Starved or Sustained
The Sunday Night Reader for 11/27/22
Ever more like ourselves
I really enjoyed this essay by Joshua Rothman about how we perceive our selves. Thinky reflection backed with some real research — which is the perfect New Yorker article, for me — on those who see themselves as changing throughout their lives versus those who see themselves as relatively unchanging and the way those two perspectives overlap in ways we might not consider. Are our personalities continuous or are we a chain of episodes that we respond to differently?
From the essay: “One problem is that many studies of development are ‘retrospective’ in nature: researchers start with how people are doing now, then look to the past to find out how they got that way. But many issues trouble such efforts. There’s the fallibility of memory: people often have difficulty recalling even basic facts about what they lived through decades earlier. (Many parents, for instance, can’t accurately remember whether a child was diagnosed as having A.D.H.D.; people even have trouble remembering whether their parents were mean or nice.)…The value of the Dunedin project [which tracked the same group as they aged], therefore, derives not just from its long duration but also from the fact that it is ‘prospective.’ It began with a thousand random children, and only later identified changes as they emerged.
The Dunedin researchers began by categorizing their three-year-olds. They met with the children for ninety minutes each, rating them on twenty-two aspects of personality— restlessness, impulsivity, willfulness, attentiveness, friendliness, communicativeness, and so on. They then used their results to identify five general types of children. Forty per cent of the kids were deemed ‘well-adjusted,’ with the usual mixture of kid personality traits. Another quarter were found to be ‘confident’—more than usually comfortable with strangers and new situations. Fifteen per cent were ‘reserved,’ or standoffish, at first. About one in ten turned out to be ‘inhibited’; the same proportion were identified as ‘undercontrolled.’ The inhibited kids were notably shy and exceptionally slow to warm up; the undercontrolled ones were impulsive and ornery. These determinations of personality, arrived at after brief encounters and by strangers, would form the basis for a half century of further work.
By age eighteen, certain patterns were visible. Although the confident, reserved, and well-adjusted children continued to be that way, those categories were less distinct. In contrast, the kids who’d been categorized as inhibited or as undercontrolled had stayed truer to themselves. At age eighteen, the once inhibited kids remained a little apart, and were ‘significantly less forceful and decisive than all the other children.’
That durability is due, in part, to the social power of temperament, which, the authors write, is ‘a machine that designs another machine, which goes on to influence development.’ This second machine is a person’s social environment. Someone who moves against the world will push others away, and he’ll tend to interpret the actions of even well-meaning others as pushing back; this negative social feedback will deepen his oppositional stance. Meanwhile, he’ll engage in what psychologists call ‘niche picking’ — the favoring of social situations that reinforce one’s disposition. A ‘well-adjusted’ fifth grader might actually ‘look forward to the transition to middle school’; when she gets there, she might even join some clubs. Her friend who’s moving away from the world might prefer to read at lunch. And her brother, who’s moving against the world — the group skews slightly male — will feel most at home in dangerous situations.
Through such self-development, the authors write, we curate lives that make us ever more like ourselves. But there are ways to break out of the cycle. One way in which people change course is through their intimate relationships. The Dunedin study suggests that, if someone who tends to move against the world marries the right person, or finds the right mentor, he might begin to move in a more positive direction. His world will have become a more beneficent co-creation. Even if much of the story is written, a rewrite is always possible.” Read more.
Normal People Aren’t Buying In
Market researcher and author David Atkins on Twitter: “A big part of the freakout you're seeing from Elon and the rest of the rightwing crowd is that they just ran a whole campaign against the ‘woke mind virus’ and LGBTQ people in an electoral environment that should have favored them heavily — and they lost. They thought they had a big popular majority for ‘anti-woke.’ They did not. They lost. Elon is going anti-woke, and going broke. All their rightwing startups are going belly-up. They lost a Senate seat, and without new illegal gerrymandering they would've lost the House.
Normies voted against them. Women were more furious about Roe than they expected. Young people voted big against them. They've lost the culture, and they've lost faith in electoral solutions to it…Tech is stacked in favor of the GOP: the Facebook groups/algorithms and YouTube algorithms favor them. They dominate AM radio and cable news. Twitter was the most balanced & responsible, so Elon bought it because the far right couldn't stomach even a hint of social responsibility.
But they still lost. They lost the popular vote in 2016. They lost in 2018. They lost in 2020. They lost embarrassingly in 2022. They lost in Brazil. Putin lost in Ukraine. White Christian Nationalism is failing. So they're taking desperate measures for control.
As generational replacement continues and the failures of authoritarianism become more obvious, they will lose even harder. The desperation for control will increase. Times will get more dangerous. But as long as the rest of society resists, we will win. This ‘rest of society’ is what the far-right calls ‘The Cathedral’ as if it's some conspiracy. They see themselves as a brave rebellious resistance to it. But of course none of that is true. They are defending the hegemony of good ol’ boy power.
Meanwhile, ‘the cathedral’ is no such thing. Creatives, the well-educated, scientists, real altruists and curious all lean left. Young people are economically disadvantaged, and lean left. The big problems like climate change do not have rightwing answers. And importantly now even big corporations *seem* to lean left in their public comms only because 18-45 years are the target advertising demo. And guess where we live, what our values are and how we vote? The Fox News audience isn't the target demo anymore. Too bad.
So now you've got a coalition of theocrats with aging, declining followings, and megalomaniac billionaires who think only an dictatorship under their control will lead humanity into a sci-fi future of their grandiose and self-serving delusions.
But normal people aren't buying in — especially the vast majority of people under 45. They're going to lose…No worries — progressives and ethical science will get us to a sustainable sci-fi San Junipero future just fine. And we'll get there faster and more safely the more that Dunning-Kruger tyrants like Elon are sidelined from control over it.”
An Appreciation: The Wonder
Florence Pugh as a Florence Nightingale who makes her way Ireland to sit watch over a girl who hasn’t eaten in months and who claims to be surviving on manna from heaven. Something of a mystery and a bit of a thriller with a wink of fourth-wall breaking, The Wonder is a consideration of the stories we tell ourselves and how they can starve or sustain us.
And how about Florence Pugh?!? Put this with Midsommar and Don’t Worry Darling (and even her role in the Marvel universe, for that matter). She’s earning a spot as her generation’s badass who won’t stay on the mat no matter what is thrown at her and doing it with real charm and intelligence.
Great stuff, streaming on Netflix.
