We Are ALL Innocent Ebook Free through March 8

The online ebook publishing site Smashwords is having a one week ebook promotion. During this time, We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity will be free. Visit my Smashwords page where you'll find the coupon code you need.

Collective Beliefs and War

One of the premises of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity is that much of our worldview is influenced by the collective beliefs of our culture. We are programmed to think the way people in our culture do. A trip to another country is an interesting way to see this programming in action. Culture shock is the way we describe the experience of visiting people who have different assumptions about reality. A favorite example of mine is the time I went to Fiji, and saw big strapping policemen wearing skirts. That conflicted with one of my culture’s sillier assumptions, that men can’t wear skirts.

But the assumptions that make up our collective reality are not all silly by any means. In fact they have profound consequences in how we think and interact with each other.

One that has been on my mind lately has to do with war. As I noted in a recent post, after Syria used chemical weapons why was the Obama administration so focused on bombing to the exclusion of diplomacy? Why do we have so few non-violent mechanisms for enforcing international norms?

David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, recently published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled Are We Hard-Wired for War? that argues that our fundamental assumptions about human nature affect our attitudes toward violence in general and war in particular.

You've Got to be Taught to Hate

The actor Kirk Douglas just published a blog post on prejudice at the Huffington Post called “On Jews and Justice.”

Mr. Douglas mentions the controversy over the Broadway musical South Pacific, which addressed racism head-on—in 1949. The play concerns an American nurse, stationed in the South Pacific during WWII, who falls in love with a French plantation owner. She has trouble accepting the fact that he has mixed-race children.

In addition there is a secondary romance between a U.S. lieutenant and a young Tonkinese woman. The lieutenant worries about what people will think if he marries the woman, and he sings the song “You've Got to Be Carefully Taught":

You've got to be taught to hate and fear,
You've got to be taught from year to year,
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear,
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate.

Prejudice has to be taught. This is the key to compassion: a bigot’s thinking became twisted during his or her upbringing. This is the bottom-line of my book, We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion. All of us are confused in our thinking. All of us have been programmed to believe our particular culture’s reality. We all confuse our mind-generated reality with actual reality--this delusion is what makes us insane.

The South Pacific song made me think of a beautiful passage from Martin Luther King’s account of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, in his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story [Harper & Row, 1958]:

I tried to put myself in the place of the police commissioners. I said to myself these are not bad men. They are misguided. They have fine reputations in the community. In their dealings with white people they are respectful and gentlemanly. They probably think they are right in their methods of dealing with Negroes. They say the things they say about us and treat us as they do because they have been taught these things. From the cradle to the grave, it is instilled in them that the Negro is inferior. Their parents probably taught them that; the schools they attended taught them that; the books they read, even their churches and ministers, often taught them that; and above all the very concept of segregation teaches them that. The whole cultural tradition under which they have grown—a tradition blighted with more than 250 years of slavery and more than 90 years of segregation—teaches them that Negroes do not deserve certain things. So these men are merely the children of their culture. When they seek to preserve segregation they are seeking to preserve only what their local folkways have taught them was right.

 What an incredibly beautiful mind to have been able to perceive this truth, right in the midst of the struggle!

The Need for Validation

In my new book, We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity, I say that everyone is insecure, including celebrities. After reading it a friend asked, “Is that really true? I know I’m insecure, but famous people seem so certain of themselves.”

I replied, “They just have a better act.” But not being a celebrity myself, this statement might have come across as envious or bitter. It certainly wasn’t based on personal experience.

Today I got confirmation of this proposition from none other than Oprah. In a Washington Post article about commencement speakers—Oprah is the speaker at Harvard this year—the author wrote:

In doing more than 35,000 interviews, she’s [Oprah] learned that everybody wants to be validated. Everyone she’s ever sat down with, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to “Beyonce in all her Beyonce-ness,” has asked, in his or her own way, after the TV lights went out, “Was I OK?” [Watch Oprah's speech here, this passage is at 20:25 in.]

Insecurity is common to all of us because our personalities are an act, a role we put together as children and then play for a lifetime. On some level we’re aware that it’s an act; we fear that other people are more “real” than we are; and we’re afraid that one day the curtain will be pulled aside to reveal that there is nothing but our act.

Who are we really? None of us absolutely know who, what, where, when, or why we are. No wonder we are all in need of validation.

Oprah continued, "The common denominator is we all want to be validated, we all want to be understood...We all want to know, 'Did you hear me?' "Do you see me?'" She finished her speech with, "Was that okay?" 

We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity on sale!

My book, We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion, is now available as an e-book at Smashwords.com and Amazon.com. At Smashwords you can read the first four chapters for free.

Here's a brief description:

Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately, but we don’t. What we see is an individual mind-generated reality, heavily distorted by our beliefs and assumptions. We erroneously believe our subjective reality is actual reality. We’re all insane because we’re deluded about what is real.

What better explanation for dysfunctional human behavior than universal insanity? What better way to explain why loneliness, fear, and hatred are so familiar and love so rare? Why so many people need to use alcohol and drugs just to get through another day? Why half of all marriages end in divorce?

We are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity presents the idea that the primary cause of human suffering is universal insanity. Insanity is defined as: confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality. In practical terms, this translates as confusing subjective opinion with objective fact.

For example: “I made a mistake” is an objective fact. “I made a mistake because I’m a loser” is a subjective opinion. When I think and act as if the subjective opinion is an objective fact I’m confused about what is real. It is this confusion of fantasy with fact that makes me insane.

Free will is shown to be a complete myth. Insane people do not have free will. We are driven by subconscious psychological forces over which we have no control. Recognizing our insanity means the end of blame, shame, and arrogance.

In addition, the recognition of universal insanity is the key to compassion: we’re not right in our minds.

By understanding that all hurtful behavior—from gossip to mass murder—proceeds from insane thinking, we can experience compassion for ourselves and everyone else.

The book includes references to recent scientific and psychological research that demonstrates how out-of-touch with reality we really are. Other references range from Zen stories to the Three Stooges.

I use examples from my own life to illustrate how we all build a personal subjective reality—My Story. I also share my personal growth as I face my own insanity.

This book is for adult audiences. There is a chapter on sexuality and passages in other chapters that discuss sex in an explicit manner.

Sanity is love. Love is defined as: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is. This means that when we experience acceptance of reality exactly the way it is we experience love.

This book may transform the way you see yourself and the world.

Next Front in the Equality Wars

I predict that the next front in the struggle for equality will be prejudice based on physical features: attractiveness, height, and weight.

I have never worn makeup, and I have often mocked women who do. In my mind, makeup created an artificial face, and I have been a devotee of the natural. “Why can’t women be like men,” I thought, “and live with the face they were given?”

Recently the New York Times had a forum about the use of makeup, “Does Makeup Hurt Self-Esteem,” with brief essays on both sides of the issue. One was by Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and a research psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has done research into the perception of women’s faces with and without makeup.

Her experiments showed that when a viewer first saw a face with makeup, the initial reaction was positive, but upon longer reflection, the more dramatic the makeup the less trustworthy the person was judged to be.

We asked people to rate photographs of women with and without makeup. Seen very quickly (250 milliseconds), women wearing makeup looked more attractive, likeable, competent and trustworthy to our viewers than those who went without it. On longer inspection, responses became varied and nuanced. Faces with natural makeup were seen favorably but faces with more dramatic makeup were seen as less trustworthy.

This seemed to validate my prejudice against makeup, but then I read her journal article online and changed my mind. Ms Etcoff and her associates cite four different studies showing a strong prejudice against unattractive people in the workplace. Men and women who are judged to be unattractive have a harder time getting hired, earn lower salaries, and are judged to be less intelligent and competent.

Of Cannibals, Kings, and Collective Realities

I am a big fan of the television show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (MST3K), in which the characters watch bad movies and crack jokes. Sometimes the show included short educational films that were shown in schools fifty years ago, with subjects like “body care and grooming,” or “why study industrial arts?”

These films taught children our culture’s basic assumptions. One of my favorites, “A Date With Your Family,” is a classic example. It taught that children should be well-mannered and polite; a woman’s role is to be charming to the men of the family; daughters help with dinner while sons play and do homework; etc.

This film is hilarious (particularly with the MST3K jokes) because, with all the changes that have happened in our society over the last sixty years, the assumptions of 1950’s American culture are obvious.

However, some of the assumptions on display in the film are still taken for granted, and because they are part of our cultural reality they are hard to see. One that jumps out at me is the belief that “family = two parents and children.”

Recently I read an interesting article about cultural assumptions with the wonderful title, “Of Cannibals, Kings, and Culture,” (how can you not click on that headline?!), by Adam Etinson. In 1593 the essayist Michel de Montaigne encountered three Brazilian cannibals at the court of the French king. Montaigne also interviewed some of the sailors who had been in Brazil, and his subsequent essay, “Of Cannibals,” gives a fascinating account of Brazilian society, including their polygamous relationships. Of most interest to Montaigne is that the women liked this arrangement:

And it is one very remarkable feature in their marriages, that the same jealousy our wives have to hinder and divert us from the friendship and familiarity of other women, those employ to promote their husbands' desires, and to procure them many spouses; for being above all things solicitous of their husbands' honor, 'tis their chiefest care to seek out, and to bring in the most companions they can, forasmuch as it is a testimony of the husband's virtue. Most of our ladies will cry out, that 'tis monstrous; whereas in truth, it is not so; but a truly matrimonial virtue, and of the highest form.

Montaigne then cites the Bible as evidence of the virtue of this type of marriage: Jacob not only had two wives but they both “gave the most beautiful of their handmaids to their husbands.”