Does a better world depend on good people?

The Better Half reports hearing chickadees' spring songs today. That's a hopeful sign. Tomorrow, and a number of days thereafter, the high daily temperatures are forecast to climb above freezing about every other day. I look forward to hearing the sounds of melting, dripping waters and seeing life return to bare branches that need greening.

springtime chickadee

Photo by J. Harrington

Back in the prior millennium, during my college days, I encountered the teachings and writings of several schools of psychology, including gestalt and humanistic. As I scan social media and news reports these days, it seems clear that many people aren’t familiar with, or have rejected, a fundamental perspective of Fritz Perls captured in the Gestalt prayer:

“I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.

If not, it can't be helped.”

 These days I suspect many might claim that the “prayer” is but a rationalization for a world view that justifies a colonial mindset. On the other hand, an alternative approach seemed to offer more.

Humanistic psychology helps the client gain the belief that all people are inherently good.^[2] It adopts a holistic approach to human existence and pays special attention to such phenomena as creativity, free will, and positive human potential. It encourages viewing ourselves as a "whole person" greater than the sum of our parts and encourages self exploration rather than the study of behavior in other people....

I suspect many of us would undoubtedly quibble with  the validity of the first sentence in the quotation immediately above. Personally, I can accept “many” or, on a good day, even “most,” but I’ve seen too much evidence to the contrary to believe that “all people are inherently good.” That brings us to one of the  reasons I can’t and won’t accept inherent goodness: the abuse of the attention economy today.

We have misinformation, often due to incompetence, disinformation, usually due to malicious intentions, both of which bring a signal to noise ratio to the point of being largely useless and contribute mightily to confirmation bias on either or all sides of an issue. If we are to have a future, we can and must do better. “How?” becomes a key question. See if this possibility is of interest:

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.

If so, watch his TED Talk here: How to get your ideas to spread [there’s also a transcript if you’d rather read.] I need to spend time rewatching and rereading this and a few more of Godin’s presentations and see if they help me understand, accept and learn how to respond to the fact that Republicans seem to be winning a war of ideas that I would expect Democrats to prevail in. Or is grasping power only about power and not about ideas?

Ideas

By Kathryn Starbuck

I was the lonely one in whom   

they swarmed in the millions.   

I was their creature and I   

was grateful. I could sleep   

when I wanted.   

I lived a divided   

existence in sleepdreams   

that lit up a silence as dreadful   

as that of the moon. I have   

an overly-precise recall of   

those solitary years before   

I opened the curtain and drew   

upon a universe of want that made   

me so strong I could crack   

spines of books with one hand.

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