Feeling Down?

Thanks to The Dish.

A culture "perfectly suited for contagions of hysteria and overreaction"

Earlier this month, David Brooks wrote an interesting column on the different kinds of fear contributing to the panic about Ebola.  It’s worth a read, but I found these two passages particularly interesting:

That means there are many more people who feel completely alienated from the leadership class of this country, whether it’s the political, cultural or scientific leadership. They don’t know people in authority….So you get the rise of the anti-vaccine parents, who simply distrust the cloud of experts telling them that vaccines are safe for their children. You get the rise of the anti-science folks, who distrust the realm of far-off studies and prefer anecdotes from friends to data about populations. You get more and more people who simply do not believe what the establishment is telling them about the Ebola virus, especially since the establishment doesn’t seem particularly competent anyway.

It’s a weird phenomenon of the media age that, except in extreme circumstances, it is a lot scarier to follow an event on TV than it is to actually be there covering it. When you’re watching on TV, you only see the death and mayhem. But when you’re actually there, you see the broader context of everyday life going on alongside. Studies of the Boston Marathon bombing found that people who consumed a lot of news media during the first week suffered more stress than people who were actually there.

I don’t know if this helps the situation, but for me it provides a small comfort; there a certain rationality to this panic.

From Paul Krugman's column yesterday:

Remember, your spending is my income and my spending is your income, so if everyone tries to spend less at the same time, everyone’s income falls.

Waking Up

Here’s one more passage from Walking Up by Sam Harris:

That which is aware of sadness  is not sad.  That which is aware of fear is not fearful.

Reason

Am I Crazy?

I’m reading Walking Up by Sam Harris, subtitle, “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.”  With Harris, you can expect some hostility toward religion.  Those comments seem minimal here.  Instead, most of the time, he really does focus on spirituality. For him that means, trying to explain consciousness and “the riddle of the self.”  At times, I find myself merely trudging along.  At other times, I delighted or fascinated at how he sees things.  Here’s a passage that has me observing my self a little differently.

When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill (provided he is not wearing a headset of some kind).  But we all talk to ourselves constantly—most of us merely have the good sense to keep our mouths shut.  We rehearse past conversations—thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said.  We anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear.  We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our head who required continuous narration to know what is happening; “Wow, nice disk.  I wonder what kind of wood that is.  Oh, but it has no drawers.  They didn’t put drawers in this thing?  How can you have a desk without at least one drawer?”  Who are we talking to?  No one else is there.  And we seem to image that if we just keep this inner monologue to ourselves, it is perfectly compatible with mental health.  Perhaps it isn’t. (93-94)