Idea Laundering

Consider this idea: the government forces you to pay taxes at the end of a gun. 

It may seem ludicrous to you. The IRS does not use guns. Nobody has ever stuck a gun to you and told you to pay taxes. But most people also never refuse to pay them. We accept them as a requirement, so we don't really contemplate what would happen if we didn't pay. I challenge you to try to do just that though. 

If you don't pay your taxes, you may get a letter telling you to do so. If you ignore the letter, they'll send more. Future letters may also include increased fines. Ignoring them will lead to debt collectors harassing you to pay. Ignoring the debt collectors will eventually lead to some authority being called. By not paying your taxes, the police will eventually take you to jail, and if you refuse that, a gun will be drawn and targeted at you. And finally, you are forced to pay taxes at the end of a gun. 

Look how incredibly long it takes though. There are so many layers and so many months or years involved. The average person simply cannot see through all of these layers. 

This process works very similarly to money laundering. If you take an amount of money and use it to buy and sell and trade over and over again, eventually you will create so many layers that people just can't care enough to see it all. 

I think of this as idea laundering. It is a particularly effective means of obfuscating the truth, and one that rhetoricians should be well aware of. 

Subtlety

Subtlety is when you make a point without announcing that you've made a point.

I recently watched the movie Network. It's a movie from the 1970s that was prophetic in its depiction of TV news changing from journalistic integrity to a three-ring circus. The movie has a famous scene where a news anchor who is "tired of the bullshit" and is ranting on air about the sorry state of the world commands the people to go to their windows, stick their heads out, and shout, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore." The call to action was monumental in its scope and its effectiveness. The TV network turned the anchor into a celebrity, giving him his own show that was an absolute spectacle. At the beginning, the studio audience shouted that same line, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," but there was no conviction in them. They had blank stares and hollow power. They shouted it the same way a studio audience shouts out, "wheel of fortune."

And never once in this movie did they mention it. The whole story was about the network, about the corruption of minds and brainwashing of the people, and the characters did talk about it, but never once did they bash you over the head and demand that you acknowledge their symbolism. What they did was subtle, and I appreciated it. 

Functional States

The word "functional" has two meanings. The first is that it works the way it is supposed to (i.e. being not broken). The second is that something operates in the se way is a completely different thing. 

If you go out to the farm and see a big red tractor that turns on and can pull a trailer around the field, then it is a functional tractor (in the first definition). If you go to a farm and you see a station wagon pulling a hitched-up trailer around the field, then it's a function tractor (in that it isn't actually a tractor, but it functions in all the same ways that a tractor does). 

This second definition I find endlessly fascinating. It's like saying "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it is functionally a duck." It doesn't matter if it's a duck or a man in a duck suit or a fox in a zebra suit; when it covers all the factors that are relevant to determining duckness, then it doesn't matter what things make it not a duck; for all intents and putposes, it's a duck.

You Can't Skateboard Safely

Tiny Hawk is happy to show people all the scars he had and broken bones he's acquired over his life. He will also show you all the sweet moves he can do on a skateboard. What is important to remember though is that he would not have the skateboard moves without those scars and bone breaks. 

There is no way to skateboard safely. No matter how much you watch and study and do anything else, at some point, you have to get on a board and move. You are basically guaranteed to fall down, over and over, in fact. But that's ok. When you don't have any actual experience and don't know how things are going to go, you're going to fail a lot. You just have to accept it and keep pushing forward. Learn from your failures and don't make the same mistake twice. 

The same holds true in writing, of course. No amount of prep will prevent you from failing a lot. You just have to take the bumps and don't give up. That's how you win. 

Fear Itself

Franklin Roosevelt famously said that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." This saying was so famous that it was inescapable. Growing up, it would show up in tv shows and other media. But the problem is that it was lost on me as a child. 

Children are fearless. They do whatever they want. They climb over roadblocks and they rattle every cage. They may scream and cry when they don't get their way, but they aren't ever afraid to try. 

Adults are full of fear. Somehow, as we raise our children, we make them afraid of everything. Adults spend so much time thinking about everything that could go wrong that they end up convincing themselves not to do anything. People have anxiety and panic attacks about imagined circumstances. 

As an adult myself, FDR's wisdom comes through much more. I understand that we waste hours, even days being afraid. But ultimately, fear is unproductive. If you are afraid something bad will happen, do something to prevent it. If it's unavoidable, then deal with the situation in the least damaging way possible.

Fear doesn't accomplish anything; it only makes situations worse. When you get over your fear and accept the situation at hand, it is about a hundredth as bad as you thought it was going to be. With that in mind, the most terrifying thing truly is fear. 

Animal Intelligence

By all means, animals assuredly have a level of wisdom under which they operate. They eat when they're hungry and they sleep when they're tired. If it's too hot, they find shade. 

With that said, there is a definite line of intelligence that animals don't have. Fish can't speak. Birds don't make telescopes. Dogs can't do your taxes. 

Animals have, well, animal instincts. It's that simple mind that, when it wants something, it goes and gets it. When a dog is curious, it sniffs things. When it's horny, it humps your leg. The whole idea of social constructs and things being inappropriate is simply incomprehensible because a dog is simply not smart enough to understand it. In fact, babies and small children (and sometime full-grown adults) have this same condition. But where a human's intelligence generally grows tremendously to be able to learn all this stuff, an animal's maximum capacity isn't that high. 

Animal intelligence is an interesting concept to play with. How do we treat the same level intelligence differently? A 12-year-old dog and a 3-year-old child have roughly the same intelligence, but do we treat them the same way? If a 30-year-old has a traumatic brain injury that gives him the mental age of a child, do we treat him the same way that we treat a child of that actual age? And again, why?

Animal Wisdom

When I was in college, I had a conversation with a member of the Blackfeet tribe. He told me that for his people, they believed that the animals came before humans, so they are like the older brothers of the family. Because of that, people observed the animals and learned from them. By seeing what a bear eats in the wild, you can figure out which foods are poisonous and which are fine. You can see which plants have medicinal values. You can find ways to make shelter.

Ever since then, I’ve been intrigued by animal wisdom. Our culture generally regards animals as lesser creatures because they can’t use words or build things with tools. There is a great deal of high-function processing that animals are simply incapable of. But in a certain sense, that doesn’t make us better than them.

Sparrows may not have the luxury of antibiotics to cure infections, but they also don’t get ulcers from stress. They don’t worry about whether or not the sparrow next door likes them. They don’t have to fight one another for jobs at Sparrow Inc. They eat when they’re hungry and sleep when they’re tired. They avoid trouble as best as they can, and when trouble finds them, they get out of the way.

So many of people’s problems just don’t happen in the animal world. And there is definitely wisdom in not getting wrapped up in people’s pettiness.