Choices: Life on Dignity or Terror

Choices: Dignity in Life, Choices over Terror and Death

There’s duality in fear for living and embracing death. For samurai, choosing a worthy cause to die for is a means of embracing the presence of life and inevitable reality of death. The result: life is fleeting, live in the present as if you will die today.

Choice is fundamental for human dignity, yes. Terror happens when one’s in a situation that makes severe irreparable harm or death seem imminent and you’re unable to find or create any other choices for living.

Plum blossoms, a close relative to cherry.

-A fragmented note to myself from 11/3/14 found in my draft box

…

Back to the present:

Approaching life from grasping death first can be a very severe, spiritually violent, and overall dark approach.

Even for me today, the opening sentence was a little unclear. I think I was also touching on moments when someone is genuinely afraid of stepping into living their life fully — because with all the joys it can bring, you’re also choosing to accept and embrace the consequences of failures too.

A caveat on foolhardy failure: In my experience, the slogan “fail faster” that gets hyped in silicon valley/startup circles glorifies the downside and understates the resources necessary for recovery. Failing faster also requires proportionate tools and support to respond or rebound quickly. For people living in severe situations where balancing life and death, genuine poverty, etc. are at stake it’s a naive and misleading attitude.

We need to set parameters for failure. It doesn’t need to intrude on the sum of your existence, find ways to contain, govern, or facilitate it. Failure isn’t always bad, if you learn and grow from it. But what we’re really supposed to focus on are controlled or informed risks that we can successfully navigate. Where possible, fail forward — choose to fail in a direction of your preference so you can learn from it and still know how to stay on track. Immersing yourself in failures that go beyond your capacity to move on or focus on what’s worth failing for however, becomes a detriment one’s existence.

But this idea, really deciding to commit to living your moments fully, genuinely overwhelmed me into nihilism at times. The most overwhelming moments looked like shutting down, or believing it was important to stay with any accessible pain because that seemed like an essential part of living fully.

When some aspect of the idea made less sense to use as guidance for life, it also manifested into isolating myself in existential angst and numbness for months at a time. Of course, I still sought to show up online in minor ways and at work to keep me up to date with the rest of reality on topics I knew were important, but bridging the gap between what you think and what you believe can be quite the challenge.

The connection to choice: Life, Death; Dignity, Terror

Understanding the link between choice and dignity matters as much or even more than understanding how terror works. Terror is designed to happen when it deprives people from their sense of choice. Choice is fundamental to dignity. It requires a degree of consciousness to discern and make a genuine choice. Paraphrasing my mom: “Even into death, you have choices.” The trick is to see what they are, choose from the best, or create better ones.

Dignity and terror reflect life and death in their simplest forms. They hinge on your ability to discern, and choose with some sense whether active or intuitive.

The best practical tools for overcoming the designs of terrorism I know of boils down to three things: Joy, Truth, and Love.

It sounds unrealistically naive and Utopian at first — especially when considering that I came across them listed in a song written by my friend, Markita Moore. But the more I thought about those three around the time the Orlando shootings took place, the more I realized each element has clear, practical components that allow most of the public to deal with reality in a way that doesn’t make them beholden to reactions spurred by fear from terrorist acts.

Of course, counter-terrorism work still has an important place in the world, but for the general public in the long-term, I think this goes a long way to prevent or overcome terror:

Joy can be shared, draws people together, and builds cohesion. It inspires curiosity and deeper understanding on a voluntary basis. People are often drawn to humorous and positive moments. It can soften entry to challenging dialogues and conversations through assurance that comes from sharing a common experience — so long as it’s not used divisively at someone’s expense. It’s a significant topic in research for effective education.

Truth, upholding it and understanding it, shows us that we have more choices than what terror wants us to believe. It reminds you that a supremacist ideology is flawed putting your beliefs into proper scope with additional realities. Presenting or facilitating the truth also holds people accountable.

Love revolves around manifesting the best in and with people, which includes celebrating them as they are and the effort, history, and legacy that surrounds them in its most humane light. You can look at it in subtle forms like the discipline it takes to prepare meals for your kids even when you’re dead tired, care for the state of society, or consider the camaraderie and solidarity earned from common hardship and purpose.

Love is one of the most powerful motives used for framing purpose. Military boot camps in part are designed to cultivate an iteration of love — in terms of camaraderie — among service members and for the country. Simon Sinek, an anthropologist focused on leadership, cites similar examples in several of his talks. If you spend time speaking with service members, veterans, or yourself served you probably hear this too.

Coincidentally, scientists notice love and hate share many neurological pathways in common. What distinguishes a lively hate group from a healthy successful organization is the way they force dependent relationships and control information. But they start out and often frame their cause in terms of loving an identity, or protecting who they are. The rest of the hallmarks of their process actually mirror characteristics you’d see in healthy organizations that would appear in a Zappos/Delivering Happiness case study.

As a nation, the same applies: beyond taking care of the basics, don’t react to terrorism out of fear — else you play into someone else’s game by doing so. Focus on the things people would do in the first place when combat isn’t imminent: joy, truth, and love. It draws people to the righteous reality from their own volition, or asserts the truth without necessarily escalating violence.

But I keep returning to the general concept that making choices for death and life presents us. Major turning points basically revolved around thinking: “what’s something worthy of dying for/living for?” there’s more to say about the question itself, but that was a big starting point for my life in 2012.

Last year I met a wonderful woman who demonstrated the same idea but with an opposite (in my opinion, much healthier) approach — I’m still working on going about it from a joyous angle but it’s the same goal as far as living fully is concerned. Perhaps all of the above gives you a jump start too.

REFERENCES

On “fail faster”Example of common narratives around “fail faster” — I may or may not have a tendency to attempt living ideas to straw-man proportions, if you must try in that fashion too, don’t do it the way I did. Resilience comes from the ability to rebound instead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjrOaoHz9s

What would have been nice to hear more often with “fail fast”
https://venturebeat.com/2015/03/15/heres-what-fail-fast-really-means/ 

I especially wish this was something I read in 2014 to affirm some of my own questions about the slogan, but it’s nice to see today now that I’m reading up on how other people looked at it. Also note that someone created an entire company/consulting practice around “fail forward” — focused on dissecting failures. I guess it was bound to happen:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2014/07/14/why-silicon-valleys-fail-fast-mantra-is-just-hype/#27c7ac0124bc

Three Chords: Joy, Truth, and Love (song excerpt by Markita Moore)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0QqQ_zKj1E
[side note for those following our band’s progress: we’ve finalized the recording, moving to fundraise for filming a video with the students who sang in the song and coordinate its release with the video, ideally around October]

Humor in education (need to follow embedded links within this article for the research):
https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/humor-in-the-classroom-40-years-of-research/

Humor in Education via the APA, learning — it seems mostly focused on higher education, I’ve yet to read in-depth for source articles, etc.:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/learning.aspx

Other iterations of love, many Latin rather than Greek, a good framework, I think Ubuntu should be considered too though it’s of African origin:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-ancient-greeks-6-words-for-love-and-why-knowing-them-can-change-your-life

Military — trust, co-operation as interpreted by Simon Sinek in his research referenced multiple times in his talks:
https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_why_good_leaders_make_you_feel_safe

Simon Sinek speaking on “Why Leaders Eat Last”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRcHdeUG9Y

First-hand story on service leadership from Lt. Col. Drowley (the A-10 pilot mentioned in Simon Sinek’s book and talk, “Why Leaders Eat Last”):
http://www.hankschuurman.com/videos/johnny-bravo

Recovering from hate: how hate groups function and the neurological wiring behind love/hate
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/hatred/ 

Delivering Happiness, p. 173 Happiness Framework 1:https://raymkt.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/delivering-happiness_-a-path-to-profits-hsieh_-tony.pdf 

On choosing worthy reason(s) to die. Also contains practical instruction for one-strike swordsmanship (iaido) in addition to the philosophical context that informed/s the martial art: Flashing Steel, Second Edition: Mastering Eishin-Ryu Swordsmanship by Masayuki Shimabukuro (Author), Leonard Pellman (Author)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/833931.Flashing_Steel
[seek out the second edition, supposedly a worthy improvement from an already excellent first edition]

This post originally appeared at: https://wordpress.com/post/iandtran.wordpress.com/3271

Desperation, "American Beauty"

I saw American Beauty for the first time this weekend at a house screening as a friend's guest. The person who chose the film explained it was "a classic", and another mentioned it was a "dramedy"--humor to be found in the absurdity of emotional extremes.

Desperation was a key theme to a lot of the behaviors that drew most of the snickers and laughter. If willing, conscientious choice is fundamental to dignity desperation then serves as its converse.

Example: an insecure suburban WASP mom archetype forces a smile and recites capitalistic mantras for success as her work in real estate continues to fail.

For those who rely on one belief or another as a way for finding self-worth and meaning in life, ridiculing desperation quickly skirts the line toward becoming a demeaning and disempowering act. It's mean-spirited if not cynical humor shrouded in the laurels of being an iconic film for mainstream U.S. Cinema.

It's also a negative feedback loop [here's a place better suited for diagrams than text]:
A desperate individual's chosen actions for self-preservation are demeaned when subject to ridicule (bullying). If it's vicious enough, giving up on the practice out of fear becomes a probable outcome, further reducing their choices for a willing existence.

Also, what happens when the topics and subjects of laughter are current and real for members of the audience?

For the sake of self-preservation, the characters are constructed to have little to no choice--they operate from a default stance of desperation--and as a result, little room for realizing dignity. The few who embody a glimpse of dignity are killed or kicked out from families unable to cope with the way their perception of the world unfolds around them.

It's not far from me either: what difference does it make if someone like me ascribes to outdated religious and moral codes like Bushido, or draw from Buddhism's principles, or Christianity's in the hopes that ancestors and family knew what how to cope with their reality in resilient grace?

The answer comes from asking another question I've overheard Cesar Gonzalez emphatically ask: What is the courageous choice?

The courageous choice doesn't involve choosing a particular religion for the sake of having to believe in--unless you have to. If one recognizes holes in any of the religious and spiritual frameworks above, it is courageous to forgo holding onto an ineffective and rigid belief for the sake of faith in oneself and one's capacity to engage the future by embracing the present.

As easy it is to write, that's a tall task for one, myself included, to instantaneously take to heart and keep.

Similarly, is it better to leave a familiar source of suffering for peace of mind or choose to endure it for the sake of seeking meaningful actions out of repetitious exposure?

Side note:
Circa 2011/2012 I adapted Hamilton's Rule from evolutionary biology:
(Relatedness * Benefits)-Costs >1 for altruistic behavior to be likely
as a way to roughly rank experiences with a film:
(Relevance x Benefits) - Costs > or = to 1 for a good film

If it's really relevant, and it benefits you in some way which outweighs the costs of cognitive/emotional/time/physical load, it's a good film.

Definition: good? I'll reference Aldo Leopold's characterization of good:
A thing tends to be good when it preserves the integrity and beauty of the human and biotic community.

American Beauty, at least on first impression, does almost the exact opposite. We find glimmers of hope in one or two individuals, not the community.

Originally I adopted the rule out of anger at Pan's Labyrinth--which takes viewers through a fantastical and terribly oppressive world, and the end reward for the audience is a glimpse of the protaganist entering eternal life as she leaves the rest of the real world behind to carry on in dystopic chaos. It was a disproportionate benefit and the movie left a bad taste...

Just as Pan's Labyrinth, American Beauty was a relatively disempowering film. Yes, grace in American Beauty could be found in the protagonist's moment of transcendent acceptance (to paraphrase: "there's so much beauty in the world, you just have to let it flow through you"), and two teenagers deciding to leave abusive households. However, the overwhelming chain of events in the film lead to negative and destructive fragmentation of many relationships and some resulting in killing. The reality depicted in the film echoes much of what we already see in the world or grow up with. The emotional impact calculus burdens the viewer with more vivid problems than they can engage or resolve, and the "one to many" nature of communicating content in film and television to large audiences more often than not makes it an isolating endeavor.

Honesty without humanity is brutality, to paraphrase...

"Fair isn't an option in your life. You'll have no choice but to go forward."

Two quotes burning in my mind today:

"Choose to take care of yourself, or else you won't have a choice." ~paraphrasing Minda Zetlin
(I'm overcoming some health challenges at the moment too)

"Fair isn't an option in your life. You'll have no choice but to go forward." -a grandmother

This quote stuck with me today as it captures how I used to, and likely still look at a lot of social and environmental justice issues. It's why I don't see much productive in protests on their own aside from its fleeting public presence and media attention, nor do I share news that's devoid of or taxes my ability to find actionable next steps to change what's going on around us. I'd call that attitude proactivism: make the solutions that don't yet exist. Yes, if you need to talk it out to process what's going on, that's fine and important to heed stories too, just don't get stuck.

It normally isn't an issue or something I think too much about. Today's a bit different, here's how it knocked me in the gut:
I heard it from--here come the labels--a black female entrepreneur who cited her grandmother's advice for resilience. Hard wisdom from the oppressed. I say oppressed because the quote says a lot about a status quo that denies the dignity of choice to a certain degree.

I think it resonated so much because I realized that's where my perspective comes from--a lot of us are still on the ground or digging ourselves out of a hole of problems made by someone else's legacy of hatred, apathy, neglect, or unknowing. A core part of my worldview still comes from reacting to what's a painful reality for a lot of people in the world.

This evening, in the same day, I sat down for soup a restaurant in "America's most educated city" where a woman asked me where I was from. When I answered "Michigan" she tried correcting by saying "no, where is your family from"--this line of questioning normally entails that a person thinks I'm from another country, usually China, sometimes Korea. Today, she thought I was Chinese and then Korean. When I got up to pay my bill, my waitress cashed me out and asked if I was a professor and then with certainty claimed I was an engineer "because I looked like one".

To be clear, I don't view being Chinese, or Korean, or an Engineer as wrong, or bad--I have friends who truly are of those nationalities, one of them is among the most brilliant people I know. For many people, their nationality isn't an item of choice. As a profession, engineers tend to strive to create and improve things.

The issue is this: Starting a conversation with "where are you from" creates a narrow set of assumptions when asking that to a person who looks like they come from a different ethnic background. The assumption being that their identity can be simplified--even stigmatized--into a specific set of characteristics, values, and behaviors. It's a question set up to impose an identity and denies the person being asked an opportunity to represent or fully create the reality of who they are.

Choice is fundamental to dignity. Your choices become very limited when you're asked to represent something you had little to no control over choosing.

By the way, I honored the first woman's curiosity by answering the question. After I ate and was willing to put up with conversation, I politely shared that some people can find that question offensive and culturally insensitive.

Sometimes the only solution to oblivion and apathy is empathy.

Empathy and patience for education take a lot of energy to educate someone who could have cared less about what they do or say. It's an odd paradox--more work for the people who need to be heard and heeded than the people who make the problem.

Yet it's your responsibility to tell them else it keeps happening.

This quote didn't cross my mind today until I started writing, but since the arc of the universe needs some bending, and since the content's just as timely and topical, I figured I'd throw this picture off Martin Niemoeller's quote from the Boston Holocaust Memorial.

Fair isn't an option in your life. You'll have no choice but to go forward. Hopefully, you're quick enough to create it as an option for others before choking on your own soup.

Fairness isn't an option in your life. Eliminate it as an option and you can adjust faster, hope to create it for others.

Fairness isn't an option in your life. Eliminate it from your expectations and you can move forward faster.

It hurts a bit to realize the insight comes from a place of oppression. It's good to know it was embraced by personal choice and from a creative stance. There's a subtle and equally important difference between being told to accept a reality versus choosing one for yourself.

Fairness is an option in our lives. Embody it in our intentions as we move forward. Will you choose that?