Brave New Kitty

The only way to truly help another person is to become a Whole person yourself.–Lama Everest

Having said all that, I want to be clear that I don’t mean we should throw up our hands and give up on people or on making the world a better place. The fact that change is a choice which can only happen inside of an individual does not mean there is no point in trying to help people. Actually, if you understand this basic principle of personal change, then making an effort to help people becomes more important than ever.

Change happens internally, by a subjective process unique to each individual. But this doesn’t mean that external stimuli don’t have an influence. Indeed, external stimuli have a huge, vast, tremendous influence on our internal, subjective lives. Everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and feel will affect our worldview. Every idea that evokes a response in us will have an influence on the path we travel, the direction we take in life. Some of these influences are small and insignificant, while some of them are profound and life-changing. But the external world “gets in;” everything we experience has an effect on us.

These external ideas and opinions by themselves don’t have the power to transform our views. For that to happen, these ideas and opinions have to be fed through our internal processes, some of which we are aware of and some of which we aren’t. (It’s important to know we aren’t fully aware of our processes for a couple of reasons. First, it can push us toward a greater desire for self-awareness–something which can only benefit us–and second, knowing that we never have full control over our internal processes keeps us humble–we all have blind spots and nobody completely understands himself, much less the external influences that make waves in our psyches. So we should humble ourselves accordingly.)

Anyway. External influences matter. They have a big effect on our internal world. If we understand and believe this, then there are (at least) two significant implications to consider:

1. What we’re exposed to will have an effect on our thoughts, feelings, opinions, and choices. Thus, we should choose carefully the influences we expose ourselves to. In this day and age of “entertainment saturation,” where the choices are overwhelming and banality and titillation abound, it becomes more important than ever to be conscientious about how we spend our free time. We don’t have to spend every waking moment in the pursuit of happiness or personal betterment; in fact, we shouldn’t. But we should be aware that how we spend our time will, indeed, have an impact on how we think, what we believe and, indeed, who we are. If our pasttimes are primarily banal, we will inevitably be banal. If we never challenge ourselves, we’ll never get better at anything. If we don’t spend time learning how to love ourselves and other people properly, we’ll never get good at it. If we eat too much and don’t exercise, we’ll get fat. And so forth. As a friend of mine used to say, “If you hang around a barber shop, you’re gonna get a haircut.” She was talking about staying away from bars when you’re trying to stay sober, but the idea works for any situation: hang around a good barber, you’re gonna get a good haircut. Hang around a bad barber, you’ll get a bad haircut. But the choice is yours.

2. How we behave will have an effect on others. We should act as if we are examples to other people, because we are. We are their external influences. We should not take this responsibility lightly. We should act, to the best of our ability, as though we knew that everything we said and did was being observed and soaked up by other people, because it is. If certain principles are important to us–kindness, respect, tolerance, and personal development, for example–we should act with those principles always in mind. We should strive to be examples of how we believe people should live their lives. This is the greatest influence anybody can have on another human being–the influence of our example.

If we extend this second implication a bit further, it becomes easy to see why coercion doesn’t work to induce personal change. If we practice coercion, or believe that it’s morally correct for a political, religious, or other social body to practice coercion for purposes of individual change, then we are saying that we believe in the principle of coercion. We are setting an example of coercion. Which means we believe that not only is it okay to coerce others into doing what we believe is right, but also that it’s alright for others to coerce us to comply with standards that they believe are right. That is, if coercion is condoned for one person or group, then it is okay for all persons and groups. And where does that stop? Who decides which person or group is right?

Besides its terrifying implications, such coercion is generally responded to with resentment, which is never an incentive to personal change. But it can be hard to see until we become the ones being coerced–which is going to happen in a society that condones social control and the attempt to legislate morality. Considering all of this, is coercion–aside from prevention of force and fraud–really an effective way to evoke change?

Since none of us knows, for sure, what’s right or best for anybody but ourselves (and even for ourselves, what’s right and best is often sketchy), the wisest course of action can only be to allow people the freedom to make their own choices. Once such an environment exists, people may or may not choose personal betterment, but having the freedom to make such a choice (or not) places the principle of freedom above the principle of coercion. This is the most respectful thing one person can do for another, or a government for its people. As such, it creates an environment that allows for the greatest possibility for personal change.

Where would any of us be if there weren’t people who’ve helped us along the way? Helping others is crucial, not only to their well-being, but to our own. We don’t have a lot of control over the myriad external influences out there, but we do have a lot of control over the ones we expose ourselves to, and even more over the influences we present to other people. We should use our power of choice wisely in both arenas.

Personal change can only come from within, from the desire of an individual.

I say this because there seems to be some confusion about it. There are a lot of people who think you can decree rules or laws from “above” that will result in individual change. These do-gooders might mean well, but they are missing the point, and their work will never result in positive, lasting change. The only thing that can is the choice an individual makes for himself, by having the freedom to make his own decisions, his own mistakes, and to come to his own conclusions.

The reason for this is that a person’s view of the world is completely and utterly subjective. Everybody has a unique interpretation of life that arises from the sum of their experience. We all share similar wants and needs (to be loved and respected, for example), but nobody ever really knows what it’s like to be another person, or how another person sees the world. Our internal world is the only world any of us can ever truly know; this is what “personal and subjective” means. Everything important to us exists in this personal and subjective space.

In this personal realm, change must happen by choice. Of course not all those choices are conscious; many of our beliefs are products of our culture and our upbringing, neither of which we have any choice about. But within the confines of things we do make conscious choices about–career, education, friendships, romance, entertainment, diet, work habits, and values, to name a few–we weigh the pros and cons, we deliberate on the issues involved, and we decide what we want to do. We consider outside influences, absolutely, and we are influenced by things beyond our awareness, yes. But in the end, the choice is ours and ours alone. Or, to state the obvious, choice happens voluntarily.

Many people think they can create a better world by trying to force others to make better choices, or, as is more often the case, prohibit them from making bad choices. Such social controls have been around for a long time. A few hundred years ago, they were primarily the province of religion, which threatened disobedience with eternal hellfire. Today, these social controls are largely accomplished through legislation, which threatens disobedience with fines, imprisonment, or both. Neither religion nor law has had much success with actual personal change, the kind of change that really would make the world a better place.

Instead, they merely squelch the means by which people can do and get and behave as they want. And rather than resulting in people wanting different things for themselves, such prohibitions instead tend to result in black market economies that provide the restricted item or an adequate substitute for it. As long as social controls have been around, people have risked both hell and imprisonment to resist them and do what they want. Not exactly positive change, is it?

The Prohibition Act of the 1920s is perhaps the strongest example of this. Not only did people continue to drink, but drinking increased. This era also prompted the rise of organized crime in the U.S., as those willing to take risks got rich providing alcohol by subversive means. After ten years, the federal government admitted defeat and repealed the amendment so people could once again do out in the open what they’d been doing behind closed doors for a decade.

Unfortunately, an identical prohibition continues today with all the conflicting and hypocritical drug laws, which also allow criminals to get rich providing for people what they can’t obtain legally. And in this absurd “war” on drugs, everybody seems to ignore the fact that if people didn’t want them, the problem would vanish overnight. Why is this ignored? Because from an external viewpoint, the demand side of the equation is an unsolvable problem. You can’t force people to want different things. Until people choose different pasttimes, drugs will continue to be exchanged in a thriving marketplace, legal or illegal.

Similar prohibitions have created similar black markets around the world. In soviet Russia, there was a black market for everything from meat to Levi’s–whatever people wanted that the government couldn’t or wouldn’t allow a market for. Today in countries like China, where the Internet is censored by the government, people have found ways to bypass the mainstream channels to get unfettered Internet access. If you can afford it, there is always a way to get what you want.

The moral is that external rules do not change what people want. This mountain of historical evidence doesn’t stop do-gooders, though. Every new generation has new ills and people who think they can cure them through legislation or some other coercive means. They look around at all the problems of the world and say, “My god, we must do something!” And they proceed to try to change how the king thinks by moving around the chess pieces on the board. Sometimes, the controls even succeed in changing people’s behavior. But they can never succeed at what they’re really meant to do, which is to improve the internal quality of people’s desires and choices.

Now, it is entirely possible to create an environment conducive to personal change, an environment in which people ponder and question and reflect on themselves, their lives, and the choices they’ve made and want to make in the future. It is entirely possible to encourage and support people in their desire to improve themselves or their lot in life. And it is important, if you think you have a valid message, to make the effort to help people who want to to change. But that’s as far as it can go. Anything more is not only ineffective, it is disrespectful. Most importantly of all, it violates people’s freedom–and freedom must always trump social control, even if that freedom means allowing someone to go to hell the way he sees fit.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a stellar example of an organization that elicits change from the inside out. AA creates an environment where people can get help if they want it (or as they themselves put it, an environment where a “spiritual change” can occur), but it never forces that help on people. In fact, unsolicited desire for sobriety is so crucial to the program’s success that it is written into the group’s by-laws: the third tradition states that “the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” This was a brilliant awareness of the founders of AA. Such desire is not only how sobriety occurs, it is how all personal change occurs.

Sometimes do-gooders will make the argument that the world doesn’t have time to wait for change to happen. This argument, they think, justifies their foisting of laws and rules and limits and prohibitions on people in the name of “the public good” or of “saving people from themselves.” They claim the behavior will cause suffering to society, or future generations, or taxpayers (fill in the blank), and it must be stopped. But aside from what we’ve already established–that such means have a dismal record of success–this is a very dangerous argument for anyone who cares about their personal freedom. It always precedes efforts to place ever-greater controls on people, which is really just another way of saying efforts to restrict people’s freedom to do what they want. Taken to its logical extreme, this argument could be used to modify every single aspect of society and human behavior–and to hand over ever more control to the powers that already have too much of it. Of course there are many problems with many behaviors, today as always. And sometimes these behaviors have repercussions that echo ominously through the halls of a culture. But social controls will always have vastly more far-reaching repercussions than any personal behavior could, and none of them are good.

It’s true that personal change can be very, very slow, if it happens at all. It’s true that change is hard, that looking inside yourself and trying to become better is hard. Just as it’s harder to be fit than fat, it’s harder to think critically than it is to be intellectually lazy. Thus, there will always be more shallow, intellectually lazy people in the world than there will be critically thinking, introspective ones. Sad as this might be (and I’m not convinced it is), the only person any of us has the power to transform is ourselves.

Sometimes this can be hard to accept, but acceptance is the only viable option we have, and here’s why. The only way people truly change is by their own volition, when they have the freedom of choice to do so. So if we really want to create a world where positive change is possible, and valued, we must work for ever greater levels of freedom and ever greater levels of understanding. It may seem like the long way around, but as with all things worth having, the long way is the only way that results in anything worthwhile.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. — French proverb

Anytime we think the problem is out there, that thought is the problem. — Stephen Covey

Recently, I got into a discussion with a friend about technology in general and social networking in particular. His beliefs are that technology had made us less critical thinkers (which is what I mean by “stupider”), and that social networking, with its powerful allure to the banal and mundane, has elevated that problem by great proportions. Because of social networking, he and similar minded people believe, we have become less tolerant, more impatient, more opinionated, more narcissistic, less able to discern fact from fiction, less capable of having meaningful relationships in real life, and even that our physical well-being will suffer because of our “addiction” to the Internet and social networking; it’s such a simple, instantaneous source of pleasure, how could it not have detrimental effects?

I can understand how people would think this. All you have to do is look around you to see problems caused by technology. Pollution from factories and cars, for example. Overpopulation caused by better living conditions and longer life spans. Weapons that can destroy the entire planet. And video games, cell phones, smart phones, the Internet, and now, social networking to distract us from more serious pursuits and fill our heads with banal, pointless entertainment that can only be bad for us.

But this attitude is exactly backwards.

It is a mistake in reasoning to think these problems are caused by technology. Technology can’t cause problems. It is inanimate, it has no agency, and it is unable to perform any action, positive or negative, on its own. The problems of technology are, at their heart, the problems of humanity. The nature of our problems isn’t pollution and annihilation, it is greed, self-centeredness, shortsightedness, hatred, and fear. Technology can’t create these issues; it merely exacerbates the issues that are already there.

Yes, this creates some problems. To take an extreme example, if a power-hungry ruler wanted to wipe out an enemy country 150 years ago, it would have been very, very hard to do. Today, all he needs to do is get his hands on a nuclear weapon, and not only could he wipe out his enemy, he could wipe out the entire planet.

This is a serious concern. And having grown up in the shadow of thermonuclear annihilation, I know how much fear and anxiety the possibility can cause. But does this mean the ability to control atoms is bad? After all, radiation also kills cancer cells and creates cheap energy for millions of people. And more importantly, does it mean that nuclear energy is immoral? This is like asking if the sun is immoral. The answer, of course, is no. It is only the people who use the technology who can be appraised in terms of morality and value judgments. The power-hungry ruler may have immoral motives, but the nuclear bomb is no more moral or immoral than the garage it sits in before the ruler decides to use it.

Even so, you may say, the possibility of destroying the world is bad, so therefore, nuclear energy is bad. And in the same vein, you may say that the Internet has created a generation of mindless, instant-gratification zombies who are incapable of thinking for themselves, so it’s bad, too. But if you say these things, you are getting the causality backwards.

You are also getting the causality backwards if you think that 150 years ago, people had longer attention spans or a greater capacity to think critically. They did not. Then as now, the majority of people got by on the minimum amount of energy and effort that they could. It’s just that they had to work much harder back then to maintain their subsistence level of existence, and they had far fewer opportunities for entertainment of any kind. It’s true that if the Internet had existed then, people wouldn’t have used it the same way people do today–but that’s only because most people were illiterate. Thanks to technology, poor people today have much more comfortable lives than they once did, and much more free time to enjoy themselves. They also have access to education that was unheard of back then; today in an industrialized country, everyone gets the opportunity to learn how to read. If anything, more people have become critical thinkers than in the past, thanks to technology, and yes, the Internet.

And if you think that the Internet and social networking has created a desire for the banal and inane, you have got that causality backwards, as well. People have always gravitated toward the banal, the inane, and the sensationalistic. Think of lions killing Christians, or public hangings, or gambling, pornography, and prostitution. There is nothing new in entertainment that appeals to the lowest common denominator of human interest. Banality is fun, it’s entertaining. And everybody wants fun and entertainment in their lives.

Has the Internet taken this too far? I suppose if people cease being able to support themselves and make their way in the world because of their Internet and social networking usage, they would need to look seriously at how they’re spending their time and make some different choices. But until then, people should be left alone to spend their free time how they want to, even if it’s not what we would choose for them. This is what “personal freedom” means. Often, that freedom means the freedom to meet the minimum social and personal obligations, and otherwise to be left alone.

Some people do develop obsessions with the Internet that cause problems in their lives (although pornography is usually involved, not Facebook). But once again, this is a human problem, not a technology problem. Technology may have intensified the problem–because that’s what technology does, whether problem or solution–but it is still a human problem, and one that can only be solved on a personal, subjective, internal level. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to getting sober is admitting you have a problem.

You see, “external” solutions don’t work for personal issues. They may force people to conform, and in the case of laws to protect us from other people’s greed, self-centeredness, and violence, this is a good thing. But when it comes to protecting us from ourselves, external laws don’t work. They can’t squelch desire. Rather, they tend to create greater desires, and black markets to fulfill them. This is human nature. People have always done what they want, and they always will do what they want. In fact, technology exists largely because of people inventing better ways to do what they want!

So, the Internet is not making us stupider, i.e., less critical thinkers. It just appeals, in a big way, to tendencies that already exist. Technology makes the problem look new, and worse, but neither is the case. And it never has been. The older generation has always worried about the younger generation’s trends, fads, and crazes. Before social networking, it was video games. Before that, it was rock and roll and drugs; before that, it was jazz. And before that, it was something else, ad infinitum. It is almost the job of the older generation to criticize the younger one. But the truth is that every generation manages to reach adulthood pretty much intact and unscathed by their “dangerous” pasttimes, able to graduate from college and go on to have families and create new and better technology for future generations. There is no evidence whatsoever that this pattern of human life won’t continue for many generations into the future, or that there is any cause for alarm.

Oddly enough, I actually do think people have gotten stupider. Or at least ruder and more narcissistic. But I know that a lot of this is that I am now part of the old guard, looking down at the younger generation and seeing all their foolishness and short-sightedness (youth truly is wasted on the young!), and I try to keep in mind that, even though I didn’t have the Internet and even though I was a pretty serious kid, I had my own ways of rebelling and screwing off that horrified my parents. And I turned out alright, just like everyone else in my graduating class (which I now know for a fact thanks to Facebook).

And if people actually have gotten stupider, ruder, and more narcissistic, which is entirely possible, it is not because of technology. It is because of a gradual migration away from values, from an internally-derived sense of self that is so crucial to happiness, confidence, integrity, and everything else that makes life worth living. I’m not certain how this migration is occurring, if it is at all. One theory is that the vast success of technology since the Industrial Revolution has shifted the focus of modern cultures so far to the external end of the spectrum that people have ceased to look within for solutions to their problems. We’ve come to expect that technology will solve all of our problems, so we’ve moved away from reliance on our internal self–our values, emotions, and ability to develop ourselves.

I suppose on the surface this seems like an argument against technology. But this is not so. It’s more an argument that values are equally as important as technology, and it is more important than ever to develop them. To paraphrase the great physicist Richard Feynman, “science can create technology, and it can tell you what you can accomplish with it, but it can’t tell you the right or wrong of those accomplishments. Only values can do that.” In other words, technology is, in and of itself, completely neutral and absolutely benign. Only human thought bestows value on it. So if we do not have a good sense of our values, then technology is going to cause problems for us. Thus, because technology yields such tremendous power and offers such a vast array of choices, it is more important, not less so, to have a strong sense of who we are, what we want, and why.

The problem is not too much technology, it’s too little introspection. If there is one single message the world needs to hear, one single message that will change everything for the better, this is it. People are not getting stupider. But if they don’t figure out that everything that matters happens inside of them, and not “out there somewhere,” they are never going to get any smarter, either.

The healthiest people are age-androgynous. — Robert J. Ackerman

Years ago, I was at an alanon meeting where the topic turned to the inner child. I had heard of the concept, but considered it one of the hokier ideas related to emotional recovery and hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it. A woman I respected was talking about a book she read, I believe it was this one, and she said she got a lot out of it. After the meeting, I went to the bookstore and looked at the book. I didn’t buy it, but I read a great deal of it there in the store. For a book I was too embarrassed to buy and read only cursorily, it had a pretty big impact on my recovery.

I don’t know why I shy away from the topic of the inner child. I guess I think it sounds slightly schizophrenic, and that it might validate people’s preconceived prejudices against taking on the work of emotional recovery. But the truth is, the concept of the inner child is really, really important. I think it is at the core of re-parenting ourselves, which is a necessary undertaking in the effort to heal from our emotional pain.

I don’t remember a lot of the specifics from the book. I only remember that after reading it, it felt necessary to me to try to get in touch with my inner child. So I began to try. I did various things, such as asking my inner child questions: how did she feel, what was she thinking, how could I show her I loved her, things like that. In response, I got nothing but stony silence. I would lay quietly, in complete silence, and just wait for her to show herself to me. Again, nothing. I would get frustrated and give up, then try again. For a long time, nothing happened. I knew she was there, because the silence seemed somehow outside myself. But she was unwilling to show herself to me, and there was nothing I could do about it. I think the book said this could happen, and that I shouldn’t worry too much about it. So I tried not to.

One day, I was at a meditation group. And again, I don’t remember the details of how or why it happened, but for some reason, my inner child chose that occasion to come out of hiding. In my meditation, I found her deep down in a dungeon made of cold, dank stone. It felt like she was a prisoner there, and I don’t think she’d been able to come out before this. Now, she was peeking at me cautiously, letting me know she was there. I asked her her name, and she told me, “Little Kitty,” and nothing more.

After that I began talking to her regularly. I felt how angry and afraid she was, and I told her all the things that I thought would be important for her to hear. I told her I was sorry I hadn’t taken better care of her, that I was sorry for her difficult childhood, that she had every right to be angry, and that from now on I would try to take care of her better so she wouldn’t have to be afraid. After months of sessions like this, usually taking place while I was falling asleep at night, she began to relax a little. On a few occasions, she would actually laugh like a happy little child. On a few other occasions, she would revert to being angry and afraid again because I’d betrayed her somehow that day; that is to say, my anxiety got evoked and I had betrayed myself. When this happened, I would tell her I was sorry, ask her forgiveness, and promise to try to do better. Then, in my mind’s eye, I would hug her, if she let me.

Through these conversations, I began to see how much of my present behavior was affected by this angry, frightened aspect of myself. I had known for a while that I was scared, angry, and anxious, but these inner dialogues really brought me in touch with that part of myself in an intimate and visceral way. I began to develop compassion for myself, which I realized that I’d utterly lacked before undertaking this work. And in developing that compassion, I realized that this was one of the primary emotions lacking in my childhood–no wonder little Kitty was so angry and distrustful! She’d been conditioned to be from birth! And prior to this awareness, I wasn’t really doing much to make her feel safe. I felt so bad for her, and thus for myself. I believe this was my first real experience with self-forgiveness.

After little Kitty and I mended our fences and she began to trust me–and this is where it begins to get really schizophrenic–more “inner children” began to surface. There was P.K., who was even younger than little Kitty, so young she couldn’t yet talk. She was just one mass of quivering terror, desperately needing to be held and comforted, over and over and over and over and over. Then there was T.K. (and don’t ask me where these names came from, because I don’t know), who was the early adolescent version of myself, awkward, gangly, self-conscious, and horribly lacking in self-confidence. (T.K., by the way, was a male voice.) T.K. was also very angry, but largely unable to express it except by being withdrawn and sulky. But he was willing to talk to me, and after awhile he began to come out of his shell a little bit. I bought T.K. a sports car a few years ago, and he’s been having a great time with it.

A few others surfaced, too, but didn’t stay around very long. One was “Higher Kitty,” who was not an inner child at all but my connection to my wise higher self. Another was an adult (another male voice) who seemed to be in charge of everyone else; he was strong and wise and kind, and it was good to know he was in there.

I spent a couple of years doing this work of really connecting with all of these disowned, fragmented, and unfamiliar aspects of myself. Many of my conversations were me apologizing for not taking better care of them (i.e., of myself), and listening to how they felt about it. The more I apologized (and you can’t apologize to yourself insincerely, because you would know), the more willing these aspects of myself were to tell me how they felt, which was largely angry, scared, unsafe, and abandoned. But the fact that I was able to verbalize these feelings to myself, which had thus far in my life been far too dark and menacing for me to face, felt like massive progress.

It was hard to hear how unloving I’d been to myself all my life, harder than I can even say. But I needed to hear it, and I needed to own it like this, internally, because no amount of other people telling me got in until I was able to tell myself.

It was some of the most healing work I ever did.

The intense period of work is past me now, or at least it’s felt that way for awhile (and this process is nothing if not a feeling, intuitive one). This is probably because I’ve largely integrated those fragmented aspects of myself, becoming my own parent (this time a loving one), my own child, and my own voice of wisdom and reason. It’s a pretty good place to be.