difficult it is for Congress to view itself as anything other than the legal arm of corporations.

The Benevolent Dolphin

Hollywood’s contention is that piracy is costing billions of dollars in jobs and lost revenues. This contention, however, is what’s known in cognitive theory as a benevolent dolphin. Here’s what that means: Dolphins have a reputation for benevolence because we hear many stories about dolphins nudging a flailing swimmer to shore or beating off a shark when someone was stuck at sea or swimming next to boats etc. As a result, word has spread about dolphin kindness toward humans. Of course, we have no idea if dolphins are really benevolent because we have no idea how many people dolphins have pushed out to sea and drowned as those people obviously never returned to tell the tale.

Hollywood’s insistence – and Congress’ blind belief – that piracy is costing money and that therefore speech should be squelched in the name of protecting copyright is based on a similar fundamental logic flaw – which is the assumption that piracy has a cost at all. Here’s why.

First, piracy only applies to people who would’ve bought a particular piece of content but downloaded it for free instead. If all the Jennifer Aniston movies in the world were somehow locked away and only available for purchase and you never, in a billion years, would purchase one (I admit, I may be talking about myself here), then Hollywood loses no money if you managed to download one since you never would’ve spent that money to begin with. If, however, you’re that one Jennifer Aniston fan and you download a movie for free, then, yes, you’ve stolen money from Hollywood. In other words, the cost of piracy only applies to the subset of people who would have paid but didn’t; let’s call this number A. A, of course, is impossible to calculate, which is why Hollywood uses inflated numbers that include everyone.

Second – and this is where the benevolent dolphin comes in – Hollywood has utterly failed to calculate the benefit of piracy, i.e. the people who bought a product solely as a result of access to an illegal copy. Let’s call this number B. If you’ve ever downloaded an MP3 illegally then later purchased the band’s album as a result of enjoying that stolen MP3, you’ve experienced how piracy benefits the industry. Author David Pogue did a little experiment in this regard whereby he released both a print and PDF edition of his book; the PDF was copied everywhere around the internet for free… yet his print sales rose. Along those same lines, the megahit children’s book Shut The F*** Up was the consequence of pirated PDFs, and Justin Bieber has made tons of money for the recording industry as a result of singing pirated songs on YouTube.

Thus piracy is only a cost if B – A = (a negative number). I find it bizarre that Congress is doing something as extreme as suppressing speech based on a non-existent number. And, btw, this isn’t the first time Hollywood has cried foul about copyright only to turn out to be totally wrong. In the ’80s, Hollywood tried to destroy the VCR (they lost in the Supreme Court) only to have tapes and DVDs become Hollywood’s largest source of revenue.

Once again, Hollywood is being shortsighted in its view of the future. This would be totally irrelevant except this time Hollywood’s shortsightedness is going to directly affect YOUR ability to communicate. Only corporations and Congresspeople could think that the solution to internet piracy would be shutting off speech and creating opportunity for individual Americans to be silenced by the threat of an endless stream of corporate lawsuits – because those RIAA file-sharing lawsuits were so amazingly successful I guess!

The Bottom Line

Congress’ job is not to protect a dying business model. No law requires Hollywood to put its product on the internet. In fact, up until around five years ago with the rise of YouTube, Hollywood’s product came to people via totally separate pipes (cable and satellite) from speech. Hollywood wants to be on the internet because it’s cheaper for them, and their contention is that, now that Hollywood’s arrived on the ‘net, all other issues better take a back seat to their corporate profit mongering because nothing else matters but them. I don’t blame Hollywood for trying to pass this law – it’s their business after all and they should be fighting for their interests – but I do blame Congress for its utter lack of thought about the issues.

If Hollywood doesn’t want its product stolen, Hollywood should protect it better, and Congress certainly shouldn’t be taking away our speech in any event. Clearly, Netflix is doing just fine with uncopyable streaming content (as, by the way, is Hulu and every single TV network website that streams its TV shows). If you don’t give people a product they can copy… it won’t be copied. Put another way, if you don’t want your diamond bracelet to be stolen, maybe you shouldn’t leave it in the middle of Times Square.

The good news, if the these bills pass, is that you will be able to take down the website of your own Congressperson simply by accusing them of infringing your copyright, and by the time your false accusation gets sorted out in the courts, someone else will have been elected. In fact, I highly recommend that you issue takedown notices to all the members of the committees in both the House and Senate as well as the websites of all of the major Hollywood studios so their freedom of speech can be removed just like they’re lobbying for to be. Just sayin’…

Not To Be All Demanding Here But I Got Some Demands

Back Up And Tell It Right, Corporations, Redacting the News No Responses »

Oct 112011

The Setup

Occupy Wall Street has pushed a lot of – perhaps undefined – disassatifaction to the fore which, from my relationship-centric POV, really boils down to one problem: corporate America, you have boundary issues!

What Corporations Say

What’s good for us is good for everyone.

Back Up And Tell It Right

Um, no.

To be clear about something upfront, I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with corporations; rather, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the legally defined relationship between corporations and humans. The Supreme Court, since the early 20th century, has been treating corporations more and more like humans. To me, the Supreme Court has utterly failed to consider one essential question in granting these rights: what are the characteristics by which we define “human”?

The problem with the Supreme Court’s assessment and with American laws in general is that they’re very focused on what corporations should receive but not at all focused on what should they give up in exchange. This get/give exchange is inherent in human law because human law is predicated on the notion of other people – you can park at a meter but not all day because other people might want to park there too; you can have a BBQ but not in your apartment living room because other people might get hurt or their property damaged if there’s a fire; etc.

This sense of other people puts the brakes on some of our more selfish inclinations and can be summarized in two basic behavior-mitigating characteristics that corporations lack and which the law and the Supreme Court currently fail to take into account: size and sociality.

Size, aka Goliath Meet David, David Meet… Oh, I Guess He Already Ate You

Unlike corporations, humans don’t enter the world with a battalion of attorneys. For that reason, it’s rare that the law gets involved when humans settle differences with each other – we do this thing called “working it out” or, when working-it-out tanks, “dealing with it.” By contrast, human-on-corporation dispute resolution always involves either (a) the human losing the dispute or (b) the human paying for an attorney.

The problem is the David-and-Goliath financial inequality – human earns $40k, corporation earns $4 billion – which allows corporations to use the cost of engaging the legal system as a means of bludgeoning humans into submitting to corporate will (I’m looking at you, Monsanto!).

Barring a few exceptions, real humans are, basically, equal in size, meaning while sure there’s variation in income, physical strength, intelligence, etc., we’re all really just a bunch of Davids. The law needs to address this size inequity between humans and corporations by squeezing Goliath’s power down to David’s level, like by requiring corporations to pay our attorney fees upfront during disputes which can then only be reimbursed to the corporation if the human loses, a situation which might cause corporations to think twice – just like humans do – before stonewalling on settlements or taking things to court.

Sociality, aka But I Want It Now, Daddy!

Laws aren’t there to tell humans how to behave. Rather, laws are a function of how most humans behave most of the time anyway; laws are a consequence of the millions of years of evolution that resulted in us being the only species on Earth to cooperate extensively with groups of unrelated individuals. By contrast, laws ARE there to tell corporations how to behave because, in the absence of laws, corporations would behave in their own self-interest regardless of the consequences to those around them.

What we call “morals” or “ethics” are really just the constraints we evolved to put on our own behavior in order to reap the huge benefits we get from being in a group. It’s why we teach 2-year-olds to share; we rein in their natural instinct to keep everything for themselves so they will be better able to integrate with and connect to other people.

Sociality is why humans don’t need laws telling us not to steal; humans (barring some people obviously) don’t steal BECAUSE we’re human. By contrast, if there were no laws against stealing, corporations would be stealing from us and from each other nonstop. Along the same lines, a corporation would never give an anonymous donation because what would be the point (Exhibit A: Idol Gives Back) – how could the corporation get something out of it if it didn’t tell all the humans the amazing thing it had done? Humans, by contrast, give anonymously all the time because we have evolved with an inherent sense of relating to each other, feeling each other’s pain, and extending ourselves and our resources to each other with no thought of ever getting anything in return because sociality is a core component of our humanity.

This lack of inherent sociality is why corporations often get labeled as “greedy” or “evil” – because if a human behaved as self-centeredly and uncaringly as corporations do, that’s how the human would be labeled. Corporations aren’t human; thus, they can’t be “greedy” or “evil” either. However, because they’re not human, they have no idea how to behave among humans. The law, then, needs to remedy this by constraining corporate behavior so it more approximates the natural give-and-take of actual human beings. I believe part of Occupy Wall Street’s frustration is that Congress seems to be operating from the deeply bizarre perspective that we humans need to adapt to corporations’ non-human needs as opposed to forcing the non-humans to behave like the rest of us.

To put it another way, Mitt Romney and all you others who think corporations are people, let me just say, if you wind up with the terrible circumstance of having a heart attack, I hope, for your sake, that you are surrounded by, oh, a subway car filled with total strangers rather than a bunch of your corporate donors.

How About This For A Start

So Occupy Wall Street and 99%-ers, here are three demands (though believe me, I’ve got pleeeeeeeeeeeeeenty more, but this blog post is already getting too long), the ones related to size and sociality that upset this particular human; feel free to pass this on and/or add to it the ones that matter to you:

Pass laws preventing corporations from using my humanity against me. Yes I’m a human – I’ll make mistakes, I’ll get sick, I’ll make controversial lifestyle choices, I might be bad with paying off my credit cards, with dieting, with doing illegal drugs in my free time, with being kind to my friends. What does any of this have to do with me getting or keeping my job?
No mass consumer contract can ever take away or limit my rights. When, exactly, did we waive our right to trial by jury in favor of arbitration? How’d that shizz go down? Or how about this seemingly innocuous one: Amazon, via the Kindle, has decided to eliminate the “first-sale doctrine” (the law that allows people to give away or resell their books). Um, really? Hey, Amazon, if you want to prevent me from donating my Kindle books to hospitals or giving them to my mom, from selling them on Ebay or lending them to friends for whatever duration I choose, take it up with Congress, but who the Hades are you to eliminate a federal right just because you stuck some clause in a licensing agreement? The point of the first-sale doctrine, like many human laws, is sharing and giving up some self-interest in favor of a larger whole (see Sociality above). How come some self-serving corporate licensing agreement can override the balance of individual versus societal needs that forms the basis of our Constitution?
Get rid of limits on civil suit damages. Since you can’t put corporations in prison, the only meaningful punishment to a corporation is money, and, if the money amount isn’t commensurate with a particular company’s finances, the company won’t feel it. Civil amounts that would be ridiculous in David-on-David disputes – $5 million! – would barely be a rounding error for most Goliaths. Because humans (like juries and appellate judges) have such a hard time grappling with one human receiving so much cash, how about this: instead of juries awarding damages in dollar amounts, they award them as a percentage of a corporation’s 5-year average gross. That way a jury, without having any idea whether a company grosses on average $10,000 per year or $10 billion per year, could give a damage payment of, say, 12% or 20% or 3% or whatever the jury felt was fair irrespective of how much real money that percentage translated into. Congress’ weird notion is that somehow corporations will be treated unfairly by vengeful juries. In other words, Congress’ belief is that a system we entrust with being able to put aside bias in order to take away human life and liberty is somehow incapable of putting aside that bias when it comes to judging corporations. Really? Let me get this straight – corporations are the ones that require Congressional protections from humans? Huh. Who decided we humans were incapable of judging corporations fairly and that therefore corporations shouldn’t be held to human standards?

Bottom line: in Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi universe, even robots have three laws controlling robot-on-human interactions. So shouldn’t the non-humans in our present-tense real-world universe have a few as well?

“I’m Not Here To Make Friends!”

Back Up And Tell It Right, Hell's Kitchen, TV No Responses »

Aug 032011

Reality-show villains – like Elise from HELL’S KITCHEN for example – sure have a hard time doing two things at once.

The Setup

Elise is a reality-show staple, the contestant who has gotten into fights with more or less everyone on her team but sees everyone else as the problem. Her main techinques are the classics, talking over rather than to other people, escalating arguments instead of resolving them, etc. Having been put up for elimination twice because her team finds her to be disruptive in the kitchen, she vows that, from here on out, she’s going to prove she’s a team player.

What Elise Says

But then, in previews for next week’s episode, Elise, during a confessional, says that she’s not here to make friends, she’s here to win!

Back Up And Tell It Right

Elise’s line which, in my completely unscientific survey, has been said on every single confessional-based competition reality-show ever produced, begs a very simple question: why do people have such a hard time both making friends AND winning? Why, for them, is it either one or the other but not both? Well, it’s not just reality-show contestants who find themselves unable to distinguish being nice from losing. Many people feel that conciliatory or kind gestures undercut their positions during conflict. If you’ve ever been in a fight with someone and told yourself that they need to call you first because you’re certainly not calling them, then you’ve experienced exactly this feeling, the notion that reaching out equates to giving something up. It doesn’t. Expressing a desire to resolve the conflict isn’t the same as sacrificing your core principles; admitting someone is important to you doesn’t mean you’ve just handed them all the power in the relationship. Real winning, on HELL’S KITCHEN or otherwise, means being able to integrate the various ways you interact with the world around you – being friendly AND winning – rather than feeling a need to compartmentalize them – being friendly OR winning.

Friends are good, Elise, though you might want to work on that rubbery lobster…

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