Book Review-The Assault on Truth

It’s a tragedy when the truth is discovered but, because of the desire to protect egos and keep secrets, that truth is then buried.  That’s The Assault on Truth that J. Moussaieff Masson is writing about.  His claim is that Freud discovered that children were being sexually abused and made the claim publicly, but because of his ostracization retreated from his position.  If true, Freud traded protecting children for his community and fame.  He may not have known he was doing it at the time, but it may have been the result.

Controversy

Before I move on to the tragic claims, it’s important to surface whether these claims are supported in fact or the kind of fantasy published by tabloid newspapers.  The criticisms of Masson’s work largely focus on his character rather than the validity of his claims.  That’s a serious reason to ignore them.  Mastering Logical Fallacies calls this approach abusive – and I agree.  Rather than explaining how Masson’s conclusions aren’t correct, the focus is on him as a person.

Observationally, Masson is clear about the places that he’s “reaching” to draw conclusions.  He presents the facts that lead to the conclusion and, in at least a few places, some facts that lead away from the position he’s taking.  While I don’t anticipate that anyone is completely unbiased, his writing in this place has the characteristics of a reasonably well-balanced argument.

In the Morgue

The suspicions that Freud developed, that his patients were suffering due to the abuses they suffered as children, may have originated in a Paris morgue.  Freud studied with Ambroise Tardieu, who was a professor of legal medicine at the University of Paris.  Tardieu’s position had him performing autopsies on children who had died, and he was tasked with either validating their accidental death or determining the more sinister situations that led to the death.

Tardieu’s investigations began to uncover the frightening frequency with which sexual assaults were being perpetrated against children, particularly young girls.  Despite the claims that would come later that the children were “making up stories” about their assaults, the physical evidence of the deceased didn’t lie.  The assessment was that there were real assaults that had occurred.  The physical trauma was consistent with the kinds of trauma from a sexual assault.

Tardieu wasn’t alone.  In 1886, Paul Bernard published a book with the English-translated title, Sexual Assaults on Young Girls.  Paul Brouardel published a book on the rape of children, which was published posthumously.  The point isn’t to catalog the list of professionals and researchers who were elevating this real societal problem.  The point is to clarify that Freud’s voice wasn’t the only voice.  His ideas likely were drawn from the work of his medical mentors.  But Freud’s interest was slightly different.

His focus wasn’t on the physical trauma or the brutality.  His focus was on what happens to children who are sexually abused.

Hysteria

At this time in history, it was believed that only women got hysteria.  Hysteria was extreme – and often uncontrollable – emotions.  To the outside world, it didn’t make logical sense.  There weren’t conditions that should have warranted the kind of response that these women were experiencing.  We know today that these experiences aren’t confined to women.  They’re trauma responses that can happen to any human who has experienced trauma and hasn’t been able to deal with it.  (See Trauma and Recovery for more.)

However, for Freud, the behaviors were a mystery.  He was trying to sort out the root cause, and he stumbled across the secret of childhood abuse and its potential relationship.  As researchers came after Freud, they would ultimately dismantle psychotherapy but, in the process, validated the core tenet of the relationship between the past and the present.  It would be decades before John Bowlby and others would observe and explain the vulnerability of the young and how seemingly insignificant behaviors may have overwhelming impacts later in life.

Attaching Bowlby

John Bowlby isn’t mentioned in the text.  However, it’s important to assemble the puzzle that Freud couldn’t fully see.  His initial claims were that the disturbances that occurred later in life were caused by the abuse, and therefore trauma, of their lives as children.  To understand the connection, we need to understand trauma and understand how attachment plays into the ways that we respond.

Michael Meaney observed odd behaviors with rats.  Some would confidently leave their safe harbors and explore.  Others would cower and go nowhere.  The defining difference, Meaney’s observations confirmed, was that some pups were licked and groomed by their mothers more than others.  In short, the behavioral support conveyed by licking and grooming made them more confident.  Believing that they’ll be comforted and supported made them more likely to see what they were capable of.  This was consistent with Bowlby’s belief that young children need a secure attachment to feel confident later in life.

Harry Harlow discovered something similar with rhesus macaques (monkeys).  He placed monkeys in cages with two surrogate, inanimate, mothers.  One had a bottle holder where the monkeys would feed, and the other had a terrycloth covering that provided physical comfort but no milk.  He found that the monkeys would go and feed but then return to their terry cloth comfort.  They ate enough to live but craved the comfort the terrycloth mother provided.  This, too, was consistent with Bowlby’s belief that we need more than material needs: we need to feel nurtured.

Meaney’s work with rats was a part of the discovery that it was more than genetics that influenced growth.  It was the experiences animals had that altered the gene expression (activation or deactivation), which played a part in an organism’s future.  While Freud didn’t have the benefit of these experiments, he intuited that something was wrong with the adults he encountered.  They were behaving in odd ways that seemed inconsistent with the way that other adults behaved – just as the animal analogs would prove later.

Disordered Attachment

The disordered attachment, in Bowlby’s attachment theory, comes from the idea that an abusive childhood results in behaviors that are observable.  To understand why, we need to understand how much our internal sense of safety plays into our behaviors.

Our overall safety has three basic factors: our situational assessment, our mood, and our traits.  Very few people have a good understanding of their perceptions of safety.  We know that our responses and behaviors are shaped by numerous things well below the threshold of consciousness.  (See Predictably Irrational, Influence, and Pre-Suasion.)  Our perception of safety is one of those things that often is subconscious.

State and Trait (with Mood in the Middle)

Richard Lazarus in Emotion and Adaptation explains that our sense of fear or safety is based on our assessment of the impact and probability of the potentials that our environment – including stressors – may bring.  This is divided by our capacity to cope.  When we assess the probability as very low, the impact as very low, or our ability to cope very high, we’re likely to feel safe.

This moment-by-moment assessment is our state.  It’s the degree to which we perceive safety in our environment.  While we believe these assessments are made without bias, we know that our mood and our traits can be invisibly influencing our sense of probability and our belief about our ability to cope.

If we’re in a foul mood, we won’t realize that we over-estimate the probability and impact while simultaneously underplaying our coping capacity.  The factors that cause us to assess impact are varied but generally rely on our mood and our traits.  Our mood is the most short-lived but influential factor in our assessment of the situation.  Of course, sustained negative evaluations can reinforce a foul mood and ultimately create a reinforcing loop.

At the other end of the spectrum is our overall disposition.  Largely, we expect that there’s some degree of the way that we see the world that comes from our genes.  Some of us are blessed with less reactive genes and others are cursed with overactive genes that want to find concern in everything.  While trait effects from our genes make up just less than half of the impact, for most people, cultivating moods can make a big difference in the way that the current state is evaluated.

The Coming of Cults

We each have images in our head of what a cult is.  In most cases, we see the people in the cult as very “other.”  That is, we believe that they’re not like us.  For the most part, this isn’t correct.  Mostly people in cults got caught up in a system designed to transform them to a disordered attachment so that they can be manipulated.  The techniques that are used are both subtle and powerful.  (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing.)

By changing normal attachment to disordered attachment, it’s easier to manipulate people.  Cult leaders do this by sending conflicting messages of love and punishment.  The messages muddle care and concern with exploitation.  Their safety can be threatened more easily, and they’re more susceptible to suggestions.  The cult puts people in the very vulnerable state that Freud discovered and discussed, where their future behaviors don’t conform to norms because their attachment was disrupted.  Instead of by a cult leader as an adult, it’s disrupted by a family member or acquaintance as a child.

Psychological Trauma

As Trauma and Recovery explains, psychological trauma is simply that we’re momentarily overwhelmed.  This means that we have some sense of inherent coping capacity.  This coping capacity is severely diminished in the presence of disordered attachment.  The evaluation of the potential for harm is substantially larger in disordered attachment than in a securely attached individual.  If we want to prevent psychological trauma, we reduce the stressors and make them safer.  If we want to create disordered attachment and trauma, we can do that by sending mixed signals.

Tonic Immobility

Freud and his contemporaries didn’t have the benefit of Peter Levine’s work or the researchers who discovered tonic immobility.  They didn’t know that, in cases of extreme fear, it’s possible to lose the ability to voluntarily control motor neurons and therefore muscles.  They didn’t understand that even strong people who are sufficiently scared can freeze in ways that they can’t immediately self-resolve.

The result was that sometimes it was decided that rape victims weren’t actually raped, because they had the strength to resist their attacker.  They didn’t know that, if tonic immobility sets in, strength doesn’t matter, because there is a gap between the brain’s instructions and what the muscles will do.

Some people experience a brief glimpse of this as they wake up.  They’re conscious but are also aware that they can’t move their muscles.  This is a normal brain process that occurs during sleep where muscle control is disconnected to prevent you from harming yourself.  In some people, the effects extend until after conscious thought, resulting in a very concerning and disorienting period.

During a rape, tonic immobility isn’t disorienting.  It’s terrifying.  The dynamics of the situation sometimes cause the victim to act as if it were their fault.  They’ll say to themselves, “If I only fought back.”  They say this not realizing that it wasn’t an option.  It wasn’t a matter of lack of will.  It’s a matter of brain chemistry.

Sometimes accusations of rape are dismissed because the victim didn’t fight back or, occasionally, because they had previously had sex.  Hopefully, we’re beyond these conclusions; unfortunately, I’m not so sure.

Sexual Gratification at Any Price

Adults who believe that they can and should pursue their desires without regard to the cost victimize children who seek protection and tenderness.  The price the child pays is problems with relationships and love for the rest of their lives.  Even those who have recovered through hard work and therapy will feel the lingering effects.  They’ll have to fight for normal relationships that should come naturally.  All of this happens while the adult inflicts their desire for sexual gratification on someone who can’t say no.

They can’t overpower the adult.  They can’t say no because of the relational power structures – and their physical power.  If the adult cares more about their sexual gratification, they’ll harm the child in the act, in the disordered attachment they create, and in the sense of powerlessness that they’ll leave the child with.

It would be appropriate to classify these acts as hatred for the child rather than love that some adults hope to contort them into.

Hypersexuality

On the surface, the fact that many of the children grow to be hypersexualized makes little sense.  It’s only when you realize that they’ve coupled the sexual act as being worthy and desirable that you can see how the grown child might interpret sex as a way for them to restore their value.

The paradox is that the premature sexual contact often leaves the children believing there’s something wrong with them – that it’s their fault – and they seek the same thing to relieve them of their burden.  We must realize that, in the face of uncontrollable abuse, children often choose to believe that it is about them.  This allows them a sense of control – even if it means they must believe they are bad to make this work.  They believe that they can become good enough, so the problems don’t happen any longer.  (See The Myth of Normal for more.)

Ferenczi Follows

While Anna Freud was growing, there was a protégé of Sigmund Freud’s who he called “dear son.”  Sándor Ferenczi was Freud’s closest analytical friend.  Perhaps it was the friendship that caused Freud to discourage and block Ferenczi’s publication of nearly identical to the claims that Freud made and then retracted.  It seems that Ferenczi reached the same conclusion – despite Freud’s objection.

Maybe there was some bit of Freud that Ferenczi detected that still harbored the knowledge that his disavowed theory was right.  The record, as edited by Anna Freud, doesn’t contain evidence of her father’s contemplation about whether he did the right thing to retract the theory.  Maybe he never lost the question – he just became more adept at hiding it from the record.

Ferenczi’s paper in 1932 was almost an echo of Freud’s 1896 paper.  It validated the belief that something was happening to these children, and it’s the result of this psychic trauma that was being studied all this time.  It wasn’t fantasies.  It was a fact.  Despite his mentor’s objections, Ferenczi persisted and accepted the ostracism to ensure that those whose voices had been silenced would once again be able to speak.

The fact that it keeps coming up, that individuals keep coming to the same conclusion, is evidence that it’s the truth, and that Freud, for the benefit of his career, played his part in The Assault on Truth.

Book Review-Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives

Personal change matters.  When people change, they make their lives better.  They find ways to change the world.  In Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives, William Miller and Janet C’de Baca explain how these changes can some quickly.  Miller is no stranger to change, having spent his life helping people change and having co-developed Motivational Interviewing, which is successful at helping people overcome substance use disorders (SUDs).  His curiosity about how people could change quickly rather than the methodological changes that he had spent his career facilitating led to Quantum Change.

Characteristics of Quantum

What Miller found was that there were these rapid and profound changes happening to people in seemingly spontaneous circumstances.  These changes were mostly broadly benevolent (positive) and enduring (long lasting).  They were moments that mattered.  The people could remember the transformation vividly, and they described it both as a moment and as a continuing process of transformation.

I instantly remembered my moment.  I was driving home from a speaking event.  I was still hours away from home, and my now ex-wife and I were in a conversation about a situation where she was placing the blame at my feet.  In most situations involving two people, both parties have a part to play in the situation.  It had been this way for my entire marriage.  There’d be some part of the situation that I’d own – and I’d try to accept at least that much of the blame and ownership.

In a moment of striking clarity, perhaps spurred by my exhaustion, I realized that I truly owned none of this situation.  She persisted in making it my fault, and rather than accepting it, I decided that it wasn’t mine to own.  It caused me to start getting clearer about what parts of problems I own and which parts I accept as external to me.  To be clear, I still don’t get this perfect.  I still learn.  However, this was a quantum change where I could accept that there are times when I have no responsibility or control of a situation.

It’s allowed me to detach from outcomes that I couldn’t have prevented.  (See The HeartMath Solution and The Happiness Hypothesis for more on detachment.)  It’s allowed me to accept that I don’t own all of the problems in any relationship – that I need to own only what I can control.

It Will Be Okay

My family and my current wife are tired of me saying “It will be okay.”  They retort, “You don’t know that.”  I respond that I do know that.  I do know it will be okay – but I don’t know what okay will be.  The conversation sometimes continues that some things are unchangeable.  People die – and they’re not coming back.  Certainly, how can the world be okay without these beloved?  Despite this, we continue.  We mourn.  We grieve.  We live.  We laugh.  And, perhaps more importantly, we continue to love.

I thought that this was a particular quirk of mine, but it seems that, from Miller’s research, it’s common in the people who he discovered had quantum changes.  They had a general sense that things would be okay.

Mystical Experiences

Miller recounts the work of William James and Walter Pahnke, who collectively developed a list of characteristics of mystical experiences:

1. Ineffability. They are experiences that are more like feelings than thoughts and defy expression in words.
2. Noetic quality. They are experienced as providing new insight and revelation that is of great depth and significance.
3. Transiency. They do not last long, usually not more than half an hour, before they fade.
4. Passivity. They are not experienced as being under personal willful control.
5. Unity. They produce an internal and external sense of unity of oneself with one’s environment.
6. Transcendence. They convey a perspective of the timelessness of life, transcending the limits of space and time.
7. Awe. They produce a sense of awe or sacredness, a non-rational intuitive response to being in the presence of inspiring realities.
8. Positivity. They yield deeply felt positive emotions usually described as joy, peace, love, and blessing.
9. Distinctiveness. They are transient states of awareness felt to be quite different from ordinary experience.

They are important, because mystical experiences are similar to or perhaps sometimes trigger the kinds of changes that Miller was studying.

Seeing the System

Those who Miller studied explained how things just “came together.”  It was as if the random events suddenly lined up to form a system they could see.  (See Thinking in Systems as a primer for systems thinking, Seeing Systems for how systems work in an organization, and The Organized Mind for how we create organization in the midst of chaos.)  The alcoholic reorganized his thinking from drinking to relieve pain to how that drinking was causing pain in others.

The reorganized thinking caused people to release control of the future realizing that control is an illusion, and that all we can do is influence the results, not control them.  (See Compelled to Control for more.)  It allowed for harmony between the parts of their thinking.  (See No Bad Parts for the idea of parts of our psychology and how they become integrated.)

It’s hard to consider now, but there was a time when the elements didn’t make sense.  When Mendeleev organized the elements into his periodic table, the behaviors suddenly made sense – and it made it clear that there were elements that hadn’t been discovered yet.  (See The Tell-Tale Brain for more.)  This is the fundamental organization that was spontaneously happening with those experiencing quantum changes.

Because intuitive types (in MBTI) are able to more easily grasp patterns and larger pictures with missing details, perhaps it’s no surprise that intuitive types were overrepresented in Miller’s sample.

Gratitude for Pain

A curious part of those who have experienced quantum change is that they often are very aware of the pain and trauma they’ve had in their life, and they’re equally unwilling to let go of the experience.  In my review for Theory U, I shared an experience with the Church of Scientology and my retort to them that I didn’t have regrets – because the things I had done that were wrong helped to shape me.  I needed those experiences to be the me I am, and I like who I am.  People with alcohol use disorder would describe their past – and without wishing it on anyone, explain how they needed that past to get where they are.

Story

Miller was convinced that “story” was a part of what happened to the people he saw with quantum changes.  He saw how they rewrote or reorganized their life story and the story of the moment to propel them forward.  They had a redemption story rather than a story of victimization or vilification.  Miller’s subjects were like the hero in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.  They began as one thing, and by the end of the story, they became something else.  Maybe your story should include a Quantum Change.

Book Review-The Age of Overwhelm: Strategies for the Long Haul

Few, I think, would argue against the idea that we’re in the age of overwhelm.  The amount of information that we encounter daily is overwhelming.  The rate of change is overwhelming.  That’s what makes The Age of Overwhelm: Strategies for the Long Haul such a great title.  It’s the statement that we all know is truth.

Why It Matters

Before we delve into what being overwhelmed is or what to do about it, it’s important to understand why it’s important.  It’s important because it drives some of the most negative effects that society grapples with.  Substance use disorder (SUD) – “the drug problem” – is a result of the pain that people feel.  (See The Globalization of Addiction and Dreamland for more.)  Our American prisons and jails are overflowing as a result of lawless behavior that often comes from an inability to cope.  Some, like Clay Johnson in The Information Diet, are calling for a more conscious approach to media consumption, but this is likely insufficient to confront the torrent of information we encounter every day.  Daniel Levitin in The Organized Mind takes on the challenge of information overload – and how this leads to being overwhelmed – before explaining the cognitive processing impacts.

In short, humans don’t function well when we encounter too much information.  Our productivity and our mental health suffer as we try to stand in the face of our daily experiences.

In Our Control

As we look to navigate in this world, we must recognize our self-autonomy and our ability to control only ourselves.  We can’t stop the emerging use of AI-generated content and the impact that has on making our identification of key information harder.  We can’t control the market forces that have driven an explosion of human-generated content in the last decade leading to an increasingly difficult position of identifying content of value.  (So much for Peter Morville’s world of Ambient Findability.)

Depression

Sherry Turkle in Alone Together warns us that our technological connections aren’t the same as real connections.  Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone and Our Kids warns us of how we’re becoming more alone and less civic than we’ve ever been.  Chuck Underwood notes this in America’s Generations, as does Tom Brokaw in the introduction to The Greatest Generation.  Simultaneous with the erosion of our personal, face-to-face connections, we’ve seen an explosion of depression to the point where it’s the number one mental health concern and takes a substantial bite out of our healthcare costs each year.  (See Choice Theory and Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health for more about depression and treatment.)

Brokenness

Brené Brown is famous for her work on vulnerability – though she mostly describes herself as a shame researcher.  (See Daring Greatly, Rising Strong part 1 and part 2, The Gifts of Imperfection, and I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) for Brown’s work.)  Central to her work is the understanding and acceptance that we’re all broken.  We’re all vulnerable.  We all need others to accept us for who we are – not who we want to appear to be.  (See How to Be an Adult in Relationships for more about acceptance.)

Another recurring theme in Brown’s work is the sense that we’re “enough.”  It’s not clear what context we’re evaluating ourselves on, who sets the standard for “enough,” or even that there is such as thing as enough.  Yet each of us faces these questions – particularly in the face of overwhelming situations every day.

Humility and Learning

If we want to survive this overwhelming world, we must be humble.  The best definition of humility, I believe, comes from Humilitas: “power held in service to others.”  There’s a lot to our pull towards compassion and why it is critical for our survival as humans even if some try to do “social loafing.”  (See SuperCooperators and Does Altruism Exist? for more on how our compassion and altruism have evolved.  See The Righteous Mind and Collaboration for more on “social loafing.”)

In the end, the best that we can do is find ways to learn and keep learning.  We won’t keep up with the overwhelming pace of change, but we can perhaps make it easier to live in The Age of Overwhelm.

Book Review-Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential

It’s heretical.  What would happen if we applied free market capitalist ideas to charities?  What would it be like to have non-profit organizations operate with the same (or similar) rules as commercial organizations?  Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential explores this from the perspective of a former fundraiser – someone who used the power of marketing to gain funds for charities – but in the process spent a lot of money.

Changing the Rules

The way that charities are ranked, rated, and evaluated isn’t based on their results.  It’s on their efficiency.  We’ve confused effort with effect.  Instead of asking the hard questions about whether they’re effective, we simply ask what percentage of their income goes to programs.  In addition to not being the best measure, it may be fiction.

If you want a universal measure that applies to all non-profits, efficiency – how much is spent on programs as a percentage – makes sense.  It’s universal.  It sounds good.  The problem is that it doesn’t tell you anything.  I can spend 99% on programs with minimal infrastructure.  I can also fail to accomplish anything meaningful for anyone.

Consider an organization that spends 50% on programs – but is incredibly effective and transitions people from food scarcity to abundance.  Compare that to an organization that spends 99% on programs but only serves to address the current food need of people daily.  They can’t meet demand, and the demand keeps getting bigger – because they never help people find ways to eliminate their food scarcity.  Which is the better organization?  From the metric, the second.  From the outcomes, the first.

In addition, when everyone is pressed for the magic number of what they spend on programs, they’ll necessarily put more into that bucket than should be there.  Take accounting fees, which 27 percent of non-profits categorized as program expenses despite IRS rules telling them not to do so.  What about grant writing or proposal writing?  How do you account for an executive director’s time if they’re also running programs?  The answer is that in many – but not all – cases, the answers are biased towards programs.

Of course, it’s a bit of a misnomer, because everything is ultimately in service of the programs – it’s just a matter of how directly or indirectly those funds are used.

Short-Term and Long-Term

We know that in the long term, long-term investments will do better than short-term investments.  It’s a tautology.  We know the best way to create the best societal outcomes is to focus on the long-term problems – but there are people in need today.  Charities are penalized – and sometimes vilified – when they invest funds to improve the situation in the long term if they can’t serve today’s needs.  Consider the example from above, with the organization that spends 50% of its money on programs that transitions people out of food scarcity.  If this process takes a year or two, and significant investment in training them for better skills, it may be that the organization is vilified because they’re focusing too many resources on too few people.

In the corporate world, we look for organizations that are capable of producing consistent results and that transform their industries.  For charities, we look for those who are processing the most people today – regardless of whether they’re solving the real problems or not.

Financial Efficiency

A 2008 Ellison Research study found “most Americans believe non-profit organizations and charities are not financially efficient in their work.”  This may be in part based on the guidelines for what should be devoted to program operation versus overhead.  It may be in part because nonprofits are unable to make long-term investments to reduce their operational costs.  Whatever the source of the concern, it’s one that nonprofits need to take seriously.

Strangely, the effort to be cost efficient – accepting donated computers, furniture, and more – may lead to the inefficiency that so many of the public are concerned by.

Selfless and Selfish

At the root of financial problems for charities is the tension between the completely selfless and the completely selfish.  We expect that corporations are filled with people who are entirely selfish.  (See The Selfish Gene.)  We expect that charities are completely selfless.  Neither is true.  The movement towards corporate responsibility and B Corps is one way that we see that corporations aren’t entirely selfish.  (See Red Goldfish for more.)  Conversely, most people who are working for nonprofits need to make some money to support their lifestyles.  They need to make something to contribute to their family’s needs and dreams.

Donor Absolution

Certainly, donors contribute to a nonprofit because they believe in them.  They believe that the mission that the nonprofit is on is a worthy one.  However, there’s also a hidden challenge lurking in the shadows of most people’s consciousness.  The challenge is that people don’t believe that they should have so much money or that they’ve made decisions that have unintentionally hurt others.  Donating is at least in some small part a way to pay penance for sins.

The Puritans who started America believed that financial success meant God’s favor and living right.  However, at some level, they also believed that it was sinful to amass worldly goods when they’re supposed to be working for heaven.  This dichotomy has plagued us ever sense.

Tactical Morality

Most people haven’t given deep consideration to their morality.  Certainly, there are works like How Good People Make Tough Choices, The Righteous Mind, Choosing Civility, and Trust Rules that offer a detailed view of morality.  However, most of us don’t consider that there are three different approaches to morality.  Do we care about the results (ends-based, utilitarianism), the rules, or the intent (care)?  (This whole conversation is reminiscent of feeling, meaning, and power perspectives in Dialogue.)

This creates a problem when we’re talking about funding options for nonprofits.  Consider a fundraiser that raises $5 million but costs $3 million to do.  The net – utilitarian – view is $2 million in the coffers of a good cause.  This would seem on the surface to be a good thing.

However, those more concerned with the rules might wonder whether such a “wasteful” approach makes sense when $3 million would do a lot of good.  In the view of Uncharitable, this is not the right way to think about it, since the $2 million wouldn’t be available for good if the $3 million hadn’t been spent on the event.  The cries of efficiency echo.  Instead of looking at the outcomes that can be had with the additional money, we challenge the way it was raised.

Bowling Alone decried the loss of social capital, because instead of investing in relationships in groups, we started paying our dues.  We didn’t look at fundraising based groups the same way that we did the ones we participated in – and that may hold the kernel of our concerns for large scale, but high cost, fundraising.

Hiring a Service for the Poor

In some ways, a donor is hiring a person or service on behalf of those served.  The donor wants to be compassionate and thereby resolve the pains of those who the nonprofit serves.  This view isn’t the common thinking about donations, but it helps to change the conversation from one of efficiency to effectiveness.  There’s an opportunity to negotiate on costs at the start of the donation process.  It’s during this time that the nonprofit can set expectations about what the impact should be.  The donor can make $100,000 available with the expectations that 10,000 people will be reached and supported (or whatever the numbers are).

This changes the conversation to the efficacy.  Did you do what you said you would do – yes or no?

Failure Is Not Accepted

In the long term, it may not be acceptable to fail – but in the short term, are there incentives for bold initiatives that can make a real change?  In most cases, there’s not.  When donating, people want certainty – even if that certainty offers marginal benefits.  A venture capitalist knows that many of the companies that they invest in won’t make it.  They’ll fail.  They’ll break even.  However, there will be the occasional break out success.  The success will earn them 10x or 100x or even 1000x on their investment, and in doing so, they’ll make the whole portfolio of investments work.

However, a similar sentiment doesn’t exist in the nonprofit space.  First, there are fewer investments being made in nonprofits.  It lowers the threshold for risk.  You want to know that your donation made an impact – you don’t want a one in seven chance of making a 10x impact.  It doesn’t make emotional sense.

Investors and Donors

What if we gave investors an opportunity to invest in nonprofits – and to make a return on those investments.  It’s a radical and uncomfortable idea where we’d allow investors to participate in fundraising capital with the idea that they could take some percentage of the outcome from the event.  It feels wrong – but it might make the capital that nonprofits need to be able to get more donations easier to get.

There are many forms of how this investment might happen and the potentially promised returns might be structured.  For many, myself included, it “feels” wrong even if it might be morally right.

In all, that’s the challenge of Uncharitable: how do we get past our simple evaluations of morality and look to the broader good – even if it’s uncomfortable?

The Way It Really Is

In the end analysis, I struggled with the gap between what really is today and where Dan Pallotta would like to see the world.  I do think that we need to have a bold vision for making things better.  I believe in better metrics.  I accept that better marketing means more total dollars and a lower percentage.  I accept that, to get more capital than what donors are willing to provide, we need to find other approaches.  What I don’t see is the path from where we are today to where we want to go.  Uncharitable sets out a bold vision and explains the problems, but it feels short on solutions.  Pallotta claims that his subsequent works address this gap – we’ll see.

Book Review-The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

It’s a short book.  It is perhaps the shortest book that I’ve reviewed.  However, there’s something profound about The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, which is both hidden from view and inherently true.  We’ve been told not to back a wild animal into a corner, since they have nothing left to lose and will do anything to escape.  So too, should we be concerned about stupid people.

The Matrix

The primary model of the book is a matrix.  The dimensions are self-outcomes and other-outcomes labeled from negative to positive.  This forms four quadrants.  The quadrants are labeled helpless, intelligent, bandit, and stupid.  The helpless create negative self-outcomes, but positive other outcomes.  The intelligent create positive outcomes for everyone.  The bandit creates positive self-outcomes but negative other-outcomes.  The stupid creates negative outcomes for both themselves and others.

This isn’t the typical definition of stupid – but it’s one that works well.  The people who are the most unpredictable – and therefore risky – are those who are willing to apply a “scorched Earth” approach where everyone loses.  Much like the cornered wild animal, you just don’t know what they’ll do.

The Laws

The laws tell us how to navigate a world with stupid people.  They are:

1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person causes losses to another person or group of persons while themselves deriving no gain and possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that, at all times and places and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.

Impoverished Society

Many people encounter the book and wonder if Carlo Cipolla was serious.  Most come to the conclusion that the work is a serious one intended to highlight a challenge with humanity.  It’s exposing the truth of humanity and sharing a warning, because stupid people are always gumming up the works.

The basic premise of the book is that stupid people are impoverishing society.  By definition, they are reducing the gains for everyone.  By knowing that stupid people are everywhere, we can begin to fight against The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.