Thinky-Thoughts: The Destruction of Creativity

[Thinky-Thoughts are perpetual beta. Even if they're completely fully formed - because there's always something not thought of. That's where you come in. Comment away.]

Children lose their creative impulses because they figure out that not making mistakes is more important than being creative. Which can create situations where an owl has to reassure an incoming freshman that failure will happen, but that it will not be the end of the world. Boggle, I love you for doing this. But, when this idea is twisted to its very darkest, you end up with children and adults who become so very in-tune with the feelings of others and start actively manipulating them because failure in that realm means abuse, even after they've long passed out of the abusive situation in the sense of "I no longer live with the abusers". But the techniques they've learned allow them to shape destiny and guide everyone around them toward optimal results, usually with their recipients not knowing how much has been done to help them.

You can also end up with me, the person who becomes actively afraid of failure because everyone seems to take great pleasure in watching you fail. I'm a type-LisA when it comes to measurable systems and scores being important. Which only sets the bar higher and prevents you from taking pride in your work unless it really is perfect. And sometimes also has you not contributing to things because being Wrong is removing the doubt about being a fool and everyone will remember that and use it. That also brings around the brainweasels and the depression just as much as the other condition. Because you're so busy maintaining your perfection that you start worrying about whether anyone will find you attractive for your actual virtues (whatever those may be)...but they'll also have to be okay with you making mistakes. As with many things, wider perspective often helps - there are a lot of people who like you just the way you are. Even if you make a mistake. And they're going to be quite interesting people, too. Trust me.

The brainweasels don't go away that easily, though - the depression and the fear can come back very easily if things start threatening to get out of control, regardless of whether they're the manipulators or the afraid or any other type of person that lost their creativity through relentless insistence on Right and Wrong. Have an excellent post about advice given to depressed people - and why it doesn't work and tends to engender anger or other unhelpful emotions. What works for you when you're sad may not work for depression - what will work for depression is something they may not be able to articulate or even understand at that point in time.

Anyway, back to the kids. The continued insistence on quantifiable outcomes and the insistence that school funding be tied to those outcomes pretty well kills any impetus to show to children what life can be like outside of Right and Wrong, and the less funding there is for students, the more the pressure is on to make the students able to parrot what is Right. We've seen what happens with this - continued insistence that only the subjects that come with "objective" wrong and right are the only ones worth studying and testing upon. Learning is reduced even further past regurgitation to the point where teachers alter their lesson plans and designs such that they're basically asking the questions that will be on the test in class. What room is left for creativity in such an environment? Certainly not in dress of in behavior, as anything that sticks out gets hammered down in service to conformity, although it can be named any other way but that, depending on whether the peer group or the administration is doing the hammering.

And the worst part of it? Even though we sacrifice their creativity to the demands of the tests, such things do not actually improve the scores. We kill the spark and reap no benefit - and then people complain that the people they're hiring show no initiative or problem-solving abilities and have to be trained how to think again. (Then again, some of them prefer their workers that way.) It also becomes trivially easy to turn an otherwise competent person into a scared child again just through the threat of making them Wrong and punishing them for it. We couch our politics in Wrong and Right and how much Ideological Solidarity is important...even though they're all running manipulative games against us, pushing on our fears and pulling on us with promises.

Soon enough, we'll have the world that we wanted, where conformity and creativity have been properly stamped out so that we don't have to deal with anything different in our lives. (And then, listening to This American Life this week, I realize we're already really close to that point - but that occasionally we do actually pay attention to things outside of the cognitive realm and the impact that those things have on kids...)

Thinky-Thoughts: The Necessity of Trigger Warnings (and how Good Intentions aren't enough)

[Thinky-Thoughts, especially on sensitive subjects, are in a perpetual beta, because I can't think of everything. Comments are always welcome, because they expand perspective and provide necessary context.]

A lot of very profound people have talked about an article mentioning that trigger warnings are not effective at their intended task, may cause self-censorship, and prop up an illusion that a safe space is possible anywhere in the world, digital or otherwise. A strong reaction to the idea (and that is public) comes from eumelia that each person individually needs or doesn't need warnings - making universals out of your own experience is not good - and that the reprieve granted through the use of the triggers is a way of showing compassion to those who do suffer. I can see both sides - wanting people to be able to confront that reality does not provide them with accomodation, but also the revulsion I usually have to a Randroid saying that individualism is the only true virtue and that cooperation only breeds dependence and disappointment.

Then comes the stories. And more stories. And television writers start making stories that do things to women for the purpose of making the men better, without understanding what those things would do to the women, even though some of those women come through it stronger. And Oh, gods, the stories, even of the ones that don't end in assault. And have some more stories about Rape Culture and assaults. Did we also mention how it creeps into popular literature and widely-popular literature, and that it's really fucking hard not to victim-blame, especially in situations where the Fridge Logic of victim-blaming becomes Insane Troll Logic because victim-blaming requires ignoring reality and context at the same time?

At that point, the weight of the evidence tips the scales - reality already takes care of reminding people, repeatedly and viciously, that it does not care about their triggers, or about their experiences, and that most people will not understand nor make space for them to have a breather. And this is tough because when you're me, you've been steeped in the privilege blindness that says "Well, so long as you're a good person and don't do any of those things, then you don't really have to care about the wider picture." And that if your intentions are reasonably virtuous, then surely you can't be held responsible for the things that you do that creep the absolute fuck out of others, right? Certainly it's not your personal fault that people are withdrawing from blogging because the trolling is incessant?

A Guide For Men With Good Intentions, so that you can see where good intentions can have disastrous results, and the person pointing this out to you believes that you can change your behavior so as not to continue making bad results out of good intentions. Also, good things come from being able to appreciate your partner(s) for what they want to be known for, and then wanting to be more like them because they're better at good things than you are.

It can be disconcerting to find that the shadows on the wall that you thought were reality were, in fact, shadows that dissipate in the bright light of day. We get that. It's easier to go back inside the cave and go back to the familiar. There's also the realization that enlightenment sucks for the self-esteem (at least in the short term) when you notice that the Thing in your past that you thought was just a case of bad timing was, in fact, more than just bad timing - it was bad timing and being a creep. And then, you can look back in on what you didn't think about before and see a lot of things there that are quite evil and ugly. It's like (and here we make a Piers Anthony reference, which is a bit fun to do in this context (and also helps you figure out which book is beign referenced)) having the seeing glasses that let you show that the souls in Hell are gorging themselves on garbage, that the roulette wheel is rigged to always win, and that all the splendors of the tour are not anything like the reality.

What to do from there? Go back into the cave and bring people out. Utilize your "skillful means" to get people out of the burning house. (No mistakes there, it is a burning house and it will collapse at some point.) Trigger warnings are one way of going about this. Not being That Guy, The Nice Guy, or The Creep, which involves mindfulness about what you are doing and thinking in new ways and perspectives. It'll be hard to start with. You'll screw up. (I already have. Repeatedly.) But the end product will be better, because it allows you to examine yourself and say, "Y'know, I shouldn't be mad at Isabella Swan for Mike Newton's behavior. I shouldn't blithely assume that the person walking from their workplace to the parking lot where their car is will get there safely, even if it is a well-lit area and there are lots of people around."

It shouldn't take a crushing amount of evidence and weight to trigger the spark of self-inquiry and enlightenment. But when the illusion is as good as out modern life is...well, sometimes you have to have raw data to make it all work out. And then the compassion and humanity to decide that you do want to help and are willing to accept that the terms of how you can help aren't going to be dictated by you, but (more often than not) to you. There's no shame in letting someone with more experience take the lead and give direction, so long as you're ready to learn and grow from it.