Briefly

Few things threaten the future of the human race as much as the decline of the widespread ability to read words and evaluate them rationally. This has become a culture dominated by images and emotions, which scares me because our freedom and our wealth were built on ideas and rational thinking. Not so long ago, it was considered vital for every person to be able to read coherent arguments and respond to them with intelligence and reason. Today, emotions trump reason and images trump words. When Neil Postman published “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in 1985, he made the argument that the age of television was slowly destroying Americans’ ability to reason. Postman is long dead, but it turns out that he and other academics such as Marshall McLuhan saw where things were going far before words started falling out of favor. I beg you to read Postman’s short and clear book, but if you won’t invest that much time, at least consider this article about news today. In “Could I have some news with my emotions, please?” a former NBC News executive bemoans the sad state of “emotion over information” in television news. I believe “television news” is an oxymoron, but I’ll leave that for another time.

UPDATE: For about 18 hours, I thought I had made a serious mistake at work last month that had sent a couple thousand dollars to the wrong party. When a problem was discovered last night, the data available to us in our accounting system made it seem certain that I had made that error. I felt sick. I was humiliated. Even though I’ve handled hundreds of real estate transactions for my company — millions of dollars — without ever making an error, I felt shame that I had made this one mistake. But it turns out that an anomaly in our accounting software was hiding the truth. Once I got to the office Thursday and reviewed the paperwork from the transaction, I discovered that I had done everything correctly. It’s great that I didn’t make the mistake, but it would be even better if I could learn not to have such horrible physical reactions of shame and fear just because someone else believes I’ve made an error. The fear of being flawed is very powerful for me. Old programming from childhood is hard to change.

How do children turn into bullies? New evidence suggests that it might start at home, with parents who mock or show contempt for their children. You’ve probably seen parents who demean or belittle their children in ways that humiliate and frustrate them. I certainly see it, sometimes from parents who are just mean and other times from parents who humiliate their children with insults disguised as humor. The study by researchers in the United States, Canada and Sweden found that this sort of parent often responds to child engagement with criticism, sarcasm, put-downs and hostility. There was also a strong correlation between this problem and the tendency to rely on emotional and physical coercion to force compliance from children. This sort of parental behavior often leads to “dysregulated” anger in children, and it’s indicative of difficulties with regulating negative emotions, verbal attacks, physical aggression and hostility. Children who are victims of this sort of parenting are at a greater risk for becoming bullies and for becoming “bully-victims,” which are bullies who are victimized by other bullies. I was controlled with lot of demeaning and humiliating behavior from my father as a child, so I can definitely understand what this does to adolescents.