Ghosts

Some of your strongest opinions are probably against ghosts. My writing has taught me that a lot of mine were.

One of the hardest parts of growing up is realizing, by making a fool of oneself, that strong opinions are just as much liabilities as they are strengths. In fact they tend to be more liabilities than strengths. When we have a strong opinion that isn’t excellently justified, it’s dangerous both psychologically and socially.

And most of the opinions we form, especially now in the eternal online torrent of other people’s thoughts and bad information, aren’t justified.

What do I mean by that?

Well, have you ever seen someone open their mouth a little too wide in public, in front of someone who actually knew what they were talking about? You watch in either horror or schadenfreude as the person with the big mouth gets dressed down and put in their place. Because they shouldn’t have spoken at all. They had no idea what they were talking about.

Even so, you typically don’t learn the lesson from being an observer. Because tempering your opinions is a lesson you have to learn for yourself. Through your own embarrassment and shame.

You could sit down and write a 20-page article about how the Efficient Market Hypothesis is bullshit, because the assumption of perfectly efficient markets is dumb. Which is true — it is dumb. But if you do write that article, you’ll probably come to find out, by being ridiculed publicly, that very few people actually believe in perfectly efficient markets.

And those who do are so dogmatically entrenched that they’re not going to change their minds anyway.

You’re attacking a phantom. And to whatever extent you’re attacking something real, your target audience isn’t listening anyway. So the article likely was not worth writing.

I’ve written, numerous times, essays targeting specific behaviors in humans that in my eyes are “bad.” Like, for instance, some of the most childish behaviors of men. But there are two problems: 1) they end up coming out as rants, and 2) the people I’d be trying to reach… well, most certainly are not reading my blog. The people with the worst behaviors are not in the business of self-improvement. I’d be yelling at ghosts.

So I took those pieces and deleted them. I’ve done this more times than I can count. And I still do it with words, sentences, and paragraphs all of the time.

Writing has helped me see how most of my strongest opinions are against people who aren’t listening, and therefore I need to just let go of them. You can’t teach a man who doesn’t want to learn, as it were.

Besides, angry writing is not a good long-term way to express oneself. If you can’t attack something with humor, don’t attack it at all. That’s a good general rule.

Even the smartest frontiersmen and women on Earth are not immune. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, one of the most important books ever written, was partially an attack on the economic ideology of mercantilism. But his representation of mercantilist thinking was often exaggerated or oversimplified.

Luckily for Smith, he put forth tons of other good ideas in that book. Most of us are not so fortunate, and we instead make ourselves look like indignant children who’ve just discovered the counterculture. We just end up looking uneducated.

It’s easier to beat up an idea when you dress that idea up in its most extreme outfit. It’s easier to make fun of someone’s ears when you draw a caricature of them with huge ears. Most of us, some of the time, are caricature artists. That doesn’t make us bad or evil, it just means we haven’t yet acquired the wisdom to form well-reasoned opinions.

You have to ask yourself whether whatever opinion you have is earned.

What does it mean to “earn” an opinion? It means that you’ve done the research or you have the experience to back it up. If you open your mouth, you have some useful things to say. If that’s not the case, you haven’t earned the opinion.

The more you read about politics, the more you’d think our country is deeply and totally divided. But the more you read about people, or the more you talk to people, the more you realize that’s nonsense. Most of the people around you are just like you: they don’t play that game, and they don’t want to. They, like you, wish politics would die and go to hell. Most people, if you actually listen to them, are pretty moderate. They can be reasoned with, even if they have what you would consider stupid opinions to start with. They can at least be communicated with.

The screen on the wall and the screen in your hand want you to think you have 100 million enemies. You don’t. You have 300 million neighbors, only 5% of whom are hopeless zealots.

In your own life, do you even have any enemies? Any people you see on a regular basis who actually wish you harm? Probably not.

What often happens when you read a news story, or rather when the public reads a news story, is that the story gets simplified down to its goriest or most crude details and then gets passed around like a bowl of salad.

Imagine a hypothetical situation: a sober driver was assaulted by her drunk partner while driving, and then ran over someone who was jaywalking.

It goes without saying, some of the news coverage of this event is going to have the headline "drunk couple kills innocent man" or whatever. And it's going to result in regional protests about drunk driving, calls for stricter laws, and demands of life sentences for the couple.

What people are not going to be talking about is how the victim was jaywalking after dark, or that the real problem inside that car was closer to domestic violence than it was to drunk driving.

Everything gets boiled down and telephone-gamed to what will produce the most emotion in the most people. That’s what “viral” is.

Here’s another example: your best friend tells you that he just can't tolerate his angry girlfriend anymore.

What he fails to mention is that the reason she keeps flipping out is that he keeps leaving his soaked bath towel on their $6,000 hardwood floor, because he doesn't fucking listen.

Now you're siding with him and calling her a lunatic, because you don't actually have any information. At all. All you have is a ghost to be angry at because someone told you a story.

War is built on deception. Not just Sun Tzu’s deception, as in fooling the enemy. But Captain Ahab’s deception. Mussolini’s deception. Fooling one’s own people into fighting a war that doesn’t concern them, toward ends that don’t benefit them, against people who have done nothing to them.

We saw it in 1984, and you see it if you give the World Wars even a cursory glance. The first step to turning on the war machine is to build a ghost. An entity that you can convince an entire people to hate. Without that, all you’ll have on the battlefield will be naked, scared soldiers who see other naked, scared soldiers. And they’ll all realize that the villain of an enemy was imagined. And they’ll refuse to kill each other.

In our current state of affairs, Russia is the enemy. They did, after all, start a war. But what do we in America even know about Russia?

I know that Russian literature is probably the darkest and most hopeless on Earth, and I know that if you have a Russian daughter named Isabella, you might affectionately call her Belluchka. Other than that, I really don’t know anything about Russia. The funny part is, neither does anyone else I’ve spoken to about it.

So is Russia bad? Maybe. Should we spend time talking about Russia and hating them? Maybe. But probably only if we take the time to learn anything worth saying.

Andrew Delbanco wrote an introduction to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever found. In this introduction, Delbanco describes Ahab’s tactics for getting his men rallied behind him:

Even as he manipulates them, Ahab knows their humanity; he knows that no man among them lives unaggrieved... and that all have a reservoir of pain that can be tapped by a leader who elevates common resentment to the uncommon level of heroic virtue. Like Ahab, every man feels maimed and hopes to find relief by assigning blame.

Ordinary men and women don’t go to war over natural resources or property; they go to war over righteousness. Like Ahab does with his whale, any president or king worth his salt knows what his job is during war: to take the citizens’ pride and sorrow and transmute it into blame and hatred.

Part of the reason the Vietnam War was so heavily protested was because nobody hated the North Vietnamese. We didn’t have any reason to. We didn’t blame them for anything.

The more I read and educate myself, the fewer things I have opinions about. Funny how that works.

At this point I'd say that if you have strong opinions about more than maybe 10 things, you're overextending yourself. And probably exhausting yourself.

Every time you pull your rectangle out of your pocket, there's someone who wants to turn you against someone else or some idea. But life is better spent in favor of things, not against things. Being "against" too many things will turn you into a sloppy, juvenile person who will spend all of his time dealing with the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people.

Disagreeing with people on the internet is generally not worth the trouble. Because what ends up happening is we assume the worst about that person’s intentions (and they about ours), we get angry and indignant, and then we have to sit with those feelings without any way to resolve them. We can't shake the person's hand, we can't look them in the eyes and apologize... we just sit there with the poison of unresolved conflict.

Being in favor of things is what will lead to happiness and good relationships. Being in favor of something forces you to spend time in the real world making it come true. Being “against” something, you either go to war or you sit at home bitter and poisoned.

There are very, very few things we can actually control, and there are very few people whose lives we can actually touch. Don’t miss the opportunity to get those things right. Those opportunities can easily pass us by while we’re chasing ghosts.

You don't have to think something about everything. You’re allowed to say “I’ve got better things to do than have an opinion on that.”

Drink some water just so no one else can have it.

JDR

“What’s in your head, zombie?” - The Cranberries