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Competition Below the Surface

They are inevitable, normal, even, at time, useful – but does that make them good? Can we justify taking pleasure in the misfortune of another, or, as the German’s put it, “Schadenfreude?” Or can we keep ourselves from being envious of other’s good fortune? (See, “Our Pleasure in Others’ Misfortune.”)

A professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, Richard H. Smith, notes that we are comparing and judging each other all the time. In a new book, he wrote: “Vegetarians need not say a word; their very existence, from a meat eater’s point of view, is a moral irritant.”

The underlying issue here is that in every case our self-esteem is involved. Vegetarians irritate carnivores because their behavior implies they see themselves as superior. If the vegetarian is self-righteous, so much the worse. That would be hard for a carnivore to forgive.

But, then, vegetarians can’t help feeling superior. They made the choice to give up meat. There are different reasons for those choices, of course, not always grounded in moral or ethical considerations. Some just feel better when their digestive systems don’t have to cope with meat. Some just want to make their mother’s lives harder. But there is always the implication that the same reasons apply to others as well. You’ll feel better. You’ll be healthier. You’ll be better.

Which brings us to schadenfreude. When someone suffers a misfortune, we may not think they brought it on themselves. But we can’t help thinking, “Thank god, that’s not us.” We may not get credit for our good fortune, but there is no doubt we think we are better off. Far from deserving the complacent pity of others, we will be the object of their envy. We have not lost our jobs. Our house was not damaged by the storm. Our daughter got into Harvard.

In both envy and schadenfreude we are the targets of another’s vicarious emotion. In one it is provoked by our good fortune, in the other by our misfortune. But usually we did nothing to create either response. We deserve neither praise nor blame. They are unconscious by-products of living our lives. Together they form a continuous stream of inner commentary on our interactions with others.

But as they are socially disapproved, they create psychological dilemmas for us, reflecting badly on us if we allow them to show. Schadenfreude is somewhat more acceptable if we can agree that the person brought misfortune upon himself. In that case our pleasure is masked, and we can all join in blaming the victim. With envy it’s best to remain silent, as it is almost impossible to get people to own up to it.

Dr. Smith concludes that schadenfreude “need not be demonized.” Better to embrace the opportunity it provides to indulge our dark sides than to deny its existence. He’s right, of course, although “indulging” our dark sides is not exactly how I’d put it. Just acknowledging it to ourselves can help us to feel less guilty about what we can’t help feeling.

As The New York Times put it in its report on Professor Smith’s research: “So long as it remains passive, schadenfreude can enhance our self-worth and serve as a reminder that even the most enviable people are fallible — just like us.” It’s part of being human.

How the NSA Became Stupid

While we most of us were busy unwrapping presents on Christmas, The Wall Street Journal published an article on the NSA’s data collection. The point was not that it violated privacy – which is true – but that they were gathering far more than they could use. In short, it was also stupid.

The Journal cited William Binney, a retired, high ranking and long time NSA employee who worked on its computer code, speaking at a conference on privacy in Switzerland: “What they are doing is making themselves dysfunctional by taking all this data.”

The article went on to comment: “The agency is drowning in useless data, which harms its ability to conduct legitimate surveillance . . . Analysts are swamped with so much information that they can’t do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse.”

The article described efforts by Binney, Ed Loomis, head of a research center to monitor the data, and others, to sift through the vast troves of messages to find important and useful information. They “built a system to scrape data from the Internet, throw away the content about U.S. citizens and zoom in on the leftover metadata—or the ‘to’ and ‘from’ information in Internet traffic. They called it ThinThread.”

The agency scotched that plan, and went for one called “Trailblazer.” But, the Journal noted, “Trailblazer’s data-filtering system was never built, either. Instead, NSA officials secretly sought and won support for an array of programs to conduct warrantless wiretapping of phone and Internet content. They got similar approval to collect and analyze metadata from nearly every U.S. phone call and vast swaths of Internet traffic.” (See, “NSA Struggles to Make Sense of Flood of Surveillance Data.”)

The net result is the bloated, inefficient system we now have, one that succeeds in compromising constitutional safeguards against the invasion of privacy while failing to find the information we need to be safe. How to account for these failures?

On an individual level, it is a product of obsession, a heightened focus on one thing that leads to a kind of tunnel vision, ignoring context and meaning. In short, if your job is to collect secret data, you can’t know when enough is enough or when to stop, because your job is to get as much data as possible, not to think about what to do with it or why we need it. And if you have real enemies, it easily becomes a paranoid obsession. Then you really can’t stop, because you all too easily succumb to the illusion that one more bit of information will make you safe.

On a group or organizational level, it means lack of leadership or oversight. The technical functions and the technology required to succeed exist in a silo or a vacuum. It is similar to what happened to the banks during the credit crisis when ambitious rogue traders were generating huge profits by manipulating algorithms that their managers did not understand. Their job was just to make money, as much money as possible, while the managers, mesmerized by the profits and afraid to show their ignorance, stood by and let it happen – until the system blew up.

How smart do you have to be in order not to be too smart?

The Instagram Generation

Obama was caught taking a selfie at Mandela’s memorial service. Was he trying to show that, unlike the other world leaders there, he was just like the rest of us, an ordinary guy?

Sheri Turkle, noting the incident, commented: “Until recently . . . people didn’t seem to feel like themselves unless they shared a thought or feeling . . . . These days, we still want to share, but now our first focus is to have, to possess, a photograph of our experience.”

It is astonishing how frequently cell phone cameras are used, not to capture an interesting image or unusual event, but just to mark a passing moment on a street corner, munching a hot dog, or with friends in front of a landmark. And then there are selfies. What’s it all about?

Turkle argues against the practice, noting: “When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.” The price we pay for our constant stream of texts and images is a loss of thoughtfulness.

She adds: “These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device. In a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts.” (See, “The Documented Life.”)

She’s right, of course. But the more interesting question is “Why do we do it?”

She implies it happens when we are bored or lonely, and that certainly has to be part of the answer. But do we also fear fading away without documentation? Or that, unrecorded, we aren’t real? Are our selfies our personal “media,” so that if The Daily Beast doesn’t get around to noticing us on the red carpets of our lives, we try to make sure somebody does?

There are many reasons for taking photos, of course, but I think a common thread running through them all is that the photos add a sense of importance. Documenting our lives them helps make them seem, well, worth documenting. The pics and tweets don’t actually make us more important, to be sure, but they create the illusion of importance.

So, then, we must do it because our daily lives don’t actually feel important enough, not compared with the constant stream of celebrity coverage and reality TV. The soldiers who took the now infamous photos at Abu Graib were standing in for the absent media. They couldn’t possibly anticipate the full extent of the world-wide attention they ended up getting, but clearly they were asking for it. Those who “leaked” the photos were realizing the unconscious intent of those who took them.

And if something news worthy does occur, such as a terrorist bombing at the finish line at the Boston marathon, those with cell phones stand ready to record history – and, for a brief moment, they actually are important.

Leaning From History or Revising It?

Reading about Nelson Mandela’s career, as we mourn his death, we might never know that he had been branded a “terrorist” by our government, joined the Communist party at one point, or had been vehemently opposed by American conservatives such as Dick Chaney, George Will and William Buckley who fought efforts to support his anti-Apartheid campaign.

Such awkward facts have been air-brushed out of the American press coverage. As a result, we have a “hero.” But we are in danger of losing the man, a remarkable and complex man, who tenaciously struggled to free his people against great odds and without much support from the rest of the world – and who succeeded.

Bill Keller in The New York Times did call attention to the fact that he probably was a member of a communist party for a while. He does not hold that against Mandela, noting that his alliance with the communists says “less about his ideology than about his pragmatism. He was at various times a black nationalist and a nonracialist, an opponent of armed struggle and an advocate of violence, a hothead and the calmest man in the room, a consumer of Marxist tracts and an admirer of Western democracy, a close partner of Communists and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists.” (See, “Nelson Mandela, Communist.”)

Keller’s glib, symmetrical prose emphasizes the vital point that Mandela was committed to his goal, above all else, and willing to change tactics and forge alliances to get there – though he is troubled by the communist connection and worried about its impact.

Al Jazeera gives the most convincing account of his achievement. The Arabic news service quoted David James Smith, author of Young Mandela: “He was very much inspired by the revolution in Cuba . . . with a view to using that as a model for revolutionary activity in South Africa.” (See, Mandela’s radicalism often ignored by Western admirers.”)

Al Jazeera went on to quote Stephen Ellis, a professor of African history in the Netherlands, author of the most exhaustively researched study of Mandela’s career: “First and foremost he was a black African, and that was where his heart and his politics lay.”

Ellis notes that Mandela supported Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat and vehemently opposed western efforts to “liberate” Iraq. That makes perfect sense, given his experience of struggle against western colonial powers who were, to put it mildly, slow to embrace his cause “He stood for very firm anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist values . . . but ideologically he would always be first with Castro and independence leaders in Africa.”

“In 2003 he lambasted the United States and the United Kingdom for ‘attempting to police the world’ over their military intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and the invasion of Iraq.”

When I first thought of writing this post, my idea was to call it: “Mandela: Hero, Terrorist, or Fallible Human Being.” But I came to think that would have been redundant. To be a human being is to be imperfect, hopefully willing to suffer and to learn. The truth is that he was all of those things at various times – and more.

To recognize that variety and flexibility, in the service of his steadfast goal, might be the best tribute we could offer.

What Even Our Debates Can’t Acknowledge

Municipal finances are a mess, as exemplified by Detroit’s filing for bankruptcy, while other cities teeter on the edge.

It’s not a new problem. We have known for years about the fiscal manipulations city governments and states have engaged in to “balance” their budgets, which is to say to appear to live within their means. They can’t print money, like the US government, and the politicians can’t raise taxes and expect to be reelected – especially as taxes have become such a hot political issue. So they have gotten into the habit of borrowing from their pension funds year after year, engaging in slights of hand to make it work. And we have looked the other way.

Now, time has run out. Retired workers need their pensions, but the funds are depleted — and we still find it hard to face the underlying truths. As usual, we don’t really want to know about the massive collusions that masked the problem for years. Too many people are implicated, but, more importantly, to do that would expose the underlying rifts in our fraying social compact. Who is to pay? The 1% or, as usual, the 99%? The unions who negotiated unrealistic benefits? The tax-payers? Wall Street firms that charged exorbitant fees for managing the funds while endorsing inaccurate projections?

All the answers reflect different competing interests. That was revealed in a “debate” The New York Times just organized on the subject. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t a debate at all, as the various sides talked past each other, trying to impose their version of the truth on the reader. But it provided an opportunity to see the extent and complexity of the collusions that have led to this impasse. (See, “The Public Pension Problem.”)

The co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank, makes the point that the pension funds were paid for by the workers themselves out of their salaries. The pensions are debts, not entitlements or gifts, and he goes on to note that, restructured, they could actually be paid out by local governments over time. Those are good points, but that casts into the shadows the fact that for years municipal unions exploited local politics to negotiate sweet-heart deals.

A scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank funded by the Koch brothers, concedes that the majority of public pensions benefits should be paid, but leads off his comments by noting that, “in bankruptcy, nothing should be off the table. More important, cities and states need the right, which is taken for granted in the private sector, to alter the rate at which public employees earn future benefits.” Pensions must be “brought under control.”

That suppresses the fact that cities and states knowingly dipped into the funds to avoid covering their commitments, and many of them relied on the credit bubble to avoid making any contributions at all.

A director of research at the Center for Popular Democracy, which supports liberal causes, suggests New York should set up its own in-house management for pension funds. That would reduce the excessive cost of managing pension funds — a good point, but one that ignores the likelihood of continuing political influence and the “revolving door” between government and the financial industry.

A staff member at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank devoted to “market based solutions,” argues against blaming Wall Street, noting that even renegotiated management fees would be a drop in the bucket. State and local governments “should certainly rein in payments to Wall Street. But eventually, [they are] still going to have to rein in retirement benefits, too.” That sounds balanced and fair, but covers over the fact that the sums involved are wildly disproportionate.

None of these comments is exactly wrong, but they don’t really help us to understand what is going on. The Canadian publisher of Pension Pulse, perhaps the commentator most outside our compromised system, notes the value of what other countries do. Canada has independent investment boards, and Holland has the principle of shared risk.

We, on the other hand, we have a long tradition of deluding ourselves with economic fantasies, in this case the belief that “public pension funds will be able to attain their 8 percent investment bogey over a sustained period,” when interest rates are at historic lows.

He concludes: “These ridiculous investment targets have led to an even bigger problem, excessive risk taking among U.S. public pension funds that have allocated a large portion of their assets into alternative investments like private equity, real estate and hedge funds. . . . U.S. public pension funds are wasting billions in fees praying for an alternatives miracle that will never happen.”

The justification for such fees is to avoid facing the contradictions built into our system. But even The Times contributes to the mystification by sponsoring a “debate” that avoids looking squarely at the fault lines and conflicts that explain how we got here and, moreover, gives special interests the chance to plead their case.