Sunshine Recorder

… The word “empathy”—a rendering of the German Einfühlung, “feeling into”—is only a century old, but people have been interested for a long time in the moral implications of feeling our way into the lives of others. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), Adam Smith observed that sensory experience alone could not spur us toward sympathetic engagement with others: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.” For Smith, what made us moral beings was the imaginative capacity to “place ourselves in his situation … and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”

In this sense, empathy is an instinctive mirroring of others’ experience—James Bond gets his testicles mashed in “Casino Royale,” and male moviegoers grimace and cross their legs. Smith talks of how “persons of delicate fibres” who notice a beggar’s sores and ulcers “are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.” There is now widespread support, in the social sciences, for what the psychologist C. Daniel Batson calls “the empathy-altruism hypothesis.” Batson has found that simply instructing his subjects to take another’s perspective made them more caring and more likely to help.

Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an “affective revolution.” There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We’ve learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others. Other researchers are exploring how empathy emerges in chimpanzee and other primates, how it flowers in young children, and the sort of circumstances that trigger it.

This interest isn’t just theoretical. If we can figure out how empathy works, we might be able to produce more of it. Some individuals staunch their empathy through the deliberate endorsement of political or religious ideologies that promote cruelty toward their adversaries, while others are deficient because of bad genes, abusive parenting, brutal experience, or the usual unhappy goulash of all of the above. At an extreme lie the one per cent or so of people who are clinically described as psychopaths. A standard checklist for the condition includes “callousness; lack of empathy”; many other distinguishing psychopathic traits, like lack of guilt and pathological lying, surely stem from this fundamental deficit. Some blame the empathy-deficient for much of the suffering in the world. In “The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty” (Basic), Simon Baron-Cohen goes so far as to equate evil with “empathy erosion.”

In a thoughtful new book on bullying, “Sticks and Stones” (Random House), Emily Bazelon writes, “The scariest aspect of bullying is the utter lack of empathy”—a diagnosis that she applies not only to the bullies but also to those who do nothing to help the victims. Few of those involved in bullying, she cautions, will turn into full-blown psychopaths. Rather, the empathy gap is situational: bullies have come to see their victims as worthless; they have chosen to shut down their empathetic responses. But most will outgrow—and perhaps regret—their terrible behavior. “The key is to remember that almost everyone has the capacity for empathy and decency—and to tend that seed as best as we possibly can,” she maintains.

Two other recent books, “The Empathic Civilization” (Penguin), by Jeremy Rifkin, and “Humanity on a Tightrope” (Rowman & Littlefield), by Paul R. Ehrlich and Robert E. Ornstein, make the powerful argument that empathy has been the main driver of human progress, and that we need more of it if our species is to survive. Ehrlich and Ornstein want us “to emotionally join a global family.” Rifkin calls for us to make the leap to “global empathic consciousness.” He sees this as the last best hope for saving the world from environmental destruction, and concludes with the plaintive question “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avoid planetary collapse?” These are sophisticated books, which provide extensive and accessible reviews of the scholarly literature on empathy. And, as befits the spirit of the times, they enthusiastically champion an increase in empathy as a cure for humanity’s ills.

This enthusiasm may be misplaced, however. Empathy has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.

In 1949, Kathy Fiscus, a three-year-old girl, fell into a well in San Marino, California, and the entire nation was captivated by concern. Four decades later, America was transfixed by the plight of Jessica McClure—Baby Jessica—the eighteen-month-old who fell into a narrow well in Texas, in October, 1987, triggering a fifty-eight-hour rescue operation. “Everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on,” President Reagan remarked.

The immense power of empathy has been demonstrated again and again. It is why Americans were rivetted by the fate of Natalee Holloway, the teen-ager who went missing in Aruba, in 2005. It’s why, in the wake of widely reported tragedies and disasters—the tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina the year after, or Sandy last year—people gave time, money, and even blood. It’s why, last December, when twenty children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, there was a widespread sense of grief, and an intense desire to help. Last month, of course, saw a similar outpouring of support for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Why do people respond to these misfortunes and not to others? The psychologist Paul Slovic points out that, when Holloway disappeared, the story of her plight took up far more television time than the concurrent genocide in Darfur. Each day, more than ten times the number of people who died in Hurricane Katrina die because of preventable diseases, and more than thirteen times as many perish from malnutrition.

There is, of course, the attention-getting power of new events. Just as we can come to ignore the hum of traffic, we become oblivious of problems that seem unrelenting, like the starvation of children in Africa—or homicide in the United States. In the past three decades, there were some sixty mass shootings, causing about five hundred deaths; that is, about one-tenth of one per cent of the homicides in America. But mass murders get splashed onto television screens, newspaper headlines, and the Web; the biggest ones settle into our collective memory—Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook. The 99.9 per cent of other homicides are, unless the victim is someone you’ve heard of, mere background noise.

The key to engaging empathy is what has been called “the identifiable victim effect.” As the economist Thomas Schelling, writing forty-five years ago, mordantly observed, “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”

You can see the effect in the lab. The psychologists Tehila Kogut and Ilana Ritov asked some subjects how much money they would give to help develop a drug that would save the life of one child, and asked others how much they would give to save eight children. The answers were about the same. But when Kogut and Ritov told a third group a child’s name and age, and showed her picture, the donations shot up—now there were far more to the one than to the eight.

The number of victims hardly matters—there is little psychological difference between hearing about the suffering of five thousand and that of five hundred thousand. Imagine reading that two thousand people just died in an earthquake in a remote country, and then discovering that the actual number of deaths was twenty thousand. Do you now feel ten times worse? To the extent that we can recognize the numbers as significant, it’s because of reason, not empathy.

In the broader context of humanitarianism, as critics like Linda Polman have pointed out, the empathetic reflex can lead us astray. When the perpetrators of violence profit from aid—as in the “taxes” that warlords often demand from international relief agencies—they are actually given an incentive to commit further atrocities. It is similar to the practice of some parents in India who mutilate their children at birth in order to make them more effective beggars. The children’s debilities tug at our hearts, but a more dispassionate analysis of the situation is necessary if we are going to do anything meaningful to prevent them.

When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’.

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves.

Something like this happened to the most famous case of amnesia in 20th-century science, a man known only as ‘H.M.’ until his death in 2008. When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. During this time he was subjected to thousands of hours of tests, of which naturally he had no recall; he provided data for hundreds of scientific papers, and became the subject of a book (Memory’s Ghost by Philip Hilts) and a staple of popular science journalism; by the 1990s digital images of his uniquely disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory. Since his death his brain has been shaved into 2401 slices, each 70 microns thick, compared in one account to the slivers of ginger served with sushi. Suzanne Corkin, an MIT neuroscientist, first met him in 1962 and after 1980 became his lead investigator and ‘sole keeper’. Permanent Present Tense is her account of Henry Gustave Molaison – his full identity can finally be revealed – and the historic contribution he made to science.

Corkin had a reputation for strict policing of access to Henry, a charge she happily concedes: ‘I did not want him to become a sideshow attraction – the man without a memory.’ After the death of his mother, his last thirty years were spent at a Connecticut nursing home in strict anonymity, with staff sworn to secrecy and filming prohibited. More than a hundred carefully screened researchers were admitted over the years to perform brain scans and cognitive tests, but were never told his name. Corkin’s lucid, well-organised telling of Henry’s story merges intimate case history with an account of the current scientific understanding and how it was reached.

Henry’s surgery was undertaken in an era of freewheeling experiment in pursuit of the idea that memories were indelible snapshots of sense experience, stored in chronological sequence like the frames of a celluloid film. Over the course of his decades as a test subject, the field was colonised by information theory, the processes of memory divided like those of a computer into encoding, storage and retrieval. Now the post-mortem scanning and mapping of Henry’s brain is exposing the artificiality of these divisions and revealing complexities that no computer can emulate.

Henry had his first epileptic episode in 1936, at the age of ten; by 1953 his seizures had become increasingly frequent and debilitating. His family doctor referred him to William Beecher Scoville, a leading neurosurgeon at Yale Medical School. When massive doses of medication failed to quell his attacks and EEGs revealed no obvious locus of brain damage, Scoville suggested a novel surgical procedure. Using a trepanning drill he had constructed himself from auto parts, he cut two coin-sized holes in the skull, ‘doorways to Henry’s brain’, and suctioned out most of his medial temporal lobes, the front half of the hippocampus and most of the amygdala. After recovery, Henry’s seizures were significantly reduced, but it soon become apparent that the operation had vacuumed away any recollection of his hospital stay, and indeed most of the significant events of the previous few years. Catastrophically, it had also created a global anterograde amnesia: the loss of the ability to form new memories of any kind.

The holes that Scoville cut to expose Henry’s brain to his instruments stand as a grisly metaphor for the science that underpinned the operation: small patches of illumination surrounded by an uncharted expanse of darkness. In 1953 the hippocampus was believed merely to support the sense of smell: its role in memory was unsuspected. Yet neurosurgery seemed to be banishing the darkness at an astonishing rate. The inspiration for Scoville’s work was the Canadian surgeon and researcher Wilder Penfield, who had pioneered surgical interventions for epilepsy at McGill University in the 1930s. Penfield had discovered that by moving an electrode over the brains of patients while they were conscious under local anaesthesia he could sometimes identify the source of their seizures. But the technique also produced some unexpected, even miraculous responses. As the electrode passed across the temporal lobes, patients would twitch, vocalise and describe strange sensations, and some would experience intense ‘flashbulb’ memories such as childhood scenes or long-forgotten songs.

By plotting the sites that provoked these responses, Penfield generated brain maps that led him to new theories of ‘functional localisation’. Lavishly funded, first by the grateful families of patients whose epilepsy he had relieved and later by the Rockefeller Foundation, he expanded from remedial surgery into an intoxicating programme of research, teaching and experiment. His operating theatre was customised with cameras and EEG facilities, and he worked intensively with his ‘memory patients’ to harvest their recollections and match them to the moment of their formation. All experience, he came to believe, was perfectly preserved in memory, and perfectly recoverable: a ‘library of many volumes’, organised in an orderly record along ‘the thread of time’.

In the United States, at least 9% of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France?

Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological—psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.

French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children’s focusing and behavioral problems withdrugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child’s brain but in the child’s social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child’s brain.

French child psychiatrists don’t use the same system of classification of childhood emotional problems as American psychiatrists. They do not use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM.According to Sociologist Manuel Vallee, the French Federation of Psychiatry developed an alternative classification system as a resistance to the influence of the DSM-3. This alternative was the CFTMEA(Classification Française des Troubles Mentaux de L’Enfant et de L’Adolescent), first released in 1983, and updated in 1988 and 2000. The focus of CFTMEA is on identifying and addressing the underlying psychosocial causes of children’s symptoms, not on finding the best pharmacological bandaids with which to mask symptoms.

To the extent that French clinicians are successful at finding and repairing what has gone awry in the child’s social context, fewer children qualify for the ADHD diagnosis. Moreover, the definition of ADHD is not as broad as in the American system, which, in my view, tends to “pathologize” much of what is normal childhood behavior. The DSMspecifically does not consider underlying causes. It thus leads clinicians to give the ADHD diagnosis to a much larger number of symptomatic children, while also encouraging them to treat those children with pharmaceuticals.

The French holistic, psycho-social approach also allows for considering nutritional causes for ADHD-type symptoms—specifically the fact that the behavior of some children is worsened after eating foods with artificial colors, certain preservatives, and/or allergens. Clinicians who work with troubled children in this country—not to mention parents of many ADHD kids—are well aware that dietary interventions can sometimes help a child’s problem. In the United States, the strict focus on pharmaceutical treatment of ADHD, however, encourages clinicians to ignore the influence of dietary factors on children’s behavior.

And then, of course, there are the vastly different philosophies of child-rearing in the United States and France. These divergent philosophies could account for why French children are generally better-behaved than their American counterparts. Pamela Druckerman highlights the divergent parenting styles in her recent book, Bringing up Bébé. I believe her insights are relevant to a discussion of why French children are not diagnosed with ADHD in anything like the numbers we are seeing in the United States.

Loneliness can be a shameful hunger, a shell, a dangerous landscape of shadowy figures. But it is also a gift.

The bluest period I ever spent was in Manhattan’s East Village, not so long back. I lived on East 2nd Street, in an unreconstructed tenement building, and each morning I walked across Tompkins Square Park to get my coffee. When I arrived the trees were bare, and I dedicated those walks to checking the progress of the blossoms. There are many community gardens in that part of town, and so I could examine irises and tulips, forsythia, cherry trees and a great weeping willow that seemed to drop its streamers overnight, like a ship about to lift anchor and sail away.

I wasn’t supposed to be in New York, or not like this, anyway. I’d met someone in America and then lost them almost instantly, but the future we’d dreamed up together retained its magnetism, and so I moved alone to the city I’d expected to become my home. I had friends there, but none of the ordinary duties and habits that comprise a life. I’d severed all those small, sustaining cords, and, as such, it wasn’t surprising that I experienced a loneliness more paralysing than anything I’d encountered in more than a decade of living alone.

What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal. Being foreign didn’t help. I kept botching the ballgame of language: fumbling my catches, bungling my throws. Most days, I went for coffee in the same place, a glass-fronted café full of tiny tables, populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops. Each time, the same thing happened. I ordered the nearest thing to filter on the menu: a medium urn brew, which was written in large chalk letters on the board. Each time, without fail, the barista looked blankly up and asked me to repeat myself. I might have found it funny in England, or irritating, or I might not have noticed it all, but that spring it worked under my skin, depositing little grains of anxiety and shame.

Something funny happens to people who are lonely. The lonelier they get, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it isn’t easy to dislodge. When I think of its advance, an anchoress’s cell comes to mind, as does the exoskeleton of a gastropod.

I thought of those dreamlike crumbling rooms, extending across the water, where men long since dead freed one another

This sounds like paranoia, but in fact loneliness’s odd mode of increase has been mapped by medical researchers. It seems that the initial sensation triggers what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, one tends to experience the world in negative terms, and to both expect and remember negative encounters — instances of rudeness, rejection or abrasion, like my urn brew episodes in the café. This creates, of course, a vicious circle, in which the lonely person grows increasingly more isolated, suspicious and withdrawn.

At the same time, the brain’s state of red alert brings about a series of physiological changes. Lonely people are restless sleepers. Loneliness drives up blood pressure, accelerates ageing, and acts as a precursor to cognitive decline. According to a 2010 study I came across in theAnnals of Behavioral Medicine entitled ‘Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms’, loneliness predicts increased morbidity and mortality, which is an elegant way of saying that loneliness can prove fatal.

I don’t think I experienced cognitive decline, but I quickly became intimate with hypervigilance. During the months I lived in Manhattan, it manifested as an almost painful alertness to the city, a form of over-arousal that oscillated between paranoia and desire. During the day, I rarely encountered anyone in my building, but at night I’d hear doors opening and closing, and people passing a few feet from my bed. The man next door was a DJ, and at odd hours the apartment would be flooded with his music. At two or three in the morning, the heat rose clanking through the pipes, and just before dawn I’d sometimes be woken by the siren of the ladder truck leaving the East 2nd Street fire station, which had lost six crew members on 9/11.

(Source: sunrec)

New science on its corrosive, traumatizing effects.

Not everyone feels the sustained, melancholic presence of a high-school shadow self. There are some people who simply put in their four years, graduate, and that’s that. But for most of us adults, the adolescent years occupy a privileged place in our memories, which to some degree is even quantifiable: Give a grown adult a series of random prompts and cues, and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence. This phenomenon even has a name—the “reminiscence bump”—and it’s been found over and over in large population samples, with most studies suggesting that memories from the ages of 15 to 25 are most vividly retained. (Which perhaps explains Ralph Keyes’s observation in his 1976 classic, Is There Life After High School?: “Somehow those three or four years can in retrospect feel like 30.”)

To most human beings, the significance of the adolescent years is pretty intuitive. Writers from Shakespeare to Salinger have done their most iconic work about them; and Hollywood, certainly, has long understood the operatic potential of proms, first dates, and the malfeasance of the cafeteria goon squad. “I feel like most of the stuff I draw on, even today, is based on stuff that happened back then,” says Paul Feig, the creator of Freaks and Geeks, which had about ten glorious minutes on NBC’s 1999–2000 lineup before the network canceled it. “Inside, I still feel like I’m 15 to 18 years old, and I feel like I still cope with losing control of the world around me in the same ways.” (By being funny, mainly.)

Yet there’s one class of professionals who seem, rather oddly, to have underrated the significance of those years, and it just happens to be the group that studies how we change over the course of our lives: developmental neuroscientists and psychologists. “I cannot emphasize enough the amount of skewing there is,” says Pat Levitt, the scientific director for the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, “in terms of the number of studies that focus on the early years as opposed to adolescence. For years, we had almost a religious belief that all systems developed in the same way, which meant that what happened from zero to 3 really mattered, but whatever happened thereafter was merely tweaking.”

Zero to 3. For ages, this window dominated the field, and it still does today, in part for reasons of convenience: Birth is the easiest time to capture a large population to study, and, as Levitt points out, “it’s easier to understand something as it’s being put together”—meaning the brain—“than something that’s complex but already formed.” There are good scientific reasons to focus on this time period, too: The sensory systems, like hearing and eyesight, develop very early on. “But the error we made,” says Levitt, “was to say, ‘Oh, that’s how all functions develop, even those that are very complex. Executive function, emotional regulation—all of it must develop in the same way.’ ” That is not turning out to be the case. “If you’re interested in making sure kids learn a lot in school, yes, intervening in early childhood is the time to do it,” says Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University and perhaps the country’s foremost researcher on adolescence. “But if you’re interested in how people become who they are, so much is going on in the adolescent years.”

In the past couple of decades, studies across the social sciences have been designed around this new orientation. It has long been known, for instance, that male earning potential correlates rather bluntly with height. But it was only in 2004 that a trio of economists thought to burrow a little deeper and discovered, based on a sample of thousands of white men in the U.S. and Britain, that it wasn’t adult height that seemed to affect their subjects’ wages; it was their height at 16. (In other words, two white men measuring five-foot-eleven can have very different earning potential in the same profession, all other demographic markers being equal, just because one of them was shorter at 16.) Eight years later, Deborah Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers, observed something similar about adults of a normal weight: They are far more likely to have higher self-esteem if they were a normal weight, rather than overweight or obese, in late adolescence (Carr was using sample data that tracked weight at age 21, but she notes that heavy 21-year-olds were also likely to be heavy in high school). Robert Crosnoe, a University of Texas sociologist, will be publishing a monograph with a colleague this year that shows attractiveness in high school has lingering effects, too, even fifteen years later. “It predicted a greater likelihood of marrying,” says Crosnoe, “better earning potential, better mental health.” This finding reminds me of something a friend was told years ago by Frances Lear, head of the eponymous, now defunct magazine for women: “The difference between you and me is that I knew in high school I was beautiful.”

Our moral reactions are easily influenced by a variety of factors. One of them isanxiety. When people are confronted with disturbing experiences like mortality salience (i.e., being made aware of their own eventual death), they tend to affirm their moral beliefs. As a result, they feel inclined to punish moral transgression more harshly than they would without feeling fundamentally threatened. For example, in a now classical study people who objected to prostitution were asked to suggest a penalty for a woman arrested for prostitution. Participants who were led to reflect on their own mortality beforehand proposed a far higher bail than participants who thought about a less anxiety inducing topic. Such belief affirmation effects can also be evoked by psychologically disturbing experiences less severe than mortality salience. Hence, anxiety aroused by different situations can make our moral reactions more pronounced.

Some days ago, an interesting study has been published in “Psychological Science”. The authors showed that the common over-the-counter pain reliever paracetamol counteracts the belief-affirming effect of anxiety. Participants who took a placebo showed the familiar response pattern in the “prostitution paradigm”. They suggested a harsher penalty for the prostitute under mortality salience (a bail of around $450) compared to a control condition (around $300). Participants who took paracetamol, however, didn’t react on mortality salience. Independent of what they had reflected on before, they suggested the same penalty for the prostitute (around $300). Paracetamol seems to have reduced the fundamental anxiety participants felt due to the mortality salience manipulation, so they didn’t have to affirm their moral beliefs that strongly. In a second experiment, the same effect of paracetamol was shown using a different disturbing experience (a surrealistic movie instead of mortality salience) and a different measurement for belief affirmation (a fine for rioters instead of a bail for a prostitute).

Hence, besides killing physical pain, paracetamol seems to be capable of counteracting the effect anxiety has on our moral reactions. From a scientific perspective, this certainly is an interesting finding. But what can we make out of it from a practical ethics perspective? If we want a person’s moral reaction to be the result of cognition rather than emotion, paracetamol could be a means for bias reduction. However, some people might argue that in case a person’s moral belief is the “correct” one, wanting transgressions to be punished comparatively severely might not be such a bad thing, even if the motivation for that is anxiety. 

“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.” — Chuang-Tzu (350 B.C.)

Chuang-Tzu had it right. No more need be said. But such is human nature that the more succinctly we state the truth, the better we become at ignoring it. So, despite the completeness of the above homily, I’ll proceed, hoping that my volume may insinuate into your worldview what Chuang-Tzu’s brevity might not.

Here’s what I believe. I believe that extolling the pursuit of happiness was a toxic stupidity entirely unworthy of my greatest American hero, Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, it is a poison that sickens our culture more wretchedly every nanosecond. I wish he’d never said it.

It produces a monstrous, insatiable hunger inside our national psyche that encourages us ever more ravenously to devour all the resources of this small planet, crushing liberties, snuffing lives, feeling ourselves ordained by God and Jefferson to do whatever is necessary to make us happy.

And yet the American people are miserable. Or so it would appear.

A bit of anecdotal evidence (of which I could supply a thousand more examples). At the beginning of this year, my lover Lotte and I decided to start counting the number of spontaneous smiles we might observe in the upscale organic supermarket we frequent in San Francisco.

Since then, we’ve seen thousands of faces, nearly all of them healthy, beautiful, and very expensively groomed. We have so far counted seven smiles appearing on them. In 11 months. Seven smiles. (And at least three of these were insincere.) I am not kidding about this.

I also spend a lot of time in American airports. The same expression of troubled self-absorption has become a nearly universal mask worn by my people. Rarely do I hear laughter in an airport, despite there being plenty in an airport to laugh about, however darkly.

What am I to think of my people, who, during the year 2000, while feeding at the greatest economic pig-trough the world has ever slopped forth, also ate 13.4 billion dollars worth of Prozac and other anti-depressants (up 18% from the preceding year)? Better living through chemistry? I don’t think so. Of my legion friends and acquaintances who have become citizens of Prozac Nation. I have never heard any of them claim that these drugs bring them any closer to actual happiness. Rather, they murmur with listless gratitude, anti-depressants have pulled them back from The Abyss. They are not pursuing happiness. They are fleeing suicide.

Actually, it is unfair to single out America in this regard. The pandemic of longing may have started here in the land of infinite possibilities, but it seems to have spread now to every part of the world where industrial economy and the religion of science have taken deep root since Jefferson, Voltaire, Locke, and their other practical colleagues kicked it off a quarter millennium ago.

The smiles per mile rating is only a little higher in Geneva, Brussels, Washington, Paris, or the other capitals of the Rich World than it is in dour San Francisco. But at least the rest of G8 have not declared happiness to be the kind of patriotic obligation it has become in the country literally founded on its pursuit.

Here we suffer the tyranny of fraudulent bonhomie. Big Brother has arrived as the great Smiley Face. I think I probably sensed this early, since I came from a family where nearly everyone drank themselves into oblivion during times like Christmas when happiness was most pathologically pursued.

But not until I turned 30 was it made obvious to me that my wariness of the pursuit of happiness might be a subtle form of treason. Like many of my generation, I hadn’t really expected to live to such an age. I really didn’t trust anyone over 30 - and remain reluctant to do so even now - but since I was about to be one, I figured I ought to at least take a stab at graceful adulthood. At least it seemed clear that I would no longer be able to excuse my peccadilloes on the basis of youth.

So I spent the night before my 30th Birthday composing a list of advisories to myself that I called “Principles of Adult Behavior.” Most of these were blandly inarguable, the sort of platitudes Polonius liked to lay on Hamlet. Stuff like ” Expand your sense of the possible.” And, “Tolerate ambiguity.”

“Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.”

Despite the safely Puritan kicker, this homily actively pissed off the broadest range of folks you can imagine. Whether hippie, cowboy, redneck or debutante, practically everyone who read my list thought there was something threateningly wrong about this. It was… why, it was downright un-American! I even got this from people who were ashamed to be Americans.

Openly agitating against the very pursuit of happiness was considered a sedition of the most insidious hazard. Because nearly everyone feels its weird invisible pressure - driving them to the fatigue that is despair, in order to acquire possessions that possessed them, money that turned their friends monstrous, addictions that turned them monstrous - nearly everyone feels that secret shame of not trying hard enough to be happy.

To have someone tell them they should just stop trying felt like a threat to the oath they’d taken with their lives. They had sworn, sometime during adolescence, that they would pursue happiness, and, by raw will, that they would catch some. When you’ve sacrificed so much to a creed, having it disappear turns your sacrifices into stolen goods.

Is it morning in America again, or is the bubble that is the American economy about to pop (again), this time perhaps tipping it into full-blown collapse in five stages with symphonic accompaniment and fireworks? A country blowing itself up is quite a sight to behold, and it makes us wonder about lots of things. For instance, it makes us wonder whether the people who are doing the blowing up happen to be criminals. (Sure, they may be in a manner of speaking—as a moral judgment passed on the powerful by the powerless—but since none of them are likely to see the inside of a jail cell or even a courtroom any time soon, the point is moot. Let’s be sure to hunt them down once they try to run and hide, though.) But at a much more basic and fundamental level, a better question to ask is this one:

“Why are we being so fucking stupid?”

What do I mean when I use the term “fucking stupid”? I do not mean it as a term of abuse but as a precise, if unflattering, diagnosis. Here is as good a definition as any, excerpted from American Eulogyby Jim Quinn:

If you had told someone on September 10, 2001 that ten years later America would be running $1.5 trillion annual deficits, fighting two wars of choice in countries that despise our presence, and had not only not addressed the $100 [trillion] of unfunded welfare liabilities but added billions more with Medicare D and Obamacare, they would have thought you were a crazy doomster predicting the end of the world. They would have put you away in a padded cell if you had further predicted that politicians would cut taxes three separate times, that the Wall Street banks that leveraged themselves 40 to 1 and destroyed the financial system [would be] handed $2 trillion of taxpayer funds so they could pay themselves multi-million dollar bonuses, and that the Federal Reserve would triple its balance sheet to $2.45 trillion by running its printing presses at hyper-speed and handing the money to those same Wall Street Mega-Banks.

Well, the evidence is in, and that crazy doomster in his padded cell has turned out to be amazingly prescient, so perhaps we should listen to him. And what would that crazy doomster have to say now? I would venture to guess that it would be something along these lines:

There is no reason to think that those who failed to take corrective action up until now, but remain in control, will ever do so. But it should be perfectly obvious that this situation cannot continue ad infinitum. And, as a matter of general principle, things that can’t go on forever—don’t.

Back to the question of stupidity: Why are we (as a country) being so fucking stupid? This question has puzzled me for some time. It appears that the problem of stupidity is quite pervasive: look at any large human organization, and you will find that it is ruled by stupidity. I was not the first to stumble across the conjecture that the intelligence of a hierarchically organized group of people is inversely proportional to its size, but so far the mechanism that makes it so has eluded me. Clearly, there is something amiss with hierarchically organized groups, something that causes all of them to eventually collapse, but what exactly is it? To try to get at this question, last year I spent quite a while researching anarchy, and wrote a series of articles on it (Part I, Part II, Part III). I discovered that vast hierarchies do not occur in nature, which is anarchic and self-organizing, with no chains of command and no entities in supreme command. I discovered that anarchic organizations can go on forever while hierarchical ones inevitably end in collapse. I examined some of the recent breakthroughs in complexity theory, which uncovered the laws governing the different scaling factors in natural (anarchically organized, efficient, stable) systems and unnatural (hierarchically organized, inefficient, collapse-prone) ones.

But nowhere did I find a principled, rigorous explanation for the fatal flaw embedded in the very nature of hierarchical systems. I did have a very strong hunch, though, backed by much anecdotal evidence, that it comes down tostupidity. In anarchic societies whose members cooperate freely, intelligence is additive; in hierarchical organizations structured around a chain of command, intelligence is subtractive. The lowest grunts or peons are expected to carry out orders unquestioningly. Their critical faculties are 100% impaired; if not, they are subjected to disciplinary action. The supreme chief executive officer may be of moderately impaired intelligence, since it is indicative of a significant character flaw to want such a job in the first place. (Kurt Vonnegut put it best: “Only nut cases want to be president.”) But beyond that, the supreme leader must act in such a way as to keep the grunts and peons in line, resulting in further intellectual impairment, which is compounded across all of the intervening ranks, with each link in the chain of command contributing a bit of its own stupidity to the organizational stupidity stack.

I never ascended the ranks of middle management, probably due to my tendency to speak out at meetings and throw around terms such as “nonsensical,” “idiotic,” “brainless,” “self-defeating” and “fucking stupid.” If shushed up by superiors, I would resort to cracking jokes, which were funny and even harder to ignore. Neither my critical faculties, nor my sense of humor, are easily repressed. I was thrown at a lot of special projects where the upside of being able to think independently was not negated by the downside of being unwilling to follow (stupid) orders. To me hierarchy = stupidity in an apparent, palpable way. But in explaining to others why this must be so, I had so far been unable to go beyond speaking in generalities and telling stories.

And so I was happy when I recently came across an article which goes beyond such “hand-waving analysis” and answers this question with some precision. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer, writing in Journal of Management Studies (49:7 November 2012, for reprints please contact andre.spicer.1@city.ac.uk) present “A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations” in which they define a key term: functional stupidity. It is functional in that it is required in order for hierarchically structured organizations to avoid disintegration or, at the very least, to function without a great deal of internal friction. It is stupid in that it is a form intellectual impairment: “Functional stupidity refers to an absence of reflexivity, a refusal to use intellectual capacities in other than myopic ways, and avoidance of justifications.” Alvesson and Spicer go on to define the various “…forms of stupidity management that repress or marginalize doubt and block communicative action” and to diagram the information flows which are instrumental to generating and maintaining sufficient levels stupidity within organizations. What follows is my summary of their theory. Before I start, I would like to mention that although the authors’ analysis is limited in scope to corporate entities, I believe that it extends quite naturally to other hierarchically organized bureaucratic systems, such as governments.

Alvesson and Spicer use as their jumping-off point the major leitmotif of contemporary management theory, which is that “smartness,” variously defined as “knowledge, information, competence, wisdom, resources, capabilities, talent, and learning” has emerged as the main business asset and the key to competitiveness—a shift seen as inevitable as industrial economies go from being resource-based to being knowledge-based. By the way, this is a questionable assumption; do you know how many millions of tons of hydrocarbons went into making the smartphone? But this leitmotif is pervasive, and exemplified by management guru quips such as “creativity creates its own prerogative.” The authors point out that there is also a vast body of research on the irrationality of organizations and the limits to organizational intelligence stemming from “unconscious elements, group-think, and rigid adherence to wishful thinking.” There is also no shortage of research into organizational ignorance which explores the mechanisms behind “bounded-rationality, skilled incompetence, garbage-can decision making, foolishness, mindlessness, and (denied) ignorance.” But what they are getting at is qualitatively different from such run-of-the-mill stupidity. Functional stupidity is neither delusional nor irrational nor ignorant: organizations restrict smartness in rational and informed ways which serve explicit organizational interests. It is, if you will, a sort of “enlightened stupidity”:

Functional stupidity is organizationally-supported lack of reflexivity, substantive reasoning, and justification (my italics). It entails a refusal to use intellectual resources outside a narrow and “safe” terrain. It can provide a sense of certainty that allows organizations to function smoothly. This can save the organization and its members from the frictions provoked by doubt and reflection. Functional stupidity contributes to maintaining and strengthening organizational order. It can also motivate people, help them to cultivate their careers, and subordinate them to socially acceptable forms of management and leadership. Such positive outcomes can further reinforce functional stupidity.

The terms I italicized are important, so let’s define each one.

Revisiting the 1970s Milgram experiment on the New York subway.

Thirty years ago, they were wide-eyed, first-year graduate students, ordered by their iconoclastic professor, Dr. Stanley Milgram, to venture into the New York City subway to conduct an unusual experiment.

Their assignment: to board a crowded train and ask someone for a seat. Then do it again. And again.

“As a Bronxite, I knew, you don’t do this,” said Dr. Jacqueline Williams, now an assistant dean at Brooklyn College. Students jokingly asked their professor if he wanted to get them killed.

But Dr. Milgram was interested in exploring the web of unwritten rules that govern behavior underground, including the universally understood and seldom challenged first-come-first-served equity of subway seating. As it turned out, an astonishing percentage of riders - 68 percent when they were asked directly - got up willingly.

Quickly, however, the focus turned to the experimenters themselves. The seemingly simple assignment proved to be extremely difficult, even traumatic, for the students to carry out.

“It’s something you can’t really understand unless you’ve been there,” said Dr. David Carraher, 55, now a senior scientist at a nonprofit group in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Kathryn Krogh, 58, a clinical psychologist in Arlington, Va., was more blunt: “I was afraid I was going to throw up.”

More than three decades later, the memories are still surprisingly vivid, testimony perhaps to the trauma of their experience and an unintended postscript to a rare study on the delicate subway order.

Two weeks ago, a pair of reporters who set out to replicate the experiment struggled with similar inhibitions. The incredulous reactions they got from riders were the same as well. But they also stumbled upon convincing proof that New Yorkers have mellowed with time. The results were far from scientific, but, remarkably, 13 out of 15 people gave up their seats.

“Uh, O.K., ” said one man, holding hands with his girlfriend, before getting up. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

A construction worker sneered to a male reporter, “If you were a woman, then… .” He got up anyway.

Another woman, who sprang up from her seat, twice asked the reporter, who kept her eyes fixed on the ground, if she was O.K.

Dr. Milgram, who died in 1984 at age 51, got the idea for the experiment from a conversation with his mother-in-law, who complained to him one day that no one had offered her a seat on the subway. “It occurred to me: What would have happened had she asked for a seat?” he said in a 1974 interview in the magazine Psychology Today.

He suggested the experiment to one of his graduate student classes, but the students recoiled. Finally, one student, Ira Goodman, volunteered to try it with a partner. But instead of coming back after 20 trials as he had promised, he returned with only 14. When Dr. Milgram asked him what had happened, he said that it was just too difficult.

Dismissing his students’ fears, Dr. Milgram set out to try it himself. But when he approached his first seated passenger, he found himself frozen.

“The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge,” he said in the interview.

Retreating, he berated himself: ‘What kind of craven coward are you?”

A few unsuccessful tries later, he managed to choke out a request.

“Taking the man’s seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request,” he said. “My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish.”

In his controversial bookAmerican Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881), the neurologist George M. Beard proclaimed that Americans in the 19th century led all civilized nations in their susceptibility to nervous, anxious, and depressive disorders. Beard named the mixture of negative emotions “neurasthenia” and attributed it to five developments in “modern civilization”—steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women. In those major signs of modernity—and dozens of related ones, such as buying stocks on margin—the United States, he argued, was both “peculiar and pre-eminent” among advanced societies.

Beard claimed that American nervousness “is the product of American civilization,” and that this “distinguished malady” was seen most often among the cultural elite and the “brain-workers.” (Indeed, he had suffered from it as a student at Yale University.) Neurasthenia was strongly gendered, but it was an acceptable, even prestigious disease for male intellectuals, professionals, writers, and artists.

The physician Silas Weir Mitchell famously prescribed a “rest cure” for female neurasthenics, to slow down their dangerous mental activity and forcibly restore them to a traditionally passive feminine role. Neurasthenic men, however, were encouraged to steel their nerves and recover their masculine self-control through rugged exercise­—ideally the “West cure,” of horseback riding, hunting, and camping in California or Colorado. Beard, like many of his contemporaries, was interested in solutions to the malady of modern civilization, which offered its most advanced form in the United States. As he concluded, “He who has solved the problem of nervousness as it appears in America shall find its problems in other lands already solved for him.”

Neurasthenia peaked in the early 1900s, according to the literary critic Tom Lutz’s fascinating cultural study, American Nervousness, 1903 (Cornell University Press, 1991). But a century later, we are in the midst of a new epidemic. Depression, angst, panic, stress—whatever you choose to call it, there is clearly a lot of it going around.

“It has not escaped many observers that today we are drenched in anxiety,” says the medical historian Edward Shorter in his new book, How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (Oxford University Press). “Depression has become a mass illness.” Shorter cites statistical evidence: “Within a given year, one in 10 Americans today will have a mood disorder, the great majority of them major depression.” The psychiatrist Jeffrey P. Kahn sees an even worse trend in his recent Angst: Origins of Anxiety and Depression (Oxford), with “the commonplace anxiety and depressive disorders” affecting at least 20 percent of Americans. That’s some 60 million people.

The New York Times even has an online series dedicated to anxiety (submissions to anxiety@nytimes.com), with regular posts on such cheering topics as the dire residential options for the elderly (“You Are Going to Die,” January 20, 2013), as well as regular apocalyptic updates on poverty, guns, violence, terrorism, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, climate change, and the inexorable decline of all the professions, occupations, and institutions we thought were eternal. A report from the World Health Organization says that, despite its wealth, the United States is the most anxious nation. “America’s precocious levels of anxiety are not just happening in spite of the great national happiness rat race but also, perhaps, because of it,” suggests Ruth Whippman in “America the Anxious” (the Times blog, September 22, 2012). Hollywood, too, is cashing in on the age of anxiety, with noir thrillers like Side Effects, about the opportunities and risks of antidepressant medications.

Not surprisingly, the rise of American angst is also the subject of a flood of new books, including memoirs, literary criticism, and medical and historical studies. Looking at several of them suggests that the search for solutions has also created some of the problems, through publicizing a category of distress.

In Angst, Kahn, who is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, sees depression and anxiety as the contemporary forms of primeval instincts of self- and social preservation. He looks at five major syndromes of depressive disorders­—panic anxiety, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, atypical depression, and melancholic (or suicidal) depression—suggesting how each one could have evolved from some Darwinian drive to help organisms survive. Melancholic depression, for example, “kept us from using scarce resources when no longer useful to the group”—in other words, it led to the aged and infirm stepping onto the ice floe.

Kahn locates himself in the field of evolutionary psychopathology, a subset of the evolutionary biology that has seeped into much of our thinking about our maladies, our family patterns, even our literature. He believes the symptoms of angst are so common and widespread that they “must have served some kind of purpose for us in our evolutionary past.” He readily admits that there is not much hard scientific evidence for his ideas, let alone a “smoking gene” for disorders like panic anxiety.

On top blogging sites like Tumblr and Livejournal, the biggest new fandom is no longer anime or evening fantasy drama, but that of “SJ,” a nickname for “social justice,” which refers to discourse on equal rights and how to, essentially, be kind and respectful to all people. As a trans person of color, I have used these platforms as a means of communication, of activism, and a way to maintain my own sanity in one of the rare environments in which I can sometimes feel both safe and totally myself.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are many cases where it’s definitely needed. The recent shooting and death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman, who was initially let go on self-defense despite a recording of Martin screaming for his life and well-documented violence and racist comments, would be one of those cases. The still-existing legislation in the U.S. that makes it possible to fire transgender individuals for their gender identity would be another. There are legitimate issues that need to be addressed in our society, there’s no denying that. The need spawned things like Occupy Wall Street and SlutWalk, major movements evolving out of small internet conversations.

But as everyone on the internet knows, where there is light, there is dark.

What started as a movement by people who are suffering to try to help those of us who are privileged to understand their struggle has now become a mockery, hijacked by people whose only tangible shared problem could be described — and recognized by anyone with common sense — as social ineptitude.

They sit, watching equal rights discussions, hearing the terminology and logic, and take it for their own purposes. They quote famous activists far out of context to add that elusive air of legitimacy where it just doesn’t exist. By carefully and secretly treating their “fight” as equal to racism, transphobia, homophobia and classism, they worm their way into the real issues and cleverly tilt words designed to protect to disregard those who are at actual risk for losing their jobs and their lives.

The base of this false movement is “identity.” You’ve probably heard the term “identity politics” used to refer to people who believe that identity colors one’s experiences, and this idea is not without merit. Identity is an important concept, and is essential to the fighting of bigoted stereotypes and ideas about marginalized groups. It is very easy for people who have never lived or seen a certain kind of oppression personally to believe that it just doesn’t happen, even despite statistics. But people who seek to misuse the term take that concept all the way down the slippery slope. According to them, as long as someone identifies as something, it is true. No exceptions.

Think about that for a minute.

Do you identify as a butterfly? Then you are one. Do you identify as a pie? Then you are full of buttery, fruitilicious goodness. If you follow the “to each their own” philosophy, one could almost wave the basic idea as long as it didn’t interfere with, you know, reality. But this is the dark side of the internet, and it devours all common sense like a black hole eats light. And we’ve already crossed the event horizon. Anything not mainstream is “oppressed” in this wonderland. Wielding identity as a weapon, one can entirely remove themselves from personal responsibility for their part in harming others, and ultimately, any negativity at all.

Ever hear of otherkin, or otakukin? They refer to people who “identify” as animals or anime characters. I’m pretty open, do whatever you want as long as you’re not bugging me. According to some, though, lack of widespread acceptance of otherkin is contributing to mass otherkin oppression. Oh? Otherkin are being rounded up from their homes and killed? No? Are they being fired from jobs for being otherkin? Not that either, huh? Are they at least being disproportionately arrested and thrown in jail with sentences 60% longer than non-otherkin? Well then what IS going on? They’re… being ostracized on the internet. Oh.

But otherkin and their ilk have been around for ever. Try googling “Final Fantasy VII House.” Pick a time to read when you have a few free hours and a lot of booze. Now, there are newer, even more mockable “oppressions” coming out. You’ve heard of transgender and transsexual, let me introduce you to the new trans people: transabled and transethnic. Transabled people are disabled people hiding out in perfectly working bodies. They “identify” as blind, deaf, paraplegic and quadriplegic despite having never been so a day in their entire lives, and are well-known for talking about how hard it is to want to be disabled but unable to be. Transethnic people are white people who “identify” as a non-white race or ethnicity. They’re weeaboos multiplied by a million, with bonus “I learned about your culture in a book I read once so I know more than you.”

But not all the ridiculous “oppressions” are this out there. What normal people call “mild inconveniences,” some have blown up into full scale witch hunts. Like “kinky oppression.” The belief that people thinking your love of handcuffs in the bedroom is weird is exactly the same as getting beaten in the street for being gay, which leads to the coined term “vanilla privilege,” the preference and favoring of those who don’t engage in any kind of kink in society. Or “body mod oppression” and “goth oppression.” Oppression is just as easy as shopping for overpriced skull-themed clothing at Hot Topic, hopping down to the local tattoo parlor, and getting that box of two dollar head dye from the corner shop!

My personal favorite of these new, ridiculous “oppressions” is when people cross so far into this realm that, to them, the norm is oppressed. Fundamentalist Christians have been complaining about their supposed oppression for years, how they are now the ostracized and marginalized in our harsh modern society, and some people have decided to take a page out of their book.

“Demisexuality” is part of the “asexual” grouping. I’d tell you what it means, but demisexual people are confused about it too (and you’ll find about 100 conflicting definitions out there), so I’ll give my understanding. Demisexuality is when people only feel sexual desire for those whose personality they like, or to whom they are emotionally attracted. In other words, they make up most of the population. But they’re very oppressed, if you ask some of them. Oppressed how, exactly? No one knows, but you can’t expect them to provide any evidence. That would be wrong.

[…] But besides being all very ridiculous, it does have a clear-cut, damaging effect to legitimate oppression, those where people are actually dying, becoming homeless, being forced into prostitution, and living in dire poverty, unable to get a hand up. When you take the words of those who truly suffer, not because they feel emotions while sitting in their middle-class home behind their thousand dollar computer, but because they spent 15 years in jail on a trumped up charge they didn’t even commit, and are now unable to get a job due to stigmatization that doesn’t apply across the board, those people now receive less of the sympathy and help they need to survive. For every person that complains that a disagreement on the internet about their catbunnyanimusparklegirl status triggers them (despite them continuing the argument until the wee hours of the morning), someone who is so triggered they can barely breathe, curled up, reliving trauma, is invalidated, ignored, and not provided what they need.

… Now, this is all well and good but what accounts for the unsettling feeling that some of us share that Facebook and other social networking tools are not providing all the required vitamins of friendship. The concern is that Facebook is, in fact, just one of the innumerable fetishistic things we do to distract ourselves from the harder task of cultivating our best capabilities.  In reflecting on the older social technologies, for instance spoken language, one recalls that a person can become especially adept at them: one can be a skilled orator or a notable conversationalist, but can using Facebook become a source of a unique human excellence?  Perhaps excellence in Facebooking is demonstrated by using an appropriate ratio of likes to written comments? Or perhaps the appropriate comic timing of status updating?  Another way of expressing the concern is to wonder if Facebook is worrisome precisely because it makes something like expertise at friendship too easy, too readily and conveniently available?  That is, rather than not being good enough at replicating friendship has it, rather, become, confusingly, all too good at it?

Furthermore, has Facebook commodified friendship? The price we pay is not only in the cash-investment in the supporting technologies required to service one’s account (computer, smart phone, or even the new Facebook phone) but there is a price also paid in the sort of faith-investment entailed in going down the virtual friendship rabbit-hole: the confidence that spending time will enhance happiness.

A helpful way to frame and address the issue of Facebook’s ability to seemingly add and subtract from friendship simultaneously is by means of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm”.  Borgmann is a German born American philosopher, who teaches at the University of Montana.  In his classic critique of modern technology, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) Borgmann investigates a “debilitating tendency” of our modern technological lives, represented in the manner in which technology makes promises and subsequently erodes the quality of life in attempting to make good on its promises.  Technology, Borgmann says, promises to place nature and culture under our control and it does so by means of devices that make goods and services effortlessly available to us. The characteristic feature of devices is that they perform their tasks immediately, and without making much in the way of demand upon us in return.  Emblematic devices for Borgmann include television sets, automobiles and so forth.  Facebook and other social media tools seem to fit the bill (though there is some squabbling it seems in the secondary literature about what counts as a device and what does not).  Expressed in Borgmannesque terms the Facebook is a device that makes our friends available to us whenever we choose.  Space and time all but disappear. Thus I can conjure up my pals over my morning tea or by means of a Facebook app on phone as I commute to work.  It’s easy, ubiquitous, effortless.

So, why might any of this be a problem?

The problem is that the device, in general, supplants a richer engagement with things.  To use one of Borgmann’s own examples when a wood-burning stove is replaced by heat supplied by a coal-fired central plant and piped into our homes a rich involvement with the world of the thing is lost.  The stove is more than a mere appliance – it provides a focus for the home, a hearth. To select and chop the wood and to learn the knack of lighting and maintaining the stove requires a social engagement than one does not get by flipping a switch.  The family gathers around it.  In terms of this model, Facebook in its capacity to make friends appear by glancing at our screens, and in its reduction of social civilities to the mere deploying of “like” buttons and so on, unburdens us of many of the responsibilities of friendship.  It is fair to say that, over the years, I have traveled less to Ireland to see my parents and siblings than I might have, because they remain available to me on Facebook and Skype.  But instant availability comes at the cost of a flattening.  A poke from friend or family on Facebook has never been, I suspect, as gratifying as an embrace in the flesh.  Gone also is the satisfaction of arriving at the journey’s end – the door opening, the smell of rashers of bacon on the pan in the kitchen within, being prepared for the prodigal son’s return.

Now most people maintain a mixed strategy: inter-mingling the virtual and the physical aspects of their friendships.  I have coined the term “phriendship” to refer to those intimate relationships that call primarily for real-world physical encounters.  Clearly we need to maintain both phriendships and friendships.  However, perhaps even the best of phriendships becomes a little deracinated by our virtual commitments.  When one finally get together, the process of catching is now a little diluted.  That trimmed beard no longer a surprise, nor are the graying temples, the chronicles of births, deaths.  Entertainments and misfortunes have already been shared.  There is simply less work to do – when we next meet up the routine tasks of friendship have been attended to in tiny byte-sized pieces. 

This article by James Webb discusses existential depression among gifted young people. He examines what it is, how it may manifest in a gifted child, and what a parent can do to help their child through these difficult feelings. He points out that gifted young people are more likely to have this type of depression because of their more highly developed sensitivities. 

It has been my experience that gifted and talented persons are more likely to experience a type of depression referred to as existential depression. Although an episode of existential depression may be precipitated in anyone by a major loss or the threat of a loss which highlights the transient nature of life, persons of higher intellectual ability are more prone to experience existential depression spontaneously. Sometimes this existential depression is tied into the positive disintegration experience referred to by Dabrowski (1996).

Existential depression is a depression that arises when an individual confronts certain basic issues of existence. Yalom (1980) describes four such issues (or “ultimate concerns”)—death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Death is an inevitable occurrence. Freedom, in an existential sense, refers to the absence of external structure. That is, humans do not enter a world which is inherently structured. We must give the world a structure which we ourselves create. Isolation recognizes that no matter how close we become to another person, a gap always remains, and we are nonetheless alone. Meaninglessness stems from the first three. If we must die, if we construct our own world, and if each of us is ultimately alone, then what meaning does life have?

Why should such existential concerns occur disproportionately among gifted persons? Partially, it is because substantial thought and reflection must occur to even consider such notions, rather than simply focusing on superficial day-to-day aspects of life. Other more specific characteristics of gifted children are important predisposers as well.

Because gifted children are able to consider the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world is falling short of how it might be. Because they are intense, gifted children feel keenly the disappointment and frustration which occurs when ideals are not reached. Similarly, these youngsters quickly spot the inconsistencies, arbitrariness and absurdities in society and in the behaviors of those around them. Traditions are questioned or challenged. For example, why do we put such tight sex-role or age-role restrictions on people? Why do people engage in hypocritical behaviors in which they say one thing and then do another? Why do people say things they really do not mean at all? Why are so many people so unthinking and uncaring in their dealings with others? How much difference in the world can one person’s life make?

When gifted children try to share these concerns with others, they are usually met with reactions ranging from puzzlement to hostility. They discover that others, particularly of their age, clearly do not share these concerns, but instead are focused on more concrete issues and on fitting in with others’ expectations. Often by even first grade, these youngsters, particularly the more highly gifted ones, feel isolated from their peers and perhaps from their families as they find that others are not prepared to discuss such weighty concerns.

When their intensity is combined with multi-potentiality, these youngsters become particularly frustrated with the existential limitations of space and time. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to develop all of the talents that many of these children have. Making choices among the possibilities is indeed arbitrary; there is no “ultimately right” choice. Even choosing a vocation can be difficult if one is trying to make a career decision between essentially equal passion, talents and potential in violin, neurology, theoretical mathematics and international relations.

The reaction of gifted youngsters (again with intensity) to these frustrations is often one of anger. But they quickly discover that their anger is futile, for it is really directed at “fate” or at other matters which they are not able to control. Anger that is powerless evolves quickly into depression.

In such depression, gifted children typically try to find some sense of meaning, some anchor point which they can grasp to pull themselves out of the mire of “unfairness.” Often, though, the more they try to pull themselves out, the more they become acutely aware that their life is finite and brief, that they are alone and are only one very small organism in a quite large world, and that there is a frightening freedom regarding how one chooses to live one’s life. It is at this point that they question life’s meaning and ask, “Is this all there is to life? Is there not ultimate meaning? Does life only have meaning if I give it meaning? I am a small, insignificant organism who is alone in an absurd, arbitrary and capricious world where my life can have little impact, and then I die. Is this all there is?”

Such concerns are not too surprising in thoughtful adults who are going through mid-life crises. However, it is a matter of great concern when these existential questions are foremost in the mind of a twelve or fifteen year old. Such existential depressions deserve careful attention, since they can be precursors to suicide.

How can we help our bright youngsters cope with these questions? We cannot do much about the finiteness of our existence. However, we can help youngsters learn to feel that they are understood and not so alone and that there are ways to manage their freedom and their sense of isolation.