Lesson Two: Masculine Maladaptation and Nihilism
Essay #5: Final Capstone Essay for 200 Points: Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Gogol’s “The Overcoat”:
Option One. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the quest for identity in Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat." Consider maladaptation and the chimera as traps resulting from the search for identity.
Option Two. A wise man once said, having a chimera will kill you, but not having a chimera will also kill you. Develop an argumentative thesis that shows how this saying applies to Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat."
Option Three. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the theme of self-destructive chimera, American Dream facade, and deformed masculinity as they are evident in Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life and the 1999 film American Beauty.
Masculine Maladaptation and the Pose of the Macho Nihilist
Tobias is entering a closed society of adolescent misfits who are deluded by fantasies of greatness. These fantasies are a drug and escape from their grim reality, no prospects, no family support, alienated from life's script, on a road to nowhere.
They are desperate children hungry for a sense of belonging and family. They develop codes to be part of the tribe, a substitute family.
Too often when young men look for a substitute family, they create a hyper-masculine tribe. This tribes codes and values clash with society, are empowering over the short-term, and are self-destructive in the long-term
Why Tribes Flourish Throughout Time
One. Tribes offer a sense of belonging. Belonging is a universal basic need.
Two. Tribes offer a meaningful narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, all punctuated with grand rites of passage. We have graduations from kindergarten, sixth grade, high school, and college. We have quinceaneras and birthday parties. We have baptisms, christenings, circumcisions, bar-mitzvahs, bat-mitzvahs. We eat with guidelines: kosher or halal.
Three. Tribes offer strength in numbers.
Four. Tribes offer moral stories.
Five. Tribes take the responsibility of freedom from the individual who may be too frightened of freedom to forge of life code of his own.
Six. Tribes give refuge to loners, misfits, and malcontents who find it difficult to make meaningful connections with others.
Seven. Tribes offer a sense of moral order and certainty in a world of chaos.
Eight. Tribes create an Us Vs. Them mentality so that the “Us” can feel entitled to power and privileges.
Nine. Joining a tribe can be seen as “success,” being “a member of the club.”
Ten. Joining a tribe can be religious, provincial, consumer, business, activism, hobby, political, or any number of things. Our obsession can be our tribe if we find people who share our obsession.
Feeling Outside the Tribe
America is a huge country where it is easy to get lost, spit out by family, school, "the system" and find oneself a loner.
A lo of Americans live in the suburbs. One of the defining characteristics of living in the suburbs is belonging to a clique or suffering from loneliness.
Loners adapt by creating tribes that give them a sense of belonging.
Some people can’t stand conformity, especially if the script of the tribe seems immoral, unpleasant, or cruel to the individual. So these people stay out of the tribe or go on a search for a newt tribe.
A lot of men are too raw, too unrefined, and too rebellious to join America’s script of convention: go to college, get a lanyard with one’s work ID card, a parking pass, and a job with a corporation where one works in a cubicle for 40 years before getting a pancake breakfast and $20 watch before retiring and dying, put to rest in a Walmart casket.
The country is full of maladapted men who, unable to conform to the conventional script, are lost and hungry for rituals that affirm their masculinity and belonging to a male tribe with a strict set of codes. These male tribes, be they bodybuilding or MMA circles, become substitute families for young men.
These men are society’s wild horses. They act brave and "in control," but in truth they are scared, lonely, and empty of meaning.
In the case of Tobias and his associates, nihilism, the belief that everything in the world is complete BS, is their drug and their religion.
Nihilism is the belief that society’s scripts are BS, a joke, a dead-end, a product of empty hypocrites.
But what makes nihilism is not just rejection of the script; nihilism is having nothing to replace the script. One slogs on through life bearing the affliction of emptiness. Living in this vacuum is dangerous because nihilists will try to fill the vacuum with self-destruction, reckless hedonism, and addiction.
By joining this religion of nihilism, they become dead to their old selves, but their new selves are emotionally stunted.
Their tribes codes are malformed, born from the mind of half-baked adolescent dreams.
Half-baked adolescent dreams are often laden with grandiosity. My teen bodybuilding friend and I thought we’d become Mr. Universe and own a gym in the Bahamas while spending our free time lying in hammocks and drinking protein drinks under palm trees.
These half-baked adolescent dreams give born to “the disease” of nihilism.
Nihilism is not reality; it’s a pose, an attitude, a disposition.
Study Questions:
One. How is TW’s mother leading a selfish life and how does her selfishness hurt her son?
Selfish parents send an implicit message to their children that hurts their self-worth. “I’m Number 1 and you’re Number Whatever.”
One of my students was hurt that his father, who retired from the police force, bought himself a 50K sports car. His son had to pay his way through college. It’s not just the money that hurt my student. It was the message his father gave him: “My sports car is more important than you and your education.” My student was depressed and demoralized.
TW’s mom loves her son, but her will to fulfill her dreams drags her son into the vortex of terror and evil: bad men cumulating into Dwight, the most evil of all. He has a visceral hatred for Tobias.
We can love someone all we want, but if we’re letting a distorted dream, a chimera, drag us through the muck, our love is worthless, even destructive.
Two. How do Tobias his buddies embody nihilism?
Feeling alienated from their parents, the adult world, and any kind of moral universe, these boys embrace nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, that there is no right or wrong, that there is no higher purpose, and that there is nothing to live for.
Some distinguishing characteristics of nihilism:
Ennui: boredom with the universe
Can’t feel, state of complete numbness
Nothing matters
No meaning
No purpose
No right or wrong
No truth; everything is BS
Disease of acedia, a name for spiritual lethargy and paralysis
Some argue that few people are actual nihilists. Many people live the nihilistic lifestyle as a cool pose but don’t really believe in nihilism in their heart.
The only true nihilists, it is argued, are sociopaths, people who were born without a conscience.
I’ve known men who claim to be nihilists, but as soon as someone steals their girlfriend, takes their wallet, and uses their toothbrush these self-proclaimed nihilists suddenly believe in right and wrong, fairness, and morality.
Three. What dream of convention fuels TW’s desire to live with his abusive stepfather?
One of TW’s chimeras is the ideal American life, a house behind a picket fence, and a family that sits in front of the fireplace.
TW’s quest to live a life of image and status is so intense he’d be willing to live in a gulag, a place where he has to spend all day cracking chestnuts like a prison laborer.
Ironically, the ideal image of a safe and cozy conventional life puts TW and his mother in the lap of the devil.
Not surprisingly, TW’s quest to live a lie complements his life as a pathological liar.
Four. How does TW turn into a pathological liar?
TW lies compulsively without even thinking beforehand.
He longs to create an image of elevated grandeur and will change to facts to achieve this effect.
He longs to fabricate a parallel universe as a refuge from his real existence: hell.
Pathological liars eventually confuse reality with fantasy as my soccer coach friend’s life reveals.
I guess I’ll have to tell the story of a soccer coach from long ago.
Five. How does the memoir address the theme of failure?
TW’s mom spends too much time with men even when there are warning signs that the relationship is a failure. She says on page 143 that she is willing to do whatever it takes to make her marriage work. But should we always do “whatever it takes”? Are there situations that require we bail or abandon ship?
We all screw up in some career choice or relationship or whatever. The question is knowing when to bail. When do we abandon ship?
The question is knowing when to bail. When do we abandon ship?
One. Einstein’s Insanity Theory: When you bang your head against a wall over and over and expect a different result, it’s time to bail.
Two. When you’re putting all the effort in a relationship and the other person show no reciprocity, no effort, and no trustworthiness. You’re putting in 99% of the work and the other person is putting in maybe 1%. It’s time to bail.
Three. When your family and friends tell you you’re wasting your time and their appraisal is in constantly contradicts your own optimism. You’re lucky you have people who care about you. We often need an outside perspective to tell us we’re blind.
Four. When you determine the thing is taking more from you than it is giving to you. My brother dated a gourmet chef in Hawaii. She was tired and angry all the time. She finally bailed.
Five. When the thing you’re involved with consumes you so much you don’t even know who you are anymore. You’re falling asleep with your clothes on. You’re showering twice a week. You forgot you had a name. You’re developing psychosomatic illness you’ve never had before.
Six. When the thing you’re doing is causing you to betray your values. You’re selling something you don’t believe in. You’re cheating people. You’re deceiving people. You’re constantly trying to make up ways to take money from people. You’re always selling. You can’t live with your conscience. It’s time to bail.
Seven. When the thing you’re doing is no longer viable or causing joy but you keep on anyway in order to protect your ego. Like staying in a relationship to show others how “mature” you are. In this case, you’re sticking to something, not for your self, but to impress others and save face.
Eight. As Americans, we’re fed the Kool-Aid that “if we try hard enough we will succeed.” There is a difference between persistence and foolishness.
Persistence is only wise if it’s accompanied by progress. But if persistence is accompanied by stagnation, you’re undertaking a fool’s errand.
Look at all the artistic, business, and restaurant failures and resulting bankruptcies with people sleeping in broken-down cars and roach-infested hotels. In America, we have been conditioned to say, “I invested so much time and money in this thing I can’t bail out now.”
Sometimes in life you have to cut your losses.
Nine. You don’t have a Plan B, a Contingency Plan, or an Exit Strategy, so you cling to our failure. When failure is all you have, you are in a sorry state.
Ten. The thrill is gone. You can’t create the feelings anymore. They’re dead. You die to something. Don’t be ashamed. You simply changed. People do change. I used to be in love with oversized TV brand watches. One day the thrill was gone.
Lesson#2 Misinformation from Statistics
Example #1
In the thirty-five years since marijuana laws stopped being enforced in California, the number of marijuana smokers has doubled every year.
The above isn’t even plausible. If only one marijuana smoker existed 35 years ago, doubling that number every year for 35 years would yield more than 17 billion—more people than exist in the entire world, which as of 2013 was 7.125 billion.
So the claim is not just implausible; it’s impossible.
Example #2
Our best salesperson made 1,000 sales a day.
The above is physically impossible, so such a claim cannot be defended.
Example #3
More people have access to cell phones than toilets.
Because so many people live without plumbing, the above claim is plausible. In fact 6 of 7 billion people on Earth have access to phones. Only 4.5 billion have access to toilets.
But Bear in Mind
The above fact has been misconstrued. People are saying, in error, that more people have cell phones than have toilets. They’ve changed the language. People have access to phones. That’s not the same as owning phones.
Example #4
In the U.S. 150,000 girls and young women die of anorexia each year.
According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the annual number of deaths from all causes for girls and women between 15 and 24 is 8,500. Therefore, the above claim is not even plausible.
Example #5
The cost of a telephone call has decreased by 12,000 percent.
The above is not possible by the dictates of logic. If a cost decreases by 100 percent, it drops to zero. If a cost decreases by 200 percent, someone is paying you the same amount you used to pay them for you to take the product.
Why Statistical Interpretation Can be More Accurate with the Median Than the Mean
We are having a fundraiser, and we want to know the average net worth of 9 attendees.
Person 1 -$500,000K (due to outstanding debts)
Person 2 $96K
Person 3 $97K
Person 4 $99K
Person 5 $100K
Person 6 $101K
Person 7 $101K
Person 8 $101K
Person 9 $104K
The mean (average) of the above is $33,222 per person. But this is a weak sense of the income level of the nine attendees at the fundraiser. In contrast, the media, the middle number, is $100K, and this gives us a better sense of the attendees’ income.
Dishonest people use means or averages to arrive at false characterizations with statistics.
We also have a false sense of history from misinterpreting data. In 1850, we think people died when they were in their late thirties and low 40s, but the average results from high rates of infant and childhood mortality.
Averages don’t take into account risk factors. 1 in 2 marriages may end in divorce, but that statistic may not apply to your geographic, religious and income demographic or if you come from parents who never divorced or you are at risk for addiction.
Do you think divorce is the same in the farmland as it is in the big city? Averages don’t mean squat.
You could have a room of 100 people in it with an average income of $350 million, but the composition is Mark Zuckerberg (worth $35 billion) and 99 homeless people with no money. The average is misleading.
Bimodal Distribution
The mode is the value that occurs most often. For example, restaurants have two customer spikes, at 12 and 6. The average customers arriving at the restaurant every hour doesn’t help us see the bimodal distribution, which is more helpful for planning on how many workers are needed during the time of the day.
Unimodal Distribution
The mode spikes during one period. For example, Torrance PD issues on average 17 speeding tickets a day per month on Prairie Avenue between Carson and Artesia, but 90% of the tickets are issued during last 3 days of the month. The average isn’t telling you the whole story or the most important part of the story.
Assessing Growth of a Stock Must Have Context and Comparison
Growth in home fitness equipment makes Kettlebell King Fitness a promising company, especially when you see that it’s enjoying 15% growth every quarter for an impressive 60% growth per year. But if its 3 competitors are enjoying 120% growth a year, Kettlebell King Fitness is not a good company to invest in.
Clever representatives for whatever interest are eager to share “growth statistics” while withholding comparisons that are vital to seeing the whole picture.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)
You brush your teeth in the morning; then you go to work. However, brushing your teeth doesn’t cause you to go to work.
Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this)
When two things happen at the same time, we don’t necessarily infer that one caused the other.
It rains, and you become hungry at that very moment. The rain didn’t cause your hunger.
In cities where there is high welfare there is high unemployment. The welfare didn’t cause the unemployment. The unemployment was already high in that city. This is the case of putting the chicken before the egg.
Levitin writes that a lot of graphs and factoids are based on false representations of statistics and faulty causation: “Infographics are often used by lying weasels to shape public opinion, and they rely on the fact that most people won’t study what they’ve done too carefully.” They engage in a deceptive practice called framing.
Example of Framing
A common ad states, “Four out of five dentists recommend Colgate toothpaste.” This is true, but the ad is deemed dishonest because the ad doesn’t state that the dentists are addressing this question: “Recommend more than one brand of toothpaste.” The dentists are recommending Colgate along with other brands. They are not recommending Colgate above other brands.
The above can be described as a lie of omission. Levitin calls it “framing,” a method of manipulating information to create a false representation in order to deceive people.
Example of Needing a Baseline Comparison
Levitin writes: “New reports showed that 2014 was one of the deadliest years for plane crashes: 22 accidents resulted in 992 fatalities. But flaying is actually safer now than it has ever been. Because there are so many more flights today than ever before, the 992 fatalities represent a dramatic decline in the number of deaths per million passengers (or per million miles flown).
Faulty Comparisons or Comparing Apples and Oranges
Example of a False Claim Based on Faulty Comparison
It’s safer to be in the military during an active conflict than to be stateside on the comfort of your own home. Out of 1,431,000 people in the military, 3,482 active-duty died in 2010. That is a rate of 2.4 deaths per 1,000.
Across the United States, the death rate in 2010 was 8.2 deaths per 1,000. Was it more than three times safer to be in the military, in a war zone, than to live in the United States?
The answer is no. Active military are young and healthy. The general population includes the sick and the elderly. The comparison therefore is faulty.
Not all statistics are equal. Their validity is partly based on how they are collected.
Some methods:
Sampling
Sampling: The part represents the whole. A sample is valid if it’s representative. It’s representative if every item from the sample has equal chance of being chosen.
Astrogeologists rely on specimens of moon rock to arrive at general characteristics about the moon.
A public opinion poll to see how the entire country feels about an issue (234 million adults) can be obtained by interviewing 1,067 individuals.
Biopsies that sample that sample less than one one-thousandth of an organ can be used for accurate cancer staging.
Hasty Generalization Fallacy
If sample is not random, then the sample can produce the hasty generalization fallacy.
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