We are living in an age of anger: from American 'shooters' and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media. Renowned author and essayist Pankaj Mishra visits the RSA to discuss how and why we got to this point.
3 February 2017
Nautilus Magazine: Against Willpower
Most people feel more comfortable with Thomas’ narrative. They would agree with his self-diagnosis (that he lacked willpower), and might even call it clear-eyed and courageous. Many people might also suspect that John’s reframing of his problem was an act of self-deception, serving to hide a real problem. But Thomas’ approach deserves just as much skepticism as John’s. It’s entirely possible that Thomas was seduced by the near-mystical status that modern culture has assigned to the idea of willpower itself—an idea that, ultimately, was working against him.
Ignoring the idea of willpower will sound absurd to most patients and therapists, but, as a practicing addiction psychiatrist and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the very concept of willpower, and concerned by the self-help obsession that surrounds it. Countless books and blogs offer ways to “boost self-control,” or even to “meditate your way to more willpower,” but what’s not widely recognized is that new research has shown some of the ideas underlying these messages to be inaccurate. [...]
The specific conception of “willpower,” however, didn’t emerge until the Victorian Era, as described by contemporary psychology researcher Roy Baumeister in his book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. During the 19th century, the continued waning of religion, huge population increases, and widespread poverty led to social anxieties about whether the growing underclass would uphold proper moral standards. Self-control became a Victorian obsession, promoted by publications like the immensely popular 1859 book Self-Help, which preached the values of “self-denial” and untiring perseverance. The Victorians took an idea directly from the Industrial Revolution and described willpower as a tangible force driving the engine of our self-control. The willpower-deficient were to be held in contempt. The earliest use of the word, in 1874 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in reference to moralistic worries about substance use: “The drunkard ... whose will-power and whose moral force have been conquered by degraded appetite.” [...]
If ego depletion does turn out to be wrong, it’s striking how seemingly well-established it became before more rigorous investigations dispelled the assumptions it rests on. The story of its rise and fall also shows how faulty assumptions about willpower are not just misleading, but can be harmful. Related studies have shown that beliefs about willpower strongly influence self-control: Research subjects who believe in ego depletion (that willpower is a limited resource) show diminishing self-control over the course of an experiment, while people who don’t believe in ego depletion are steady throughout. What’s more, when subjects are manipulated into believing in ego depletion through subtly biased questionnaires at the outset of a study, their performance suffers as well.
Nautilus Magazine: Why You Didn’t See It Coming
Just as our brains have limits grappling with numbers, our senses have limits grasping sizes much beyond our personal, human-sized, scale, where different laws of nature dominate. Flies can walk on walls because gravity at fly scale is a barely perceptible pull, and electrical forces are everything. At the subatomic scales of quantum physics, rules change completely. Particles can be here and there simultaneously; until measured, distance, time, energy, and velocity all exist in a fuzzy state of uncertainty. [...]
Gravity on grand scales gets so bizarre it can trip up the best thinkers. When, almost 100 years ago, Einstein’s own equations of general relativity predicted that a massive enough star could implode into a black hole—leaving nothing behind but an extreme warping of spacetime—he didn’t believe it. You could say he saw black holes coming. But seeing is believing, and Einstein didn’t believe. Which is to say: Predicting the qualitative effects of quantitative changes takes more than mere genius. It takes a willingness to accept the unacceptable—something Einstein did on a regular basis. But this extrapolation went too far even for him. [...]
Physicists certainly needed stories to convey the dangers of nuclear bombs. It was hard to make people see (even today) that they are not simply bigger bombs. They were something qualitatively different—a factor of 1,000 different. Frank Oppenheimer, Rukeyser’s schoolmate and lifelong pal, used the example of scaling up a dinner party in your home. What if you invited four people, and 4,000 appear instead? And you have to make do with the same kitchen, same pots, same glassware? This is a fair comparison, he said, because after all, the Earth itself—the people, the homes, the civilizations—does not change even as firepower increases. The introduction of nuclear weapons brought about a phase change so profound it provoked Einstein to remark: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
CityLab: Red State, Blue City
The United States now has its most metropolitan president in recent memory: a Queens-bred, skyscraper-building, apartment-dwelling Manhattanite. Yet it was rural America that carried Donald Trump to victory; the president got trounced in cities. Republican reliance on suburbs and the countryside isn’t new, of course, but in the presidential election, the gulf between urban and nonurban voters was wider than it had been in nearly a century. Hillary Clinton won 88 of the country’s 100 biggest counties, but still went down to defeat.
American cities seem to be cleaving from the rest of the country, and the temptation for liberals is to try to embrace that trend. With Republicans controlling the presidency, both houses of Congress, and most statehouses, Democrats are turning to local ordinances as their best hope on issues ranging from gun control to the minimum wage to transgender rights. Even before Inauguration Day, big-city mayors laid plans to nudge the new administration leftward, especially on immigration—and, should that fail, to join together in resisting its policies.
But if liberal advocates are clinging to the hope that federalism will allow them to create progressive havens, they’re overlooking a big problem: Power may be decentralized in the American system, but it devolves to the state, not the city. Recent events in red states where cities are pockets of liberalism are instructive, and cautionary. Over the past few years, city governments and state legislatures have fought each other in a series of battles involving preemption, the principle that state law trumps local regulation, just as federal law supersedes state law. It hasn’t gone well for the city dwellers.
VCIE: I Got All My News from Trump's Twitter Feed for a Confusing Five Days
As a Twitter verified member of the opposition party of which Bannon speaks, I must say—I am embarrassed. I am humiliated. I, indeed, still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States. And so, in the interest of gaining some much-needed clarity, I have decided to take Bannon and Smith's advice to heart. I have decided to shut up and listen for a while.
I have created a list on Twitter labeled "Unfake [sic] News," which follows two only accounts: @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS. At the time I begin this experiment, Trump's last tweet states he will be "America's greatest defender and most loyal champion," a statement I assume has something do do with the executive order he signed Friday banning refugees from entering the country and his continued fervor for building a wall along the Mexico border.
For the next five days, the only tweets I will see from external accounts will be ones retweeted by the man himself. I will not look at Facebook or even Instagram, lest someone who is being paid to protest posts pictures from an underpopulated and over-publicized march. I will not read newspapers or magazines. I will not watch television or listen to the radio. I will, finally, embrace the truth. I will soon realize I have chosen perhaps the most harrowing time in modern history to do so.
Vox: Liberals are the new Tea Party
Over the past two weeks, liberal activists have quietly and widely circulated a long Google spreadsheet. It contains the exact time, date, and location of more than 100 events that members of Congress will host in their districts this month.
It’s titled Town Hall Project 2018, and it is a battle plan, borrowed from an old foe: the Tea Party.
In their efforts to pressure Republicans to save the Affordable Care Act, liberals are increasingly copying the tactics of the conservative activists who mobilized against the law in 2009. [...]
Protests over the past two weekends — the Women’s March first, followed by more spontaneous events at airports after Trump’s immigration order — have shown that hundreds of thousands of Trump opponents are interested in organizing.
And a few key, early victories, activists argue, can help keep those people turning out.
This includes the Trump administration sharply reversing course on a decision to pull down open enrollment ads for the Affordable Care Act after outcry from health advocates.
CityLab: Forget the Wall, What About a Mexican 'Gateway of Friendship'?
This actually happened, and not in a bizarro 2017 universe where Donald Trump speaks fluent Spanish. It was 1929, and President-Elect Herbert Hoover had floated the idea of something monumental for our associates in Central and South America. That’s according to historical documents from the 22nd Lloyd Warren Fellowship, Paris Prize in Architecture, maintained by New York’s Van Alen Institute.
The idea was strange, given the Hoover administration (with support from some city and state authorities) would right afterward help deport or “repatriate” hundreds of thousands of Mexicans as well as U.S. citizens of Mexican descent to Mexico during the Great Depression, partly due to jobs fears. But here’s the reasoning for the gateway from the competition’s “First Preliminary Exercise for the 22nd Paris Prize of the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects”: [...]
The project presumably never broke ground—Google shows one contemporary newspaper report about the competition’s existence from Texas’ Brownsville Herald—though there is a different, smaller, and much sadder version from the 1970s at the San Diego/Tijuana nexus. The ideas were wild, though, full of cloud-kissing arches and towers and godlike figures guarding what would’ve been a 50-foot-wide avenue. Here are some of the designs from the competition’s architects, who (in a bit of a kick in the seat to Mexico) had to be U.S. citizens. From one Harry A. Gnerre:
Motherboard: The New Climate Change Evangelists Are...Conservatives?!
According to Inglis, conservatives who dispute the scientific consensus on climate change are really rejecting the left's proposed fixes—"big government solutions." If he can sell right-leaning voters on solutions that jibe with economic conservatism, he reasons, they'll acknowledge the reality of climate change. Over the last year, he's been a guest at conservative events from Arizona to San Francisco. Next week, he'll be in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where Trump won 62% of the vote. The group plans to continue to host screenings across the country in 2017.
"We believe in accountability," he says. Fossil fuels may seem cheap at the pump, he argues, because society is subsidizing its costs further down the line—paying Medicare bills, for example, for people living near coal-fired power plants. [...]
The attendees aren't monolithic, but most people seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the new administration. In the post-film Q-and-A, someone tentatively asks if Inglis believes in climate change. "It's not what I believe," he says firmly. "It's what the data says." Inglis tells the crowd there's a contingent of environmentally minded conservative politicians who care about climate change, but aren't ready to go public yet.
Politico: After midnight: How the mobile roaming deal was sealed
The negotiations started at 6:30 p.m. and blew through the 10:30 p.m. deadline without dinner or an agreement. Parliament’s chief negotiator Miapetra Kumpula-Natri snacked on Haribo candies during the six-hour talks. [...]
The plan almost died last September, just days before Juncker’s state of the union speech, when an argument over the fine print broke out and pushed everyone back to the drawing board. [...]
As negotiations approached midnight, Malta defied two of the EU’s strongest members and push for a deal that benefited Baltic and Scandinavian nations at the expense of Germany and France, which wanted to protect their mobile operators and their high retail prices, according to people in the room. Although Malta is the EU member that would benefit most from the higher fees, the island nation wanted a deal.
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