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Bots, trolls, and my fellow Americans.

One of the things that's bothered me since the rise of Trumpism:   I feel I've lost contact with a part of my identity that was dear to me, lost touch with a deeply held value.  

I value this:  I desire to take people at their word.  I don't want to have a strawman image in my head of the people that I disagree with on this issue or that.  I want to understand their arguments on their own terms.  I want to begin with the assumption that my political opponents are sincere; that their beliefs are based on values that I can respect, even if they are different from mine; that everyone has a story that is worth listening to; that people may have different priorities from me, but nearly everyone wants some vision of good to prevail.

I try not to be naive.  Sometimes the values and priorities people have are wrong, worthy of opposition.  Often people say and do things that are very, very wrong.  But the people themselves are worthy of consideration, compassion, and---well---of being taken seriously.  If I didn't think so, what would be the point of engaging, of trying to win people over?

I've always tried to make sure that I stated opposing opinions as fairly as possible, in the same words that the holders of those opinions would use for themselves.  I've always tried to deal with people in terms that they and I can agree on.  Above all, I've always tried to avoid dismissing people as beyond hope.  Everyone, I thought, has some hope of being reached, either with logic or with compassion.

I mean, there's a point beyond which you stop trying, to protect yourself and to save your energies for where they might do some good.  But still you try, at least a little, or at least you try to salvage that hope in human nature.

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Trumpism, I confess, has destroyed some of that in me.  I have lost all capacity to give any benefit of the doubt to, say, evangelical Trump supporters, or the purportedly conservative commentators who used to give the appearance of caring about classical liberalism, civil liberties, and subsidiarity.  Not to mention the xenophobia, racism, and venom spewed towards immigrants of all types.  I can't find compassion in me for any of that.  I can't see a perspective in which I share any real values with any of these people, even in the most obscured and smudged and tattered way.

And I feel, in that, that it's me who's lost something.  It's troubling.  I don't want to be in a situation where I have lost so much hope in any of my fellow citizens.  It's like we don't belong to the same country.

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Which is why I sense an odd sort of hope in the news that our various organizations and social media platforms had been infiltrated by foreign agents intent on sowing discord.

The odd sort of hope comes in this:   I have a new way to think better thoughts about my fellow Americans.  

It's very odd because once upon a time, I found hope by assuming that people who expressed wrongheaded opinions were sincere, if misguided.

Now I can find hope by assuming that people who express wrongheaded opinions are not sincere at all.

I find that as I tool around Twitter or idly click through the comments section in newspapers, the dumbest and vilest opinions no longer bother me because I assume that they have been produced in a St. Petersburg troll factory with the blinds over the windows, or generated by some bot programmer's machine learning algorithm.

I don't have to worry that a significant fraction of my fellow Americans are completely unhinged, because I can merely assume that the totally unhinged messages don't come from Americans at all.  I don't have to despair at being unable to detect good will, because I can simply assume that there is no one of good will behind the messages.  There are only algorithms, and pieces of silver. 

This assumption makes them easy to ignore.  And it has mostly done away with my despair about the condition of the American people (although I am concerned about the impact of said bots on the electorate).  

If this vile opinion is probably not real, but is generated by a bot, then I don't have to feel sick that my fellow citizens are holding it.  

I suppose some of them might be unusually gullible Americans, who are only parroting things they learned from troll farms and bots.  I can't get too upset about gullible people.  I can feel hypothetically sorry for these hypothetical real Americans who are generating multiply-exclamation-pointed, red-hatted tirades.  But I also can't tell them apart from the bots. 

And I'm not about to waste my time and compassion on bots.

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I feel like I'm missing something somewhere.  Messages are coming in.   Messages of ignorance and wrong.   If a human being were saying such things, it would be worthy of engagement and rebuttal, worthy of trying to seek someone's conversion of heart.   But it turns out that only some fraction of the messages are coming from real humans who could potentially be reached by a reply.  The rest are generated by a machine or by an industry.  Is it our duty to reach back with compassion or not?  Does it depend on what fraction of the messengers are human? 

Maybe I should go watch Blade Runner again.  Perhaps I'll get some moral clarity.

 

Free agency.

Before Lent started I had been revisiting some self-help books from far back, when I was losing weight, or on-and-off trying to, and struggling with a constant onslaught of impulses that I could barely handle.  

One concept that I tried to wrap my head around, and didn't manage entirely, was the concept of accepting my own freedom of choice. 

I tended to insist on controlling myself and in forbidding myself freedom, rather than allowing myself freedom to choose, and then freely making the choices that accord with my long-term intentions.  But although this ended in the weight loss I sought, it didn't really make me "better" underneath.  I was and am still dependent on iron-fisted self-control, on slavish adherence to routines and numbers; I still waver between poles of triumph and panic.

Honestly, I think I succeeded the most in overcoming my underlying eating disorder when I came closest to doing this in reality, even if I never would have put it in so many words.   When I was saying to myself, "I don't do such-and-such anymore" instead of "I can't do such-and-such anymore."  Because although the improved health and strength of my body is an important metric for my success, it's not the only metric.  How things are inside my head, how I view the freedom to make choices; above all how much mental space and effort I allot to something that should really only occupy a small part.  

I'm trying to break the dependency on control, or at least it was what I was trying before Lent, and it's been difficult.  I'm trying to get away from thinking, "I have to stop... I have to change... I have to do things differently..." and move towards truer things like:  "I could choose to satisfy this momentary urge, or I could choose to experience it--without satisfying it--for the sake of working towards a longer-term intention." 

It's difficult.  I've barely scratched the surface of this dependency.  But I'm convinced it would be a healthier place than I've been for the past few years, and as much as I am struggling, I don't want to give up.  And at the same time since one of my real goals is to think about it less and not more I am worried that trying hard is counterproductive.

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I'm not sure that any of that made sense outside my own head, but let me move on anyway:

  It occurred to me this morning that maybe it's not just about food and exercise, but about so many other things that loom up to me as a kind of duty or obligation. 

I cannot count how many times a day I think to myself, "I have to..." when... I don't have to!

Maybe it's time I acknowledge the choices I in fact have?

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For example, take this one:  I have to get dinner ready by four-thirty today so it'll be done before I have to leave to take the boys for camping.

True?

Well... I could neglect to make dinner at all.  I could work on something else instead, or lock myself in my room and read a novel right up until it's time to leave. 

And if I did?  Would the world come to an end? 

I could, then, call Mark at work and say, "Listen, I didn't get dinner ready in time."  And he would suggest something:  that he could make dinner when he got home, or we could order carryout, or I could make a quicker soup and open a box of crackers, and the only consequence would be a somewhat later dinner.

I don't have to get dinner ready by four-thirty at all.

I could stop making dinner, period.  I don't have to make another home-cooked meal.  We could live on chilaquiles, delivered pizza, peanut butter sandwiches, and frozen entrées.  Mark and the children could cook more.  Mark and I could eat at restaurants more often, while I let the children make bags and bags of frozen pizza rolls at home.

I'm not going to do this.  I know I'm not going to stop making dinner.

But contrary to what I've been telling myself, it's not because I have to cook dinner every night.  It's because I choose to.  (And, arguably, because most of the time it's what I really want to do.) 

I could choose something different.  I could choose a lot of possible somethings-that-would-be-different.  A lot of those somethings would be objectively worse choices than I have been making.    Others would be completely acceptable and okay, and some might even be better.

I am lying to myself every time I say I have to cook dinner.

I'm freer than that.

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Or take the second part of that.  I have to drive the boys to their drop-off point so they can go camping this weekend.  

I don't actually have to do this.

I could call Mark and say "I changed my mind.  I'm not driving the boys across town this afternoon."  Then he could decide whether he wanted to leave work early and do it himself.  

Let me point this out:  I'm sure that would not be pleasant for him.  He'd be baffled as to what would have come over me.  (If I had done such a thing for a reason, such as having suddenly been taken ill, though, he'd adapt---that is one of the things that proves to me that I don't have to do it.)  He might even be angry, although I think baffled is more likely because it would really be unlike me.

And if he couldn't? or chose not to?  If that in turn caused the boys to miss their campout, they would be upset.  And some of the other boys on the campout, adults too, would be seriously inconvenienced, since one of my sons is supposed to be in a leadership role at the campout and others would have to scramble to make up for his absence.

I'm not going to decline to do what I promised, what others planned around.   It would be wrong to do so without a sufficient reason, and I don't have such a reason, and I don't want to inconvenience people, upset them, or go back on my promise.  These are reasons that I will do what I said I would do.

I'm going to continue choosing to do it.

It's not a have to.  

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I'm not sure what the point is of all this.  I think I need to think about it and meditate on it some more.  

I could see it going a few different ways.

First of all, let's acknowledge the great freedom that I have due to the privilege of my position.  Nearly all the constraints I feel myself to be in, from moment to moment, are imaginary constraints.  I have enough disposable income, and time, and various kinds of privilege to arrange my life as I see fit.  I don't really have to in the way that many other people have to do certain things, because I do not really find myself in any situation where the best alternative paths are frightening, dangerous, or irreversible.  If I grind myself down with "have to" is it not an insult, of sorts, to people whose "have tos" are more real than mine?

Second, maybe I should give myself--and by extension, other people--a little more credit as a relatively free agent, because only as a person who makes choices am I able to exercise love.  I don't often feel myself to be a loving person, a person who chooses love; and while it is a mark of humility to recognize one's failures to act in love, it doesn't strike me as a mark of humility to falsely deny love and the opportunities for love where they really are.  If I tell myself that I have to make dinner for my family, and I believe that, then doesn't this become the real reason that I make dinner?  But if I were to really acknowledge that I don't have to, can it become a free choice?  A really free choice?  And then do I acquire the ability to do it because I love them and I choose love?  Is this a necessary part of the "little way" of doing even our smallest duties as an act of love?

Finally, as a practical matter:  "Have tos" keep me from seeing possibilities that could be objectively better than the one I have pre-chosen.  It's not sensible to restrict oneself by false "have-to"s into a preplanned course of action, when circumstances change all the time and we ourselves, the planners, are fallible and can't always choose the best course from the beginning.  At any moment some better course of action might come along, and just  think what we lose out on when we are needlessly fixed on false have-tos.   For one thing, we might miss out on many opportunities for charity when we  say to ourselves, "I can't stop, I have to keep going."

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It's just a thought, still rather unformed.  I'm not sure where I'm going with it.  But one thing I think I say too much is "I have to figure out what I'm doing before I start." 

"I have to know the end before I begin." 

It's simply not always true.

Unexpected language study tip.

On Sunday afternoon I left the house, because that is the easiest way for me to concentrate:  stuffed a bag full of notebooks and pens, and headed to the car. 

My favorite places to work are coffee shops that serve food.  Restaurants want to turn over the table; ordinary coffee shops can leave you stuck with nothing but a croissant should you require sustenance.  What’s perfect is a place where I can spread my books over the table, drink coffee and work for a while, then wander up to the counter and order soup and a half sandwich, then stay drinking pots of herbal tea and scritching in my notebooks until I am good and ready to leave.

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I was muttering frustratedly to myself when the server brought me my grilled cheese and vegan butternut-squash soup and set it down in front of the chair opposite, where there was room among my books and papers.  She leaned over to remove the little flag with its take-a-number card, glanced down, and said, “Oh!  You’re studying Somali!  That’s so cool!  I know how to say a little bit, we had a workshop at work.”

”I literally just started,” I told her.  “I had my second class this week.”

”Where are you taking classes?”  I named the local community college.  “It’s a continuing ed program,” I said, “not for credit.”

”I heard that you could take it there,” she said.  “But it costs money, right?”

“Yes.  Not as much as taking it for university credit, though.  Six classes were, uh, something like $140.”  

“How’s it going?”  She had tucked the table flag under her arm.  

I put down my pen.  “Good, I think!  Like I said, I really have only just gotten started.  The first class was historical and cultural background information, mostly, and now I’m trying to learn how to pronounce the new consonants.”  

 

"Yes!"  she said excitedly.  "Some of those are really hard.  I know how to say 'my name is' and I had to practice that one with my coworker who speaks Somali.  Magacaygu Brittany.  She told me to say 'ma-ga' and then" [here she leaned back, lowered her eyelids and gave two thumbs up] "'ayyyyyyy!'  Maga-ayy!gu Brittany."  

She picked up some mugs from the neighboring table.  "Well!  Good luck!  Have fun!" and bustled back to the kitchen.

I looked down at my paper.

C - Voiced fricative pharyngeal.

Magacaygu.  Magacaygu Erin.

"Maga-ayygu."

 Who says there's no voiced fricative pharyngeal in English?

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Do you remember learning to whistle?  I barely do, but I've been watching my 8yo do it for a month or so.  I showed him how to purse his lips and put his tongue, and he worked until he got the faintest little hint of a whistle when he blew.  "Start there, and keep trying," I told him.  I've been noticing him walking about the house puffing and working his mouth, the little whistles getting stronger and stronger; he's controlling it better and better as he goes.  Now that he's adjusting his lips and tongue and diaphragm in response to the feedback he gets from his own ears, he's improving; but he needed to learn how to make that thin, high near-whistle before he could even start practicing on his own.

I'll have to check with the instructor next class... but perhaps my waitress's channeling of the Fonz will give me a place to start, at least with the letter C.