Leaving Anhedonia

World War Z, Game of Thrones & Anti-Vaxxers

Measles has made a comeback. It was supposed to be gone in the year 2000, but it's 2019 and there are well over 700 cases. Hundreds of students at UCLA and Cal State LA remain quarantined due to exposure to measles.

What happened? More and more parents feel they have knowledge superior to the medical community that entitles them to deny vaccinating their children. They're not just ignorant. They're proudly ignorant. And they've weaponized their ignorance with the help of social media. 

You can see the anti-vaxxers in full force protesting against Congressman Adam Schiff who has told Facebook, Google, and Amazon to stop publishing anti-vaxxer fake news. 

Composition Assignments

I’ve been thinking a lot about anti-vaxxers because my students are writing an argumentative essay about the anti-vaxxer movement in which they address one of two questions:

Question One: Do anti-vaxxers have reasonable justification for denying vaccinations to their children and endangering the public?

Question Two: Since anti-vaxxers pose a health hazard of fatal magnitude toward the public, should their behavior be criminalized?

Three Arguments for Criminalizing Anti-Vaxxers

Argument One: Anti-Vaxxers are a public menace.

In the year 2000, the medical community thought measles was dead, but now in 2019 there are 704 cases in United States, the highest in 25 years.

Worldwide measles is up 300%.

Anti-vaxxers link the MMR vaccine with autism even though the credible medical community has proven that no link exists.

Argument Two: You can try to educate people about the logical fallacies that make people hold this false belief, but they are entrenched with their social media tribe by embracing the following logical fallacies:

Confusing causation with correlation

Naturalistic Fallacy

Perfectionist Fallacy

Slippery Slope

Argument Three: Social media makes money on misinformation, which is click bait and the big social media players haven’t been aggressive in slowing down their fake news machine, so we need to rely on legal action.

Do I think the US government will criminalize anti-vaxxer behavior? I doubt it. Or if it does, it will be only when thousands of children die of measles.  

Two Books to Help Us Fully Understand the Broader Implications of the Anti-Vaxxer Movement.

The first is Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise. Nichols writes about a disease that is ruining society, and this disease is misinformation. In the words of Nichols: "The United States is now a country obsessed with its worship of its own ignorance." 

This proud ignorance Nichols speaks of sounds like this: "My truth is as good as yours. You may be an expert, and I don't care because I've got my own truth, and my truth makes me special."

Nichols is right: Expertise has died, and in its place is the self-righteous ignorant fury of the narcissist personality type whose anger is now weaponized by hordes of social media misinformation trolls. 

A second book is Max Brooks' 2007 novel World War Z, also made into a masterpiece 2013 movie with Brad Pitt. 

World War Z is one of my favorite movies of the last decade. I think about it all the time, not just because it’s a scary well made movie, but because those zombies turned out to be real in the form of social media misinformation trolls.  The prophecy is this:  A disease is spreading that is infecting the minds of millions of people and turning them into malicious, narcissistic trolls.

The Death of Expertise and World War Z are companion books. Read them together to find out the story of our lifetime. 

Both books examine a disease that is taking over the globe. One book addresses the disease literally, the other metaphorically. 

 

Physical Disease

Misinformation has consequences. Convincing people into believing that MMR vaccines cause autism is bringing back diseases we thought to be extinct. Measles, for example, was supposed to be eradicated in 2000, but now it’s back in full force.

Spiritual Disease

Misinformation spreads spiritual disease as well. It has caused a resurgence of racist fascism and the normalization of lies and criminality in our highest political leaders because everyone is either seduced by the misinformation and lies or they are utterly exhausted by the lies and they roll over and let the darkness take over.

To look at misinformation trolls, we can see the World War Z zombies as a powerful metaphor.

But we can also look to Game of Thrones. There is an evil force, the Night King, whose primary goal is to kill Bran Stark because in killing Bran, the Night King is killing memory and he can enjoy reign over a kingdom of forgetfulness and darkness.

In Game of Thrones, Arya killed the Night King just before he had the chance to kill Bran, but real life is not doing so well.

No Antibodies to Counteract Misinformation Trolls

In real life, the misinformation trolls are taking over the world, and they are moving quickly. We don’t have the antibodies, so to speak, to mount an effective counterattack.

These misinformation trolls are spreading racism, and, totalitarianism, both spiritual diseases, and physical diseases like measles. 

Measles was supposed to be eradicated, but it's back. We can thank another variety of troll: anti-vaxxers. 

 

Terrified

I see a broader point that terrifies me to the marrow of my bones.

Anti-vaxxing is just one example of many of a wave of zombie trolls who create their own false reality through joining mass misinformation tribes on social media. It's near impossible to change people's minds once there minds are calcified into their belief system, as a famous blog post, "The Backfire Effect," shows. 

With weaponized misinformation in social media, the potential for destruction, chaos and havoc cannot be measured.

Lack of Urgency

And I see no urgency to give proportional counterpunch to the weaponized misinformation that is spreading throughout the world via social media.

This weaponized misinformation is metaphorically and literally zombie fuel for irrational players in health, politics, and everything else.

Anti-Vaxxers are trolls. Trolls are zombies.

Zombies and White Walkers are spreading disease throughout the world:

Measles

Racism

Populism

Nationalism

Totalitarianism

These nihilistic trolls are normalizing lies, fake news, misinformation, and criminality.

We’re doing little to combat the spread of these diseases.

I want to be wrong.

But I think we got caught with our pants down. Social media is only about 10 years old. We thought it was a positive force at the beginning, as Arab Spring showed us. But social media has become a place of dark arts and mass manipulation. Misinformation zombies are growing at an alarming rate, and I see no equal counterpunch.

I wish I could say reason rules the day. But I see no evidence of this. Misinformation Zombies are taking over, and we don’t have a real life Brad Pitt to save the day. Nor do we have an Arya to plunge her knife into the eye of The Night King.

We only have ourselves and our powers of reason, but I don’t see the urgency just yet to fight the enemy that comes for us. This sense of urgency may come or it may not, or it may come too late.

We have to save the day, but how do we change minds?

Only a few people in history have had the power to change minds on a mass level: Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, St. Paul, Martin Luther King, Charles Darwin.

Most people get entrenched into their stubborn beliefs and you can’t shake them.

With social media freezing people into false beliefs, we may see the world being taking over by misinformation trolls.

How can we stop this Do you have any suggestions? Let me know.

Wonder of Food Around the World Saves Me from Misanthropy

As vicious trolls attempt to destroy democracy around the globe sending their bots into the social media ecosystem, as tribalistic nuts elect demagogue populists with no sense of anything other than their reptilian brain, and as parents deny measles vaccinations based on their lame interpretation of a Brady Bunch episode, I veer toward misanthropy. But what saves me is my wonder of food.

My favorite food from Mexico, Israel, China, Japan, India, Thailand, Turkey, Italy and Lebanon is an antidote to my misanthropy and restores my faith in human race. Be a skinny misanthrope or fat humanitarian.

 

Against Football Lesson (2 lessons)

Against Football Lessons

 

Lesson One

 

See 1 hour 53 minute Frontline League of Denial.

 

It’s also on YouTube for now.

 

Study Questions

 

One. Why does Steve Almond write that something is wrong with him for watching football? Give a diagnosis.

 

Almond is disturbed by denial and rationalization and compartmentalization. All these things he does to enjoy being a football fan.

 

He’s disturbed by his compromised integrity.

 

Another major theme is that when we acclimate to barbarism because it’s ubiquitous we confuse this pathology for being normal.

 

He argues that being a football fan encourages a tolerance for racism, violence, greed, and homophobia.

 

He’s writing as a lover of football, a lifelong fan, someone who sees football as “a work of art.”

 

Football brings about desire to watch a game and shame for that desire.

 

He is a divided soul.

Two. What is Almond’s definition of the sport of football?

 

It is a “controlled riot.” It is in other words a legal street fight designed for human spectacle and entertainment.

 

The game is so violent that in 1904 there were 18 deaths from the game, which had not yet devised protective equipment and new rules, including a forward pass.

 

Beyond a Sport

 

But Almond observes football is more than a sport. It’s a metaphor about aggression and masculinity.  Players “march into enemy territory.”

 

War-like metaphors made famous by comedian George Carlin.

 

Three. How did football begin as a barbaric eyesore and become America’s favorite sport?

 

For one, American men, cut living in industrial cities, needed rituals of masculinity that were now missing in age of consumerism.

 

Secondly, men needed a masculine diversion from the monotony of their factory jobs.

 

Third, football provided masculinity narratives that sports talk personalities could share with mass audiences. We could hear about who “performs in the clutch,” who “puts on his big boy pants in tough games,” and so on.

 

Fourth, men could live vicariously through their heroes who engaged in spectacles of violence and aggression, but did so in ways that elevated them beyond violent criminals and into grand mythical characters. Such characters could be marketed with jerseys, shoes, clothing lines, games, and so on.

 

Fifth, the football owners worked as a corporate entity, working together to insure parity to beat America’s two most popular sports, baseball and boxing.

 

Sixth, football has a much faster pace than baseball, which made it more appealing for TV audiences.

 

Seven, television used camera angles, close-ups, and instant replay to magnify and heighten dramatic spectacle.

 

Eighth, football, more than any other game, can in one play reverse the momentum of a game, maximizing surprise and drama.

 

Nine. Football created weekend rituals of fanboys getting together and forging friendships based on shared alliances, which helped overcome long week days of loneliness where many men lived lives of domestic strife and ineptitude. The dysfunctional male could get together with other dysfunctional males in the Man Cave where they could be male degenerates without  being judged by society.

 

Ten. Football combined abject physical violence with cunning strategy making it appeal to intellectuals.

 

Eleven. Football is a world unto its own. Its fans are immersed in the world to the point that the world provides comfort and meaning inside a larger world that is terrifying, chaotic, and senseless. People have a need to disappear inside a micro universe that protects them from the real universe. I see the same with other hobby obsessives: comics, wristwatches, cameras, gadgets of all kinds, computer games, TV bloggers, YouTubers of all kinds, and so on.

Twelve. Football provides so many appealing mythic stories and so much meaning to Americans that football has become a substitute for religion.

 

Thirteen. Some would say football is not so much a religion but a drug. As an opiate, its addicts can’t get enough of it. This intoxicant is in its fans’ veins and they are hooked for life such as Almond himself who sees himself as a diehard Raiders fan in the thralls of an identity crisis and enough guilt to consider the proposition that he must quit his addiction for many moral reasons. This is how he begins Chapter 2.

 

Four. What is the cause of Almond’s epiphany that football should be outlawed?

 

In Chapter 3, he has a biting memory of Jack Tatum, “The Assassin,” knocking out Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley rendering Stingley a paralyzed quadriplegic for all to see on national TV. This causes a “woke moment.”

 

But Almond tucks this inconvenient truth back into his mind and continues watching football. The sport is just too fun to quit.

 

Minhaj Hasan observes that we all want be “woke” but convenience is more important. Hasan uses Amazon Prime, which results in the exploitation of warehouse workers so his being “woke” doesn’t add up to much.

 

Being woke means taking real action.

 

Against Football

 

Lesson One

 

Essay Options

Support, refute, or complicate the argument that football is a necessary evil, including the brain sacrifice of many of the players, for providing escape to working-class Americans for whom football is their lifeblood, and to be denied this lifeblood would be to make the fans’ lives unbearable.

 

Support, refute, or complicate the argument that football is not merely an escape for Americans whose lives would be unbearable without football, but that football is the very essence of America, and therefore that to lose football would be to lose America as we know it.

 

Support, refute, or complicate the argument that football, which allows men to marvel at miracles on the field and to live vicariously through their heroes, is a salve for men’s wounded masculinity and their sense of irrelevance and worthlessness.

 

Support, refute, or complicate Almond’s claim that “allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia.”

 

Study Questions for Lesson 1

 

One. Contemplating his love of football and his ironic detachment to it, Almond writes he had an epiphany: “Something was wrong with me.” Explain what this something is.

 

Almond has acclimated to an evil of violence and of sacrificing young men for the entertainment of hungry fans and in doing so he is enabling an evil enterprise. Because this evil became his normal, he lived for so long without seeing the moral bankruptcy of football.

 

Two. In many ways, this book is about the broader problem we have of the synapses that fire in the brain and the conscience that says, “Shame on you.” Explain this duality in the context of the book.

 

Almond feels a visceral, reflexive connection to football. It is his addiction. On the other hand, his moral conscience tells him it is morally bankrupt.

The same is true of wanting to be a vegan but then salivating upon smelling barbecued meats.

Just as one questions the suffering of the animal one eats, one may consider the brain damage and other problems a football player suffers in order to provide the Everyman some delicious entertainment.

 

Moreover, this sport was a form of warfare, in which the goal was to march into enemy territory. The military aspects of football are connected, Almond believes, to nationalism and the military industrial complex. His conscience objects to football’s complicity in the military prison complex.

 

Three. How is football a salve for men’s wounded masculinity?

 

Football combines grace with physical prowess and a sense of combat. In the industrial age where many men have desk jobs, they lose their primal connection to physical force and brutality, so they need to live vicariously through football.

It appears men thrive on controlled violence as a part of venting aggression and as a part of male bonding.

Additionally, many men are maladapted to domestic life, feel incompetent and irrelevant in the family, and find escape and bonding with their tribe on football weekends.

In many ways, football, with its constant commentary and controversy before and after games, is the first Reality Show.

Four. In many ways football harkens to the past of duels and gladiator fights. Why are such bloody spectacles appealing to men?

 

Like the novel Fight Club, people in the real world become numb, alienated, and depressed over living in a synthetic universe where everything we do is the result of an elaborate mechanism.

Decent, hard-working men conform to life's script, go to college, get a job, have a family, live in the suburbs, pay their bills on time, have an excellent credit rating, yet they feel empty, hollow, humiliated, emasculated, and irrelevant. Adorning themselves in the consumer trappings of suburban life has proved useless.

Fighting is an attempt to strip ourselves of these consumer trappings and confront our manhood face to face, bare-knuckled, so to speak.

Fighting is a way to give honor to courage and survival of the fittest. We read in The Professor in the Cage by Jonathan gottschall that such rituals are pagan. Paganism values honor, strength, and courage in contrast to Christianity, which emphasizes compassion for the weak and forgiveness of others, and turning the other cheek.

Gottschall observes that duels fill the imagination. One famous duel is that of the son of Alexander Hamilton, Philip, and his opponent. Three years later, Alexander Hamilton died in a duel himself. His death agony lasted 38 hours. His son’s was about 24 hours.

These duels were reactions over insult exchanges. Calling someone a liar or something similar resulted in a duel in early 19th Century America.

Hamilton entered the duel knowing he’d saddle his family with debts and that dueling was against his Christian faith. However, he was compelled by the code of manly honor. We read that, “Throughout the five-hundred-year history of Euro-American dueling culture aristocratic men were generally prepared to kill each other at the drop of a hat.”

Honor was a premium in duel culture. Honor “represented the entirety of a man’s social wealth,” Gottschall writes.

Five. How does honor culture exist in football and what is honor culture’s appeal to men?

This notion of “social wealth” has today been transferred to what Jonathan Gottschall calls “muscular cultures.” We see muscular cultures in prison, sports, and warfare. They bring out the “roots of masculine aggression.”

We further read that , “Prisons are the most extreme honor cultures currently in existence. The harder the prison, the harder the culture of honor.”

In prison, they don’t call this social capital honor. They call it respect.

A world of honor or respect is a world of “reciprocation. A man of honor builds a reputation for payback. In a tit-for-tat fashion he returns favors and retaliates against slights.”

We read an example of disrespect, even stealing someone’s banana or cutting in line at prison, can result in death because disrespect is the ultimate sin in a prison environment. We read, “By failing to retaliate, the new guy fails the heart test . . .”

Failing to have heart and losing respect will make someone a prison slave. “Not fighting over a banana or a book is the same as declaring I am a rabbit. I am food.”

In duel culture, to refuse to duel was the equivalent to suicide, a form of “social annihilation.” To be a “duel dodger was, in many ways, a fate worse than death.”

Conclusion:

No matter how successful in the material world, men are not happy unless they enjoy "social wealth," the esteem of others and themselves for having the kind of honor that is born of courage and masculine power. Lacking esteem in their own world, they seek to live vicariously through their football heroes.

Television is able to capture the football “mayhem” in glorious close-up to make a hyper-real universe that is more “real” than their own lives.

Six. How does football use war mythology to appeal to its viewers?

Myth is a huge part of football. NFL Films captures all of its history with Darth Vader music and Captain Kirk themes. Slow motion archival films with military music is America’s Anthem.

These films are so glorious one would think they were capturing battles that defined America’s greatness in history.

To add to the mythical power, when a team wins the Super Bowl, the winning quarterback receives a phone call from The President.

George Carlin is famous for his description of football as a simulation of war.

As part of the mythology, football is perceived as “intellectual” to give respectability to primal violence and aggression. This aggression is connected to American aggression: big business, the Establishment’s desire to achieve its purposes unfettered.

Seven. How is football America’s national obsession?

Americans just don’t watch football. They consume the entire football industry: TV, radio, fantasy leagues, blogs, video commentaries, scouting and draft reports, sports talk, Twitter, Periscope, other social media. Football is all-consuming. It gives meaning to people’s otherwise meaningless lives.

Football is in love with its own sense of grandeur and significance. It is a pompous enterprise. It takes itself too seriously. But Americans buy into the myth and the obsession. Why? In part because they don’t have options.

Almond mentions that people go to church, but these same church goers spend more time thinking about football than they do God. If religion is what you do with your spare time, then for many football is their religion--or addiction.

We have to come to grips with football as our Nation’s Addiction. Do you know people who are addicted to football or sports in general? You probably do.

Eight. What was the gateway drug for football fandom for Almond?

He bonded with his father. This is common. This includes myself. Many families bond over football. This supports the thesis that “football is America.”

Once you take in this drug, “wins and losses become personal.” Football becomes your life.

Nine. Almond points out that at least 30% of football players end up with terminal brain damage. Is this a worthy sacrifice for the entertainment and “meaning” so many Americans derive from football?

What if one makes the argument that for many, for whom football is a tradition passed down from family members, football is all they know; it is the only life they know, and that to take away football with all of its grand significance, self-identity, community, and family bonding, would be to take away everything. They would find their lives unbearable. Is football, which kills and maims its players, a noble sacrifice for the rest of us?

 

Is our dependence on football so great that men must die as a result of brain damage?