Ep33 -- Laudable Reliability

 I figure everybody has at least a sense of how their parents have influenced who they are. But I'm not sure to what extent people can pinpoint specific experiences that they had as kids and then follow a straight line from there to specific attitudes and behaviors that stay with them for the rest of their lives.  I've got at least two that I can think of off the top of my head.  One is that as adults, both my brother and I host annual events that get people together, old friends, new friends, folks from next door or across the country.

My brother hosts an annual Kentucky Derby party that he's done for like 20 years now.  For me,  the one big party I hosted in high school was a clambake. I went down to one of the big seafood markets in Boston and picked up a bunch of lobsters and steamers. And I know we had several cases of Michelob because for years after that, My dad would let me know anytime he was mowing the lawn and the lawnmower would catch a Michelob bottle cap and shoot it across the yard.  I did big clam bakes every summer after that for like 10 years. Then after moving to California, I started doing an annual wino weekend, where we'd get a bunch of people together for wine tastings and a big paella dinner up in the Central Coast of California.  This past Memorial Day weekend, we had our 12th annual.  And I think my brother and I got that tendency from our father, who didn't necessarily do big annual events, but found ways to make small recurring events into fun, memorable rituals.

So, for example, every winter when we were kids, the storm drain outside the basement of our split-level ranch in suburban Boston would freeze over. And when we'd get enough winter rain or really wet snow, the basement would flood. So we'd all be down there in the middle of the night, I always remember it happening on a school night, sweeping floodwater out the basement door. And then after we were finished, my dad would make us margaritas. I have no idea why he decided on margaritas, but that just made it an event. And one that I remember fondly to this day.

The other big parental influence that has stayed with me isn't quite so positive. Although, I think I've made something positive out of it.  And that is, every single time we left the house as a family was brutally stressful. We were always running late. My brother and I sitting in the living room waiting to leave or worse yet sitting in the backseat of the car, staring daggers at the front door, just begging it to open so we could get going.  So to this day, I hate waiting.  But on the positive side, I am obsessively on time. And I don't really stress about it. I just plan ahead to make sure I'm on time. And fortunately, my wife had the same miserable experience leaving the house as a kid as I did. So we're both of one mind when it comes to stress-free departures and on-time arrivals. 

I always think about this kind of behavior as something that just works for me. It's about lowering my stress about getting places on time. I don't really think that I do it for anyone else's good.  But I read something this week about how this kind of behavior, which is really all about reliability, is essential to healthy relationships between people.  So this week, I want to talk a little bit about how something as seemingly innocuous as reliability can be essential to living well together.

Stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a man-made culture. That's out of sync with our human nature. And how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind. 

But first, a word about a sponsor. 

This week's episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by the California Chamber of Commerce, which vehemently opposes the proposed artificial intelligence safety law that just passed the state assembly, and is on its way to the state Senate, where it will likely pass and then go to governor Gavin Newsom who, to quote legendary comedy duo, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, will do God knows what with it.  Of course, it's not just because the chamber opposes the new regulations, after all, knee-jerk opposition to any restrictions on corporate behavior up to and including planet-obliterating behavior, is the Chamber's very reason for being.  It's how the chamber has chosen to oppose the law, which, as should be a surprise to precisely nobody, is less than completely forthright. 

The Chamber of Commerce has argued, and some marginally reputable media outlets have relayed, that 46% of eligible voters oppose the law and only 26% support it.  Now this poll was conducted by opinion research firm Bold Decisions. Let me read you the question they posed to respondents about the AI safety law and see if you can pick out the slightest hint of bias. 

"Lawmakers in Sacramento have proposed a new state law, SB 1047, that would create a new California state regulatory agency to determine how AI models can be developed. This new law would require small startup companies to potentially pay tens of millions of dollars in fines if they don't implement orders from state bureaucrats. Some say burdensome regulations like SB 1047 would potentially lead companies to move out of state or out of the country, taking investment and jobs away from California.  Given everything you just read, do you support or oppose a proposal like SB 1047?" 

Now I particularly love the inclusion of that Trumpian phrase "some say." Ooh, well, if some people are saying it, it must be true.  Now by comparison, the AI policy Institute, a pro regulation polling company,  phrased their question this way: 

"Policy makers are proposing a law in California, Senate bill 1047, which would require that companies that develop advanced AI conduct safety tests and create liability for AI model developers if their models cause catastrophic harm and they did not take appropriate precautions. Do you support or oppose this legislation?"

They, by comparison, found that 70% of respondents support the law.  So nice try Chamber of Commerce. Of course, if you're completely dishonest polling doesn't do the trick, I'm sure you can defeat the bill the old-fashioned way. Just have a few of your billionaire members back a dump truck full of cash up to Newsom's house and buy his veto. 

And we're back.

If you don't subscribe to the online newsletter, the Marginalian at Marginalian.org, then go do it right now. And while you're there, make a generous donation to support it. Seriously. I'll wait. 

The Marginalian has been written and published by Maria Popova and only Maria Popova since 2006. She calls it "a record of her reading and reckoning with our search for meaning. Sometimes through science and philosophy sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder."  On Being Studios referred to her as "a cartographer of meaning in a digital age."  Every post focuses on a writer, artist, or thinker, and how a deeper understanding of their work elucidates our shared humanity. 

This past week, she looked at a collection of essays by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called Home Is Where We Start From that initially got me thinking about this week's topic.

Because he started out as a medical doctor, Winnicott was very skeptical of applying the disease model to psychoanalysis. So rather than just curing mental symptoms, he wanted therapy to help his patients develop what he calls "a more widely based personality, richer in feeling and more tolerant of others because it's more sure of itself."  And to do that, he developed the concept of the care cure, which must be at the center of any healthy relationship and must be non-moralistic, truthful, and reliable.  He places special emphasis on the reliability part, which is interesting because it seems so plain and simple compared to the other two.  

And in our daily lives, how much conscious emphasis do we really place on reliability?  Remember a few weeks ago, I was talking about the ubiquity of Range Rovers at drop-off and pick up at the tonier elementary schools around LA? Well, Range Rover has one of the worst reliability ratings of all car brands sold in the United States.  So much for reliability in deciding which car to buy.  But when it comes to being reliable to our fellow humans,  I think in its seeming simplicity lies its true power.  Winnicott explains the power of reliability by illustrating the damage that can be inflicted by its absence.  He says that the root cause of so many people's suffering is that "they have been subjected as part of the pattern of their lives to the unpredictable." And, "behind unpredictability lies mental confusion, and behind that there can be found chaos in terms of somatic functioning, in other words, unthinkable anxiety that is physical."  

When I read that I was immediately back there as a teenager in the backseat of my parents' car, idling in the driveway, wondering when, or even if, we would ever leave, definitely feeling that physical anxiety.  So I sought to behave differently in this one specific way. In being on time. And I developed this one commandment based on that behavior, which I live by to this day. It is: do what you say you're going to do.  It's really that simple doesn't mean you have to do everything. It means if you're not going to do it, don't say you're going to do it. And if you say you're going to do it. Do it.

But as I've noticed, especially after reading a little bit about Donald Winnicott, is this kind of thinking spills over into every facet of life. And again, it sounds simple, but then Winnicott explains what it means when it comes to your relationships with other people. He says that it takes a balanced mind free of mental confusion to show up for other people in a reliable way. And this showing up is indicative of, he says, "the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person.  Also to allow the other person to do the same to us."  it's empathy. It's the golden rule, do unto others as you have them do unto you. It's that simple, but it's also that powerful. 

I've talked a lot on this podcast about how important our social connections are to the success of our species.  And also how that desire to connect can leave us vulnerable to those who want to use our innate tendency to connect against us, and in favor of some selfish desire on their part.  I feel like the more you can nurture those kinds of healthy relationships and the more you can understand what it is that makes those relationships healthy, the easier it will be to spot the gaslighters, the bullshit artists, and the toxic personalities that you should definitely avoid.  And the best way to start nurturing more of those healthy relationships in your life is simply by being more reliable yourself.  

So Woody Allen may have been joking when he said "80% of success in life is showing up." But when it comes to healthy, loving relationships with your fellow humans, It might just be all about reliably showing up.  

Well, that's it for this week. If you liked this episode, please share it with anyone you think might also enjoy it. And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, do what you say you're going to do, and use your f*cking turn signal.