Author: ken

Inhibited Thinking, Awkward Speaking

I am continually impressed by the stereotyped and mentally gagged quality of American responses to Israel.  We sound virtually impaired.  “It is almost impossible,” as Tony Judt put it in The New York Times, “to discuss the Middle East without resorting to tired accusations and ritual defenses.” (See, “Israel Without Cliches.”)

We tend to fall into polarized positions, unqualified justification for its actions or denunciation of its atrocities.  Somewhere between these extremes there are occasional halting expressions of regret for some unfortunate incident, usually including the obligatory reference to our “special relationship” that remains strong  Beneath the surface, there are strong and frequent hints of frustration.

This is in remarkable contrast with Israeli’s capacity to criticize and even ridicule the actions of their own government.  The recent attack on the boats bringing relief supplies to Gaza is a case in point.  The Israeli daily Haaretz proclaimed:  “Gaza Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity.”

Obviously an outsider is more likely to be thought of as intrusive, insensitive or uninformed. But given the level of interaction between our two countries, there is an exceptional degree of knowledge on both sides.  Why can’t we speak more freely?

Our inhibition suggests two things:  guilt and fear.  The guilt, I suspect, is about exposing our always-present, usually-latent anti-semitism.  The recent outburst by Helen Thomas, the “Dean of White House Correspondents,” establishes that anti-semitism in America is still very much alive and not so far beneath the surface, even in sophisticated circles.  The fear is that in frankly criticizing Israel we will seem to give support to such sentiments, or even ammunition.  We would share in the guilt of letting it out of the bag.

And then there is the threat of recrimination and disloyalty.   If we allowed ourselves to voice our dismay or our criticisms, we fear we would be blamed – and perhaps even end up blaming ourselves – for contributing to Israel’s vulnerability.  What if the Arab press should pick it up what we say among ourselves and use it as further evidence of what they are already convinced is true?

So we engage in ineffectual, heated outbursts or we ritually mumble clichés.  I hope that behind the scenes diplomats can still have, as they like to say, a “frank exchange of views.”  Even if we can’t, the diplomatic process requires a bit more reality.

Our governments may be trapped in trying to balance competing – and, possibly, irreconcilable — interests.  But our being tongue-tied can hardly contribute to the thinking we desperately need to grasp these complicated issues.

Denial of Reality – or Refusal

It is now clear that for several years big banks and other financial institutions seriously denied the risks they faced with sub-prime mortgages.  Making so much money from packaging, securitizing, and “insuring” them, they fooled themselves into believing there was little if any risk.  Caught up in their competition with each other, bankers literally lost sight of reality.  But what are they doing now with the toxic assets still on the books?

According to Gretchen Morgenson in Sunday’s New York Times, some version of the problem continues:  “Among the more glaring bookkeeping fictions on big banks’ balance sheets today are the values they assign to all of the bounteous second mortgage loans, doled out during the mortgage bonanza. As any realist will attest, many of these loans are worth little, and yet there they sit, at fantasy levels, on banks’ ledgers.”

But this is not the old denial.  It’s not even a psychological issue.  In this case, Morgenson makes clear, the banks seem to know exactly what they are doing.

The two big federal mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now in receivership, are trying to get banks to pay back the bad loans they are obligated to cover:  “Surprise, surprise: banks don’t want to repurchase these loans. So when Fannie or Freddie identify problem mortgages and request repayment, a battle royal begins.”

Morgenson points out that if “banks refuse to buy back flawed loans, taxpayers will have to cover more of the losses.”  A lot of money is at stake:  “According to March 31 figures from Freddie, for instance, the amount of problem loans that it has asked other firms to buy back stood at $4.8 billion — up 26 percent from $3.8 billion just three months earlier.”  In other words, the banks are becoming increasingly recalcitrant.

To observers who are not psychologically informed, this behavior may look the same as what went before.  But it is vital to discriminate willful behavior from mass delusion.  Morgenson writes:  “denial is a powerful thing, after all, and writing off troubled loans during a period of severe stress is, for bankers, the equivalent of getting a root canal.”  (See “Banks Say No. Too Bad Taxpayers Can’t.”

But this is different from what went on in the euphoria of the credit bubble.  It is more like the “moral hazard” so many feared would be the result of rescuing banks deemed “too big to fail.”  In refusing to pay off their debts, the banks are acting as if they’ve learned that they don’t need to be accountable.

But perhaps it is also a reflection of their increased power.  With friends in the administration and lobbyists in congress, perhaps they have come to feel that they can push back.  They don’t have to do what is against their interests.

A Personal View

A recent Gallup poll has found that people generally get happier as they age.  Published two weeks ago, the survey reveals:  “Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off . . . .  Enjoyment and happiness both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.”  (See, “Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says.”)

Researchers tried unsuccessfully to link the results to four variables: gender, living with children, having a partner, and employment.  So the explanation is not obvious.  But let me offer a personal view.

Our culture puts a premium on achievement.  In order to take our place in the world, we need to have goals and, inevitably, we feel pressure to achieve them.  But, as we age, that pressure diminishes.  This happens in two ways:  we actually get closer to achieving our goals as we work and struggle to understand better what it is possible to achieve.  We learn about the world.  And, then, those original goals lose their force.  New experiences lead to other goals and interests.  We acquire a better understanding of what matters and what we really want.

In short, as we age, we have the opportunity to accept who we are, instead of focusing on who we feel we need to become. We relax into being ourselves.  Our faces start to look like who we are.  And the world settles into more and more familiar patterns.  That acceptance brings diminished anxiety and a higher degree of enjoyment.

I am not talking about professional ambitions alone, but the kind of life goals that are common to most of us:  raising children, owning a home, having a decent job, becoming competent at some skill, paying back our parents, helping others, caring for animals, making a contribution to our communities, being a good friend.  I could go on, but such ambitions are the stuff of life.  When we start out, we don’t know for sure what we can achieve.  We feel an urgency not fail, not only to gain the approval of others but also to approve of ourselves by succeeding at what we value – by doing what we can.  But it is not until we are older that get begin to feel that we have gotten there.

Not everyone gets there, of course.  Emotional conflicts, insecurities, and ambivalence get in the way.  So do the accidents of life, war, financial setbacks, and illness.  And some are luckier than others in finding opportunity.  But, by and large, the statistics get better as more of us come to terms with our goals.  My hunch is that the tipping point happens, on average, in the early fifties.

We can’t work directly at being happy.  It is a by-product of a satisfying life, a life well lived.  But we do get better at living our lives, and that brings an increase in happiness.

Two Ways of Controlling Emotions

We expect soldiers to control their emotions of fear, rage and grief, even under the most extraordinary pressures.  Not only do such powerful emotions get in the way of the difficult judgments they have to make in combat, it has often become a point of pride for them to be tough, disciplined, immune to emotional “weakness.”  But that can come at a cost.

Nancy Sherman, University Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown, pointed out over the weekend, that so many soldiers who are caught up in their stoical behavior, eventually cry out for relief:  “They wanted to register the complex inner moral landscape of war by finding some measure of empathy with their own emotions. One retired Army major put it flatly to me, ‘I’ve been sucking it up for 25 years, and I’m tired of it.’”

Professor Sherman elaborates:  “The Stoic doctrine is essentially about reducing vulnerability…. Virtue [is] based on reason only, and shorn of ordinary emotions, like fear and grief that cling to objects beyond our control.” (See, “A Crack in the Stoic’s Armor.”)

But is “sucking it up” really stoicism?  Or is it based on a fear of emotions?  No doubt some of the soldiers who suppress what they feel seek to avoid looking “weak”?  Or they could be the victims of a well-established military convention, an entrenched expectation?  They might be trying to live up to a group norm of manliness and strength?

It could also be that, for some, the fear of strong emotions leads to their dissociation, the loss of conscious awareness they exist.  In that case, there is a good chance they will reappear at some point in the future.  They have not really been extinguished.

We can make a useful distinction between the mindfulness and self-control of someone who actively seeks a better way to live, on the one hand, and the conformity of someone embracing a norm he or she has never questioned, on the other.  The former will have pondered how others have lived their lives and considered the choices they have.  The other needs the kind of help Professor Sherman is seeking to offer.

There are other pathways of reflection and emotional peace.  Buddhism seeks a remedy for the suffering that comes from attachment.  Christianity has proposed prayer and the acceptance of God’s will.  There are others.

My point is not to propose the right way for us to manage our emotions.  As a psychologist, I am in favor of being having and knowing and expressing them.  But one has to respect those who strive to find another way – especially under repeated, extreme and painful circumstances.

The two kinds of stoicism can look the same, but they lead their adherents in diametrically different directions.

Can We Take It Seriously?

The more complicated a project gets, the greater the risk something will go wrong.  The more interconnected the systems become for managing it, the greater the inevitability for catastrophic failure.  We see this now with oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.  We saw it two years ago with the credit crisis.  It happened with NASA.  It’s now a fact of life.

As David Brooks put it in Friday’s New York Times, we are at “the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.”  Here (in my words) is his summary of our psychological failures.

*     Focused on our own piece of the puzzle we fail to see the interconnectedness of the whole.

*     We get used to risk, and discount it.

*     We put too much faith in the back-up systems that are supposed to deal with the risks we do pay attention to.

*     Management, preoccupied with the pressure for greater productivity, is not geared to deal with failure.

*     We tend to discount bad news.

*     Groupthink eliminates the thinking that might alert us to existing problems.

For someone who is not a psychologist, he offers a brilliant summary of the interlocking issues we all face in such circumstances.  (See, “Drilling for Certainty.”)

But there is one missing element:  the motivation for change.  What is needed to overcome these powerful cognitive, emotional and group tendencies?  Part of the problem is that there are powerful motivations to neglect the warning signs of danger, many of them suggested in Brooke’s list.  To go against the group’s coercive power, for example, means being willing to arouse its dislike, possibly even its derision.  Whistle blowers don’t usually have an easy time of it.  There is, as well, the expense of caution and delay, and the pressure of bosses who want immediate results.

But much of the power of the psychological factors Brooks outlines comes from the fact that they operate unconsciously.  Even when faced with obviously clues, people simply do not want to think thoughts that are inconvenient, difficult, and stand a chance of making them unpopular.  They may not even notice the evidence that something is wrong.  If a convenient scapegoat is not available to take the blame, an easy way to “solve” the problem, the usual resolution is to allow the information to simply disappear out of our minds.

People can be trained, however, to pay attention to the hints or fleeting signs of unconscious thoughts.  Moreover, they can work together to pick up on unformulated feelings, or hunches that something just doesn’t seem right.  The unwanted information can be reclaimed.

But to do this would require determination – and incentives.  We would need to have a collective understanding of our unconscious tendencies and how they operate in the workplace.  We would also need to put pressure on organizations to make the investment in such reflective processes.

Though extra thought can seem expendable, and we may never know for sure what disasters will have been averted as a result, it may be our key to a safer world.