Archives for October 2011

In the 1953 movie, “The Wild One,” a girl asks Marlon Brando’s character, “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Johnny looks at her and deadpans, “Whadda you got?” I get the same feeling from many supporters of Occupy Wall Street. They’re angry about something, so any protest is as good as another.

I’ve made it clear that I’m opposed to government handing out taxpayer money — whether real money or fictitious money made up out of thin air by the Fed — to anybody, whether it’s individuals or business interests or other groups. I’ve strongly opposed every bailout of any company or industry. But the current Wall Street protests miss the root of what’s wrong. The problem isn’t on Wall Street. The problem is in a political system that claims the right to transfer money from any group of people to any other group.

If you’re going to protest against people who are being bailed out, you’re going to have to “take over” autoworker union halls and big farms and government-operated schools all over the country, among many others. I don’t have any special love for Wall Street bankers, but it’s irrational to pretend that they’re the root of the problem. This protest just diverts attention from where the real root is — a coercive state that claims moral authority to tell all of us what to do.

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I have a long history of running away from the things I need the most. I used to assume I was the only one who engaged in this ritual of self-sabotage, but I’ve discovered that plenty of others do it, too — standing on the brink of achieving what they need and then pushing it away. Why do some of us do that?

I’ve talked before about how fear keeps most of us from doing the things we want to try, but I’ve also talked about how we can overcome fear to become the people we want to be. What is it that keeps so many of us confused about what’s important in life? Why do so many people end up stumbling through life aimlessly, with no apparent purpose other than to get finished with it?

It seems to me that many people are confused about the purpose of their lives. They’re either trying to live materialistic lives by other people’s standards or else they’ve ended up somewhat nihilistic, feeling that life has no purpose or meaning. Both approaches are missing the point of living, in my view.

I’m thinking about this for an odd reason. I watched a documentary about King Tut Sunday afternoon, and it left me thinking about the meaning of life.

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Ingrained and unquestioned beliefs lead us to do stupid and self-destructive things all the time, but our minds are frequently so strongly on auto-pilot that we don’t even realize the contradictions. That’s what I’m seeing from many people in their reactions to the assassination of Anwar al-Aulaqi.

Are you familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance? It’s an idea in psychology that says when we’re confronted with two contradictory pieces of information or beliefs, our minds experience some discomfort, so the mind is forced to ignore one or the other of the contradictory pieces — in order to make the psychological pain go away. (That’s an oversimplification, but it’s good enough for our purposes.)

After I wrote Saturday about the case of al-Aulaqi, I experienced some of that cognitive dissonance from one of my Facebook friends. Or, rather, someone who was a Facebook friend until she got so angry about my view that she defriended me, but not before demonstrating the bizarre nature of contradictory thinking about al-Aulaqi and blind support of government on certain subjects. Her initial exposition of her position started with simply, “Whatever….He was a traitor!!”

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