And that is that.

[silveradept]

Sort of. I think I put in the last word of content in my thesis. Now I need to go back through it and read for continuity and to make sure that I put everything in its proper order. Sixty pages, minus index of works. That's sixty pages double-spaced and in 12-point font, by the way, so it looks bigger than it is. Either way, it's basically finished. Still kind of surprising that I managed to avoid panicking and going (too) insane enough to do this. Now I can turn my attention towards my other papers that will need to be done soon. There's also the bit about keeping my work and study working together well enough to get out and graduated. And the part about finding a summer job. But the major major stressor of this year is complete. Congratluations should be held until I actually do graduate.

Check out the penny towers. No glue, no adhesive, merely well-stacked pennies. As of this writing, most of the pictures are removed because of bandwidth issues, but Your Mileage May Vary. Or you could try it yourself.

Will the real Loki Kindly Stand Up? Eris has something she wants to tell you about. Something about the Mother of All Pranks...

I'll pick your brains about the contents of this article about kindness. I think the article-writer's right - we're insulating ourselves from each other (says the guy at his keyboard with a chat window open and his livejournal client on his desktop - I'm aware that I cut quite the hypocritical figure on this). But I don't think it's because we're taught to see each other as obstacles. I think we're taught to see each other as threats. We're told to assume that everyone is putting on a face when they interact with us, that their real self is something different and most likely dangerous to you. Of course, that's for your peers and people considered above your rank. For those below, we're taught not to notice them - the hired help is, after all, supposed to be invisible.

If I want to, I can make this a possible reason why children go shooting up their schools - their classmates are seen as threats or opressors, rarely ever as friends or comrades or fellows. Those same classmates might see the aggressor as someone beneath their rank, not worthy of acknowledgement, much less communication. The aggressor becomes a target. Is it any wonder that the aggressor starts seeing them the same way?

Or if I feel like it, I can tie it into something like the Schavo case - each side sees the other as a threat (excepting the pols, who see opportunity). Thus, the bitter squabble. The vicious infighting over American politics and court decisions. The litigation-happy society. All of this can be linked to the simple idea that all of us are taught as children to see everyone else as a threat. My revolutionary socialist friend would call it a necessary idea for the continuation of capitalism, and I'm inclined to agree. The cutthroat competition we have these days is a matter of getting them before they get you. It's not even necessarily about making a better product, but making the only product.

At the same time, I know that there are some people that are threats to my well-being, and that I should be guarding against them. But this paranoia about everyone else is lunacy. We might find that there aren't so many threats if we started trusting each other a bit more, being a bit more kind to each other. Then we might find out where the real threats are. And I'm sure there are quite a few vested interests that don't want that.

Comments

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think its just that humans are tribalistic. Those that are outside of our group become threats or targets. Even your revolutionary friend, I'd guess, imagines that outsiders are a threat.

The system should minimise this, but at the moment it feels like culture is coming apart. maybe this is because we were trained to see life so tribalistically during schools.

[silveradept]

Very true. The revolutionary does see outsiders as threats, at least while in the process of making revolution. At the end, we're all supposed to become one giant tribe, sharing our abundance and our labor and everything else. So maybe it's just expanding the scope instead of getting rid of the idea.

So how do you propose to stop emphasising the tribalistic mentality in the schoolyard?

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

If only. Maybe smaller classes woud do it? But maybe if students only spent time with their kind they'd just end up more anti-other people.

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's so much that we're taught to see others as risks, although you're quite right that a lot of that happens, it's that we aren't taught otherwise.

Human beings are, when you get down to it, apes with large brains, we're a product of where we came from. We have evidence that civilisation has been around for a couple of thousand years, a bit more perhaps, but these numbers are a blink of the eye of the world compared to the millions of years of evolution that brought us from small post-mesozoic mammals through to the first mud brick in Mesopotamia. Thoughout our entire evolution, anything outside the group was a potential threat, our ancestors developed in a world where trust was a quick way to end up as the next meal. In the absence of training to the contrary, we will revert to our evolved response: trust nothing outside the group, the tribe. But people are being trained to just use that evolved response instead of fighting it.

But I think you've missed something...

says the guy at his keyboard with a chat window open and his livejournal client on his desktop - I'm aware that I cut quite the hypocritical figure on this
So, you're talking to people, how is that insulating yourself from it? I admit, I have a rather skewed view of things given that I don't tend to draw much distinction between talking online and talking face to face but the internet's great strength is that it allows people to come together who would otherwise never even know the other exists.

[the-entity.livejournal.com]

I suspect the problem may be that we're less tribal/community-oriented these days than we used to be. A tribe isn't a bad thing; like the family, it gives you a model and ideal of community, within which you can learn to be generous and outgoing. Any community or tribe runs the risk of making people outside the group be seen as threats, but it can also work the other way by encouraging an ethos of friendliness and generosity to outsiders. I dunno.

Interesting links, Silver; although I don't buy the "Loki and his kin were diabolized by early Christians, because their roles as described here proved incompatible to their ideology of Christianity" line of argument. If we were going to start writing our own preferences into Norse myth we wouldn't have stopped there - I'm not sure we'd even have started there, actually. I gather Christians tend to have more issues with earth goddesses than tricksters, for reasons I'd write on but don't have the time (I've a paper to finish myself and an approaching deadline... eek) but amount to patriarchal tradition, an unfortunate preponderance of celibate types among the early church fathers (who, as a result, tended to have issues about women and sexuality) and concerns about pantheism. I think the issues with Loki arose because we're talking about the Norse here, and it's fricking cold up in Scandinavia. The viking dislike of Loki & the norse Gods' struggle with the elemental forces of ice and fire represents (a) a continuous struggle against nature to survive and thrive, and (b) the fact that the viking ideal was big, tough warrior-explorers with large axes. They respected wisdom and the occasional need for deception (Odin), but were more ambivalent about smart-arse tricksters like Loki. So while I think the article's right in what it describes Loki as being, I think it was the vikings who had issues with it rather than the Christians. (Loki's demonisation leads him, I note, to be bound on a rock by the entrails of his son while a snake drips poison onto his face. That's very, very viking.)

[silveradept]

I suppose I've been drilled with the idea that face to face is superior contact than on-line text messaging - in the realm of nonverbal cues and determining the mood of the speaker, that's true. While chat and forums have advantages of drawing the distant together, to do so to the exclusion of the local enviroment is a problem. As we dive deeper into the possibilities of global chatting, we don't always spend as much time interacting in realspace.

Plus, the Internet allows for quite the horde of "me, too" if you look in the right places. Tribal constructions become easier that way. It's good to have a support group, but surrounding yourself with virtual yes-men is no more productive than surrounding yourself with real yes-men.

I agree that we should be fighting the idea of "everyone is a threat to me". How we do that effectively is a bit of a mystery to me.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on the nature of tribes. Basically, humans need community, but they also need to understand that other communities exist and are the same as their one, not threats or targets for attacks.

Its all about the type of communities we build, not trying to prevent them from forming.

[silveradept]

Mm-hmm. The tribalizing drive already happens in schools - smaller class sizes would make the education process more effective, but it could also cement certain tribal affiliations. It could also blast them wide open, depending on the constuction of the class and the willingness of the teacher to force people on opposite ends of the spectrum to work together.

What we need is more diversity in class - and I don't mean it in the restricted sense of ethnic and/or religious groups. If we're going to mandate education, we should at least give a good one for their troubles.

[silveradept]

Very Viking, indeed. And I like the article because of the possibilities it presents, not the conclusions it draws. I wonder if that's my general rule when it comes to linking to opinions and such.

As for tribes - they are useful, as you've noted. I hope I'm not coming off as saying "no tribes, ever!" because that's impossible. Rather, I want people to stop viewing other groups as threatening to their group when they don't have a reason to. (There are some groups that proudly display their threats, and others that can have them found out with a little bit of research or reading between the lines.)

[the-entity.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think if you form clear, strong tribes it's not such a problem; the problem with outsiders always arises when either there's so many of them that they form a (perceived) threat to the larger community, or when there are other reasons for insecurity. Both in Christian Europe and in mediaeval Muslim society, the Jews (& gypsies) tended to get the worst treatment when there was a lot of uncertainty and fear. Schoolkids form cliques that are absolutely vicious because schoolkids aren't mature and are far more insecure than adults; they're not capable of forming a clique or tribe that's considerate of outsiders unless they're very good-natured and have a good upbrining, I think.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

Thats probably logical. But there's another side to it. Religious and ethnic divisions aside, diversity may make life difficult on the student. As a particularly weird child who was home educated I got to mix with a small group of other kids of varying interests and ages. But I often missed having a real connection with people who shared my interests. Tribalism can serve an important purpose in human society.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

Thats the thing, isn't it? It all comes down to upbringing. We have to make kids secure in themselves. Then perhaps they;d respect each other more.

[silveradept]

Mm-hmm. Not saying that tribes don't serve their purposes, especially for kids in a changing phase of their lives, but they shouldn't be retreating inside their tribal shells and then deciding not to poke their heads out again.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

Thats true. But its a hard balance to get right.

[silveradept]

There's the sixty-four-thousand dollar question. How do you make children more secure in their own identities, especially in the times of change that the secondary school years are?

Perhaps if we can make schools a safe place for free expression, then we can make progress. Now I'll just have to try convincing administrators of that.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

I agree totally. My personal experience is probably less than normal. Strict fundamentalist Christian school is a difficult environment to grow up in, especially with Eris breathing down your neck. Faith based education places all these weird limits on personal growth at entirely the wrong time for it.

Maybe there should be a Personal Growth Class enforced by the government taught by outsiders in classes made up from many different schools that forces children to look beyong their current situation.

[silveradept]

That must have been fun, having Eris breathing down your neck and the Servants Of God telling you She doesn't exist.

The idea of the Personal Growth class would be great, but the people who probably need it most are the ones who will have their parents shield them from it and have them take something else. (The precedent of parents being able to have their kids not engage in a sex-ed class will proabbly be put to use here) As for who would teach such a class, I'd say that the maximum age on it should be twenty-five, and the ideal age range would be twenty or twenty-one. That way, the students see someone just out of their situation and get a taste of what the outer world looks like to different groups of people. Wouldn't hurt having other schools there so that the isolated kids get a view of what everybody else is up to.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to complain. Character forming, or something.

Thats true. I think it would have to be done at special facilities, and it should be done especially to the shielded students. Otherwise, schools could put their own spin on it.

I don't think that teaching students that options exist should be optional.

[the-entity.livejournal.com]

"And I like the article because of the possibilities it presents, not the conclusions it draws." - entirely reasonable. It's a good article, anyhow, dubious conclusions notwithstanding.

"I hope I'm not coming off as saying "no tribes, ever!"" - not at all, I was responding to mr. fred_smith's comments with that.

Also, "All of this can be linked to the simple idea that all of us are taught as children to see everyone else as a threat." - not so much a threat as a potential threat, which is fair enough. There are real dangers for children out there. I'm not sure that's actually the problem, but I'm not sure what is. Could be something really trite and obvious, like, kids are being taught to see others as a threat more than they're being taught to respect others. Also, I doubt the virtue of the modern habit of dumping kids in front of TV screens for so many hours a week. I suspect TV is better at teaching fear than anything else - you can kinda screen out moral lessons quite easily after you've heard them a few times, but if you see a frightening program too adult for you the fear sticks with you.

[silveradept]

Hmm... maybe I'll retcon that last statement, then, and add the "potential" to it.

About TV, Television makes its money by selling fear and conflict. Some vid gaming isn't much better, admittedly, but the decreased parental attention and TV's general inability to put across its lessons without making them over-the-top really is putting in the idea that people who look different and act different are bad things. (Unless it's trying to sell you something, then they often look glamorous. Adverts are another problem entirely.)