The Blame Game ...

Blame Game and Finger-Pointing

I keep coming back to Steve Roberts' wonderful little book of essays  entitled Cool Mind, Warm Heart.  I read it again recently on a short  trip to the East Coast, back in November.  It contains  numerous words of wisdom applicable to our  current situations and  daily lives, I think.  There is an interesting passage in the book that is quite  relevant to what I'd like to discuss today, "The Blame Game".  In an  essay entitled "It Breaks My Heart To Vote" he says:

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It seems to me that among the addictions listed in Steve's essay, our addiction to blaming others for our pain is especially important.  It often fans the flames of our other addictions, and is the reason why we often get stuck in those unhealthy patterns of mind and thought that Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön talks so beautifully about in her book "Practicing Peace in Times of War", which I quoted from in another post.  Examples of such behavior are far too many in the U.S., and the corporate and mass media is pandering to such meaningless blame games all the time.

"The concept would be great if I had thought of it first."

In fact, come voting time and you see how political ads zoom in on blame tactics. And why shouldn't they?  We buy into these games all too easily.  Those running the mass media are well aware that we are conditioned to blaming others for anything that we are unhappy about.  While most of us would be more or less happy to take credit for various things, rarely is any of us  willing to take responsibility for anything that may require extra time, thought, energy, and resources to fix.  After all, taking the blame may blemish our immaculate record of outstanding accomplishments.  Too often, even those who take the responsibility do not even really mean it.  Not really!  Dr. Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect, gives a very illuminating example of such empty and meaningless acceptance of responsibility during the Q&A segment of his talk at google not too long ago.  I highly recommend this talk, if you would have the time.  If you are pressed for time, however, you can simply listen to the question asked here,   and to Dr. Zimbardo's answer.  Quite interesting!

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We are too busy, too arrogant, too ignorant, too narcissistic, too confused.  We are trained to feel hopeless, helpless and to seek help from an outside agency to come to our rescue, be it God, a saint, the government, a  leader, you name it.  All too often, the only thing we are ready and willing to do is to pray to the right God or go vote for the right candidate, or follow the right talk-show host.  We are too proud of our country and our countrymen, our this and our that, to realize that there is a lot of mess going around that needs much more than a right leader with enough cash at his or her disposal.  Besides, as explained By Elizabeth Warren in here, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, what happens behind closed doors is often meant to maintain the Status quo, which leads to greater inequality and more concentration of resources and power in fewer and fewer hands, no matter what is claimed in public.

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We don't realize that if we are not happy about things, then it is up to us to  help correct things.  This often means working extra hard to learn and to educate.  It means to be willing to join hands in fixing things with our fellow citizens, friend and foe alike.  Our understanding of democracy is extremely narrow and lop-sided.  We think that all we need to do is to vote and pay taxes, and then things should magically take care of themselves.  Well, it is not that easy it seems.  We are passing the buck and the responsibility too. cause it is too damn difficult to correct things, but it is too damn easy to complain.  We say it is too difficult to take care of our daily lives, to put food on the table, pay the bills, put the house in order, do the laundry, wash the dishes, throw out the garbage, ... and still have to know what is happening around us, and being aware of the political, societal, environmental, and economic issues.

We think that it is just not humanly possible to do all this and yet be informed and engaged at a deep level.  Well, many of our leaders are humans too, and they often learn to take the easy way out, like we do.  Any smart politician realizes after a while, that being honest, caring, and trying to understand the true interests of their constituents would take too much time, is too damn hard and not much appreciated by any of their constituents.  Their constituents are too busy to help them find out what is actually going on, what is the right thing to do, and why.  An average constituent cannot be counted on to help, as he is mainly concerned with his immediate and personal problems and does not have an interest in anything else.  At the same time, the politician has various lobbyists and special interest groups all over them watching any moves he or she makes.

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These corporate lobbyists  have enough cash at their disposal to create a spectacle  out of any tiny misstep by the politician (that is not in line with their perceived interest or that of their employers.)  These lobbyists are very effective in convincing the politicians that it is either their way or the highway.  So, after a while, most of the politicians would give in to the pressure so as to have an easier time being reelected.  Otherwise, they are going to learn their lessons the hard way.  Well, I hope we grow a bit wiser and realize that we need to get informed and involved, and that taking shortcuts often hurt us in the long run.  I hope that we realize that it is up to us to make the effort to help bring about the change we'd like to see.  As the constitution says, "We the people ..."

I recently watched a fascinating documentary called PsyWar, which I highly recommend.  In one of the more interesting segments of the movie, Noam Chomsky discusses James Madison and some of his concerns in framing the U.S. constitution.  Here is how Chomsky explained the concern:

Now, that is an enlightening way to put things  So, the question is whose solution would have been better.  Aristotle's or Madison's?  To explore the problems with extreme inequality in the society, one may wish to do an online search on the subject.  I found the following sites quite interesting:

• Working Group on Extreme Inequality
• Institute for Policy Studies (Inequality and the Common good)
• Other 98 Percent
• Wealth for the Common Good

When the public gives in to the temptations and traps laid out for them by the spin-masters and let the self-serving mass media pick the important issues for them, then they would be out of touch with the realities that may bite them hard.  This morning I was listening to an interview with Harry Belafonte that illustrated this point:

Throughout the history, undoubtedly there have always been numerous problems.  Many fascinating people much smarter than me have had to deal with countless issues and miseries including wars, slavery, diseases, famine, rubbery, natural disasters, you name it.  However, we feel that now (the time period that we live here on earth) must be absolutely perfect.  Why?  I guess it might be because we feel we are so damn perfect.  Isn't it rather arrogant? We feel that there is injustice targeted at us (those targeted at others are not our problem, even when we are paying for it, ordering it, or committing it) and we complain back and forth why things are not perfect.  Yet, we don't want to spend the necessary effort to find out what is wrong, why, how it needs to be fixed, and perhaps even more importantly, what we should do and are willing to do to help correct the problems.

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First, we try to ignore things and postpone paying any attention to them as long as we possibly can.   We waste our times in all sorts of ways and call it entertainment.  We fill our consciousness with useless gadgets and trivial pursuits.  We follow the crowd and take our cue from the mass media, their favorite entertainers, pollsters, analysts, and scam artists.  Then things go so wrong that we feel overwhelmed by the devastation and suffering we have to go through. Then we start to pray, hope, wish and expect for God, saints, our compatriots, the big corporations, the super-wealthy, and our leaders to come to our rescue and to fix things for us.  We expect them to lead us the to Utopia by finding the way there, construct the highway, pave it, and let us know when it is safe and ready to drive on.  Well, from the outset, looks like the road to Utopia is going to be very long and winding, and that it is not going to be built any time soon, if ever!  It seems to me that even our belief in God is to a large extent an escape from taking the responsibility of going through the daunting task of finding things out for ourselves by working hard and not giving up in the face of difficulties and many failed attempts.  We see things that we dislike, and expect someone with magical powers called God to come to show us the way out of the mess.  All we need to do it to follow a few simple (well not so simple) rules he has set forth.   But this post is already getting very long.  So, I will postpone my thoughts about religion to a future post.  If you won't be offended, I recommend this skit by late George Carlin.

In closing, let me share a letter that I wrote to Senator Barbara Boxer of California, upon receiving an email from her office in my mail box containing this message.   Here is what I wrote back: