Trust: a geeky perspective

Well, I feel silly. A milestone birthday arrived today, and in addition to the bother of baking the expected cheesecake for co-workers, I lingered at my post two hours late last night and was in an hour early this morning to thwart any attempts at fitting my cubicle for its "suit of sables". As it turns out, that flavor of hazing is (by recent HR fiat) verboten. I suppose that every great once in a while, the firm's martinets can be a force for good--the law of averages, if no reason else...

The odd thing is the contrast between whom I would have expected to be the instigators and the one--according to my inside source--who was actually plotting it until she was warned off.

The notion of trust has been a dominant theme chez psyche this week, actually. On Monday I had to tell a friend that she had committed a middling breach of my trust, and have yet to receive any reply, much less apology. If there's an upside to being a control-freak, it's that one's feelings are not exempt from the illusion of "controllability". Even building a large fence around the swamp-kingdom of emotion is a form of control. And so the partitions between where someone can and cannot be trusted have been erected. I've done the same over the years with people who have hurt me far, far more deeply. And life, as is its wont, goes on.

In college Psychology 101, I never did quite grok the difference between rationalization and intellectualization. And still don't, even after twenty years and change. To me, intellectualization seems to say to oneself, "If I can find a high-fallutin' explanation for what I'm doing, I don't have to feel guilty about it." Which is still a rationalization to my mind, albeit with a philosophical/scientific pedigree. Yet here I find myself intellectualizing the impulse to throw trust under the bus. In my present mood, trust is less a warm, fuzzy emotion than it is a mechanism for minimizing the amount of information that we have to process. To wit: Streamlining thousands of friend-or-foe decisions each day down to mere dozens. From that perspective, trust can be restyled as mental laziness, something that makes me squirm whenever I discover it in myself.

On the flip side, though, I can also see a complete absence of trust having a corroding effect on the spirit, as well as the practical downside of making one seem less trustworthy. And, perhaps, even become less trustworthy--particularly if one rationalizes bad behavior by projecting one's motives on everyone else. Not good in any number of ways, quite apart from also being another incarnation of mental laziness.

All the same, this week is a good proverbial kick in the shins to start paying more attention to the agendas around me. Obliviousness is a pricier luxury than I thought.

Two faces of terrorism

Purely by coincidence, I caught two links from CNN that essentially capture the reason that we will ultimately lose the war that our so-called leaders have declared on terrorism. The domestic part of the exercise makes about as much sense as the police trying to solve a bank robbery by spending the next six years frisking everyone who writes a check. To wit, after years of subjecting everyone from children to the elderly to the degradation that comes from being considered a terrorist out of hand, our planes are just as likely to be bombed out of the sky as they ever were. Kudos for the GAO, even though the whole thing makes me just furious.

And, from a linked article, a reminder that terrorists can also be Caucasians in Armani or Prada. And I'm not talking about that Rapture-ready capitalist swine Eric Prince of Blackwater fame. Our government isn't the only one willing to outsource terrorism. Dearest and I haven't been buying Chiquita for awhile because of this. In the same way that I haven't knowingly put a dime in Nestle's pocket since learning of the infant formula monstrosity back in the 80s.

But, typically, once wheels start turning in any enterprise so mammoth, correcting course is well-nigh impossible, to say nothing of stopping before the whole behemoth rolls off the cliff.

The other edge of the theocratic sword

Normally, it's the evangelicals that can't seem to firewall religion and politics. And their bad habits are rubbing off on a crowd that should definitely know better after a few thousand years of worldly meddling. Ummm...didn't they teach you about Paolo Scarpi in the seminary? I would think that the smackdown that Venice laid on the Pope the last time your crowd tried calling the shots in the world of Mammon would have made an impression? I mean, it's only been 400 years or so, but to people who've been in business since the first century CE, what's a few paltry centuries, really?

Why-oh-why are more people not calling for the churches to be taxed and regulated and financially scrutinized when they meddle in politics? Every other rabble-rouser has to do it--why the free ride here? Oral Roberts University is scrambling to cover its backside so as not to lose its tax-exempt status after their own shenanigans--why not the entire Catholic Church? Like the GOP, they could probably use a scandal that doesn't involve sex for a change. Glass houses, an' all...

But in both cases, arguing with a theocrat will get you about as far as debating a drunk. The self-deception necessary to live in that zone I hope to never understand.

Capitalist arguments for socialized medicine

State-sponsored medical care is again in the popular lexicon, and if you care to cock an ear in the direction of BosNyWash, you'll catch the purr of the well-oiled, finely-tuned FUD machine running at full throttle. FUD, in case your vocabulary is a bit out of date, stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", and is a favorite tactic of the Powers That Be when they find themselves short of valid alternatives. Microsoft in the '80s and '90s was famous for squashing upstart competitors/technologies with this tactic.

So, as a public service to those fed up by the current cronyist system, here are a few questions/counterpoints for those who are--culpably or ignorantly--amplifying the FUD machine by parroting its talking points:

1. If Canada and the UK and all those socialist countries have such horrible health care, why does the United States have a lower life expectancy? Why are infant mortality rates higher here? Why do more women per 100,000 die in childbirth in the U.S.? And why, pray tell, do we pay such premium rates for the privilege of ranking so abysmally in such critical benchmarks?
   
2. More to the point, if "socialized medicine" is so terrible, why do its opponents--I'm looking at you, Mister Mayor of Nine-Eleven--lie so egregiously about it?
   
3. For the "I don't want the government making decisions about my health care" crowd: So....explain to me how having a faceless drone in a mega-corporation cube-farm make those decisions is any different. Oh, but wait! You can't vote CEOs out of office. That's the difference. Except that doesn't play into the FUD talking-points. Ooops.
4. And, by the bye, if you're so effin' concerned about government intrusion, exactly where the @#$%^&* have you been these past six years while AT&T and friends were feeding your calls/data to Big Brother Bush? Did I hear any gnashing of teeth from you folks at right and center while the Bush Regime canceled your slice of habeus corpus simply by calling you an "enemy combatant"? Ummm, no, actually. Why? Because the FUD told you to STFU and not distract your Alphas from their naked power-grab. That's either hypocrisy or some extremely messed-up priorities--there's no third way about it.
   

I highly doubt that the apologists for Merck, Travelers, et. al. will have any sensible retort, so please feel welcome to borrow the above ripostes. Assuming that plain ol' Common Sense hasn't supplied them already.

So, after scraping those bits of stupid off the bottoms of our shoes, let's move along to some reasons why, from a capitalist standpoint, so-called "socialist medicine" makes sense. Understand, though, when I mean "capitalist", I mean it more in the Adam Smith sense. Not our current plutocratic feudal system, wherein its suzerains and satraps earn more in a year than some Third World countries.

1. The current "capitalist" system is only benefiting a small segment of the economy to the detriment of others. Everyone else--assuming that they offer/subsidize any health benefits to their employees--faces increased premiums. Thus, they either take a direct hit to their bottom line, or they waste resources trying to re-negotiate, jiggle the plans, etc.
   
2. If the business decides not to take the hit, it then loses an advantage in hiring better people. Which doesn't show up as a line-item on the balance sheet, but can take a company downhill in the long run. (You like working with morons? Keep arguing for the status quo.)
   
3. Or, let's step outside the normal nine-to-five world. Let's suppose instead that you have a great idea for a business, and have been disciplined enough to accumulate the capital to survive its infancy. What, more than anything, is stopping you from quitting your job to get your new business off the ground? It's better than a guess that that consideration is who will cover you and/or yours if someone gets sick. COBRA doesn't apply b/c you left voluntarily. Big Insurance doesn't want to bother with your nobody chump change. In economics, that's called a "barrier to entry," which Big Insurance and its cronies have now created--not just within their own industry, but throughout an entire friggin' economy, peeps. And that, friends and bretheren, is an intolerable state of affairs, pure and simple. Intolerable even without all the noise that's made about small business doing the lion's share of job creation. Bottom line: If you want to speed along the WalMart-ization of every last business sector, please feel free to keep echoing the FUD.
   
4. And, finally, it's time to chuck the myth of the free market in an age of mega-mergers. Thanks to a $200-million plus vote-buying spree in the late 90s, the line between insurance companies and financial services has been irrevocably blurred. That basically means that the decisions about whether to cover your treatment, what you pay for premiums, etc., are directly affected by the Wall Street pony-track. And if you honestly think that the fat years will even out the lean, you need to take a hard look at the dosage of your meds. This is an industry where Sandy Weill can collect over a billion dollars for leaving a mess for his successor (Charles Prince), who himself has been shoved out the door (after pocketing mere hundreds of millions, poor thing) for losing over six billion dollars, plus a fifth of Citibank's market value. Think that this won't affect Traveler's bottom line in some Enron-style account-jiggling? (I forget who bought out whom, frankly; suffice it that they are joined at the hip.) Think that the chastened likes of Weill and Prince will humbly return their salaries and stock options so that your premiums won't spike? Yeeeeah...
   

None of this, of course, addresses the issue of whether or not the US Government, with a mandate to create a national health care or health coverage system, will do so without it being a complete mess and/or giveaway to its corporate paymasters. That's another question entirely.

But that very question is precisely what must be addressed and debated. Right now, I'm not seeing much that would pass for public discourse. The proponents and opponents of so-called socialized medicine are merely lobbing volleys of talking points at one another. Basically it becomes a smackdown between the Michael Moore fanclub against the lobbyists of Big Insurance and Big Pharma. And that will get us precisely nowhere. As our premiums continue to go up and our coverage melts. That is, assuming that we can get coverage in the first place.

Prom Queens and Presidents

I'm currently indulging in John Julius Norwich's "The Middle Sea", which is a history of the Mediterranean area from prehistory into WWI. I like Norwich--have to restrain myself from spending a not-inconsiderable sum on his three-volume History of Byzantium, actually--because he (and/or his editors) have this uncanny sense of how much detail to offer. I also admire his ability to struggle away from the classic disease of historians--namely to become serial biographers. Too often the true movers and shakers are treated like the chorus of classical Greek tragedy while the attention is lavished on the more dashing/romantic/outrageous characters who--in the parlance of our mainstream media--make for good press. Not to mention a certain retrospective (and unilaterally inaccurate) cult of personality. Which is never a good thing, whether in history or in present life.

As we swing into the last year of a U.S. Presidential election-cycle, I find myself cringing at what can only be termed "tribalism" in politics. Honestly, there's no better word for it. Mind you, I detested pep rallies in high school. And party politics are, at their roots, a pointless waving of the colors by a numbers-drunk, but otherwise passive crowd in the bleachers. Thus we send sports teams to the field, soldiers to mutilation and death and defilement of their basic humanity. And also, of course, our political "gladiators" to the arena. There is absolutely no difference between the three in terms of crowd dynamics.

It can be said of politicians more so than our other tribal champions that they--to ape Hamlet--did make love to this employment. Yet, I do wonder what it says about us that we must have our champions at all, and more so to demand that they be the vessels of every several hope we have, not to mention that they be anathema to the vices that we find most noxious. What is wrong with us that we cannot be our own champions, our own liberators?

Perhaps it's because I'm a loner by nature, but I think that we can leave at least a third (and I'm being conservative with that guesstimate) of the problems of the human race at the feet of pure tribalism, which in itself implies hero-worship: For all tribes must have their chieftains, no? To what end the Ponzi scheme of power? Sadly--to my mind--evolution (biological and especially social) does not appear to select for loners in our species. Perhaps in a more loner-friendly environment, ideas would (for once) have to stand on their own merits, rather than boiling down to popularity contests. That certainly wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to this species or what passes for civilization.