Be a man ... by being human

Remember that old Pepsi ad featuring MC Hammer?  I still remember that commercial not because of any fondness of Pepsi over Coke, but because of "feelings" that the macho rapper starts to croon.  The ad did young boys a huge disservice by suggesting it was not hip to sing about, to talk about, feelings.

I was raised with phrases like "don't cry like a girl"--like almost all kids were back in those days in the old country.  Anger I could display. Fight I could.  Because boys will be boys.  But, crying was unmanly. I see that attitude even now, even in the adopted country.

We seem to forget that feelings bring people together.  Women cultivate their sisterhood through talking about their feelings, whether it is about their husbands or mothers or colleagues or kids or ... it is a long list of people about whom we have feelings and women seem to unreservedly talk about them.  Men, on the other hand, talk about sports and politics and the weather and everything else that is not about one's own feelings. 

All these despite plenty of men singing about feelings.  Like even that "feelings" song that MC Hammer sings because he drank the "wrong" soda.

Feelings, nothing more than feelings,
Trying to forget my feelings of love.
Teardrops rolling down on my face,
Trying to forget my feelings of love.

It is also the case that men who sang about feelings were immensely popular with women, from Frank Sinatra to Marvin Gaye to ... recall Rebecca's weak spot in Cheers?

Yet, we continue to brainwash boys and men that it is feminine to get in touch with their emotions!

In the narratives they consume, as well as the broader cultural landscape in which they operate, girls get a huge head start on relational skills, in the day-to-day thorniness and complexity of emotional life. Story by story, girls are getting the message that other people’s feelings are their concern and their responsibility. Boys are learning that these things have nothing to do with them.

We have barely even registered this lack of an emotional and relational education as a worrying loss for boys. We tend to dismiss and trivialize teenage girls’ preoccupation with the intricacies of relationships as “girl-drama.” But as Niobe Way, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of “Deep Secrets, Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection,” says, “When we devalue things associated with femininity — such as emotions and relationships — boys miss out.”

It is strange, bizarre, and tragic that this is talked about even in 2021!  Am not at all surprised that of the students who come to my office, only female students ever are honest with their emotions and seek my assistance.  With a couple of male students, I have even mildly attempted to convey to them to sort out their issues, ... but, hey, I don't have too much time remaining at the university.

Some day, we will get past these false gender norms and become healthy.

The joy of life includes tears too

I, like most boys, was raised with phrases like "don't cry like a girl."  If I had any smarts, I would have asked them right then, "how do you cry like a boy?"

Anger I could display. Fight I could--because boys will be boys.  But, crying was unmanly. I see that attitude even now, even in the adopted country.

Crying is an expression of feelings.  Women cultivate their sisterhood through talking about their feelings, whether it is about their husbands or mothers or colleagues or kids or ... it is a long list of events and people about which we have feelings and women seem to unreservedly talk about them.

We men, on the other hand, talk about sports and politics and the weather and everything else that is not about one's own feelings.

All these despite plenty of men singing about feelings.  Is it any wonder then that men who sing about feelings were, and are, immensely popular with women, from Frank Sinatra to Marvin Gaye to ... recall Rebecca's weak spot in Cheers?

Yet, "vulnerable emotions are coded as not masculine."  It is a world of emotions, but men aren't supposed to feel their vulnerability and cry?  The inability to share emotions means men have difficulty with friendships too, unlike women and their sisterhood.

Normalize it. Normalize the desire. Normalize the fact that all humans need these relationships to thrive. Charles Darwin said that our social abilities and skills is the reason why we've thrived as a species. I mean, we've known this for over a century - that these relationships are critical to our mental health - and we need to stop having a culture that says, somehow, you know, a certain gender doesn't need them and only another gender and sexuality needs them.
It's human to want friends - close, deep ocean friends, friends you love with an exclamation point, friends who know your deepest weirdness and your favorite emoji.

I am not at all surprised that of the students who come to my office, only female students ever are honest with their emotions and seek my assistance.  With quite a few male students, I have thought that they could straighten out their lives if only they reached into their true emotions ... but, hey, boys will be boys, right?

Even as we try to get past these false gender norms and become healthy, Covid-19 has upended our lives.  Death and illness.  Jobless.  Houseless.  Lining up at food banks.  As we try our best to help them, one of the PSAs that we could run is this: It is ok for adults--yes, including men, to cry.

Be a man ... and cry a little?

Remember that old Pepsi ad featuring MC Hammer?  I still remember that commercial not because of any fondness of Pepsi over Coke, but because of "feelings" that the macho rapper starts to croon.  I thought that the ad did young boys a huge disservice by suggesting it was not hip to sing about, to talk about, feelings.

I was raised with phrases like "don't cry like a girl"--like almost all kids were back in those days in the old country.  Anger I could display. Fight I could--because boys will be boys.  But, crying was unmanly. I see that attitude even now, even in the adopted country.

We seem to forget that feelings bring people together.  Women cultivate their sisterhood through talking about their feelings, whether it is about their husbands or mothers or colleagues or kids or ... it is a long list of people about whom we have feelings and women seem to unreservedly talk about them.  Men, on the other hand, talk about sports and politics and the weather and everything else that is not about one's own feelings. 

All these despite plenty of men singing about feelings.  Like even that "feelings" song that MC Hammer sings because he drank the "wrong" soda.

Feelings, nothing more than feelings,
Trying to forget my feelings of love.
Teardrops rolling down on my face,
Trying to forget my feelings of love.

It is also the case that men who sang about feelings were immensely popular with women, from Frank Sinatra to Marvin Gaye to ... recall Rebecca's weak spot in Cheers?

Yet, "vulnerable emotions are coded as not masculine."  But, men's emotions are not merely about women.  It is a world of emotions.  The inability to share emotions means men have difficulty with friendships too, unlike women and their sisterhood.

Normalize it. Normalize the desire. Normalize the fact that all humans need these relationships to thrive. Charles Darwin said that our social abilities and skills is the reason why we've thrived as a species. I mean, we've known this for over a century - that these relationships are critical to our mental health - and we need to stop having a culture that says, somehow, you know, a certain gender doesn't need them and only another gender and sexuality needs them.
It's human to want friends - close, deep ocean friends, friends you love with an exclamation point, friends who know your deepest weirdness and your favorite emoji.

It is strange, bizarre, and tragic that this is talked about even in 2019!  Am not at all surprised that of the students who come to my office, only female students ever are honest with their emotions and seek my assistance.  With a couple of male students, I have even mildly attempted to convey to them to sort out their issues, but ...

Some day, we will get past these false gender norms and become healthy.

Let it go ...

Frank Sinatra famously sang in My Way:

Regrets, I've had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption

Too few to mention?  Really?

I have had a mediocre life and I have plenty of regrets.  Sinatra with too few regrets?

Given his life, Sinatra was no saint.  Which means:

“People who say ‘I regret nothing’ are either saints or stupid, in my view. Regret based on flexible attitudes is the hallmark of mental health. It is a sign that you are engaged with life.” Without regret, we cannot learn from our mistakes, and we are destined to repeat them

Humans that we are, all of us walk around with regrets.  (Unless it is this guy, but then he is a sociopath!)  The question then is what to do with those bags and bags of regrets.

Use them to understand who you really are. Know thyself!

It is the ability to accept yourself, to recognise that there was a wider context to your actions and to understand that you made the decisions you made based on the values and the information you had at the time, that leads to remorse and self-knowledge. Dryden says: “Take the psychological equivalent of cod liver oil, which doesn’t taste nice but will do you good: accept the point, difficult to swallow though it may be, that yes, it would have been nice if you had made a different choice, but you could only have acted as you did at that time in those circumstances.”

And, therefore,

“regret, though it’s very painful, can be a gift. It can be the doorway to a better way of living, of being with others.”

Indeed!

The Best Way Out Is Always Through

The following is a copy/paste from my essay at Inside Higher Ed.
*********************************************************

I wish I had learned a number of things that I didn’t in graduate school, including what it means to be a faculty member advising students. If only I had been told what I know now: faculty advising and office hours are not really about the classes, per se!

I started teaching economic geography at California State University, Bakersfield. When students came to my office, it was not to talk about agglomeration economies, central place theory or international development (my favorite). Instead, they often talked about their own lives. Earl, a United States Army veteran, talked about his experiences as a homeless person sleeping under bridges. I still recall Frank getting teary as he spoke about his homeland, Sierra Leone, which he had to flee. (I have replaced real names of students in this piece to protect their identities.) And there were more, whose names and faces are fading away in my memory.

It did not take long for me to understand that advising would involve dealing with the anxieties, vulnerabilities and emotions that students struggle with. I was unprepared. I had to quickly learn and improvise. And I did.

I became a listener.

All through my life as a student, and until I became a member of the teaching profession, I had never had such experiences. In my undergraduate years in India, I found no equivalent of “office hours.” Other than during classes, when I tried my best not to fall asleep through the lectures, I rarely saw my professors, let alone talked with them. It is not that I did not walk around with emotional baggage of my own; at times, the weight of my baggage seemed unbearable. But I had no one to talk to about my anxieties that included an acute fear of public speaking, worry about my family’s financial stress due to my father being unemployed and -- the biggest one of them all -- my intense feelings of unhappiness and depression about my electrical engineering program.

Perhaps my formative years would have been less anxious if India had continued with a variation of the old tradition of gurukula. In the gurukula system, the student (shishya) almost always lived in the home of the teacher (guru) and his family. The guru and his wife were, for all practical purposes, a second set of parents, and provided a home -- a remarkable alma mater -- that made possible the shishya’s intellectual andemotional development. In complete contrast to the gurukula, my college professors and I were total strangers in India’s modern higher education system.

Though not operating a gurukula in Oregon, which is where I have been living and teaching for the past 16 years, I am convinced that faculty members can -- and should -- play an important role in students’ emotional as well as intellectual development. News reports empirically validate the struggles of the students whom I come across in my teaching. The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has been surveying first-year students across the country since 1966, notes a significant decline in the emotional health of college students. Life has apparently become even more complicated than it was when I was a teenager worrying about my future.

At the surface, it might seem like the three-legged academic stool -- teaching, scholarship and service -- does not include dealing with students’ feelings. But teaching does have a place for it. After all, we are not dealing with automatons but human beings with emotions. The life of the mind, which serves as an unofficial motto for higher education, includes anxiety and sadness.

I fully recognize that I am not a counselor. I suggest to students to meet with the counseling professionals on the campus if they are not able to work out their problems. One student, Valerie, who does work with counselors, wrote to me recently: “I don't plan on being broken for the rest of my life though. Well, it is not like I am planning it now, but things will be better soon.”

It seems like students want faculty members like me simply to hear them out and not necessarily solve their problems. Listening to students in my office, when they engage me about their life concerns, compels me to walk a fine line -- fully engaged and relating to the person yet detached enough from the emotions and the person so that I don’t get entangled in their lives. Depending on what students tell me, I sometimes share with them some of the anxieties that I experienced as a college student. Always, they are surprised to learn that I, too, was once a walking bundle of nerves.

A few days ago, I met with a student, Gina. As we discussed her classes and the need to look for summer internships, I sensed that something was troubling her. Thanks to the years of working with students, I knew that I should not force the issue, and that if a student really wanted to share their troubles with me, they would. The more we talked about her academic plans, the more I could see her gaining confidence that she could trust me.

She paused and looked away. And then Gina slowly talked about her problems dealing with anxiety and depression.

I listened. We talked about her worries and her interests. I latched on to her mentioning poetry. I told her about a line from Robert Frost that is comforting and encouraging when we struggle with problems: The best way out is always through. “I love Frost. I will look it up,” she replied with a smile.

But then, all of a sudden, her facial expressions changed. With her fingers covering her mouth, and looking deeply apologetic, she asked, “Is it OK to talk with you about these? These are my personal problems, right?”

“Of course, it’s OK,” I replied. She relaxed more when I added that advising and office hours are not merely about classes but -- and more important -- about such issues. And that’s a profound truth that I had not known as a graduate student when I was excitedly looking forward to a life as an academic.

There is no crying in baseball?

A few days ago, I asked a colleague if everything was ok because the colleague was not looking all good.

The colleague motioned me to close the door.  And broke down.  Tears down the cheeks.

It was all related to workplace stress.

I listened.  As I have noted many times in the past, I learnt a long time ago that when people share emotions it is not because a problem has to be fixed.  Instead, it is about having somebody to listen to.

The colleague thanked me for listening.

A couple of days later, the colleague said, "I am sorry for having been unprofessional.  And I am glad you didn't roll your eyes ..."

"Whether it is at home or at work, I don't roll my eyes in such contexts" I said.  "We are humans, and we have emotions.  We can't be robots at work.  Sometimes the emotions overwhelm us."

Quite a coincidence that a leading peddler of fake news has a piece about crying at work and why you shouldn't feel bad about it.  It is an interview with "Alison Green, who runs the career advice blog Ask a Manager and whose latest book, which has the same title, published earlier this year."

The bottom-line there is no different from what I told the colleague:

We’re human! We have emotions! Good managers will know that, and it’s not the end of the world if you occasionally show that at work.

I don't understand why this should be news to anybody.  Right?

So, why the tears at work?

If you’re really invested in your work and care deeply about doing a good job, you’re more likely to experience the sort of disappointment or frustration that can result in teariness. And of course, employers want us to be engaged in our work and to care deeply about it — and it’s hard to do that but also be detached enough that you never have a strong emotional reaction. So again, it goes to context and frequency. If it’s occasional and relatively private, you’re probably fine. If it’s frequent and/or public, if I’m your boss I’m going to be more concerned and trying to figure out what’s going on.

Which is also exactly what I told the colleague: The emotions were because the colleague was so involved and invested in the work and the people.  If this investment and involvement occasionally brings out tears, hey, we are human.  "The key word there being “occasionally.”"

Sex sells?

We live in strange times.  People have plenty of "friends" but perhaps feel way more alone than ever.  It is, but one measure, of how rapidly our lives are being transformed.  In the process--and more importantly--we are completely redefining what it means to be human, with human emotions.

Sex is one of those human emotions, which is also being rapidly redefined.  "Making sense of modern pornography" is what this New Yorker essay is about.  The following sentence there makes me think about how much even our "regular" vocabulary and approach to life has changed:

It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar.

I know what the author is referring to; even in this blog, I have used phrases like 'poverty porn' when, for instance, critiquing Slumdog Millionaire.  The word "porn" has pretty much become a part of our daily vocabulary.

Porn is everywhere.  And at zero cost.  One small typo when entering a URL can easily send one to a porn site.

Years ago, back when the web was young, I wrote an op-ed about this, during my California years, in which I noted that life as a teenager has become immensely more complicated and how amazed I was that the kids were managing this quite successfully.  In the years since, the life of a young person has become even more challenging with porn so easy to access right from the smartphone, and with sexting becoming a part of the daily vocabulary.  I am so glad that I am not a stressed out teenager with hormones rushing through every possible vein.  Phew!

With the growth in technology, we knew it was only a matter of time before we reached that strange twilight zone issue--robot sex.  And, therefore, robot porn. And, heck, robot brothels.

Apparently it already arrived and I never knew about it!

A Canadian company wants to open a so-called “robot brothel” in Houston, but is getting pushback from officials and community groups, with the mayor saying the city is reviewing its ordinances to determine if they address public safety and health concerns potentially associated with the business.
...
Kinky S Dolls says it’s opening a “love dolls brothel” in Houston. It opened a similar venue in Toronto in 2017.

What is the business about?

KinkySDolls is one of many manufacturers of sex dolls that range in price from $4,000 to $20,000 depending on the features. The company operates a try-before-you-buy store in Toronto, where time alone in a private room with one of the products ranges from $80 to $120.
Or put another way, the company offers a hotel room with a sex doll in it on an hourly basis.

Why Houston?  I am sure the company did the background market research.  While people who don't care for profits make location decisions for crazy reasons, businesses guided by the profit motive don't casually choose locations.  I wonder what it is about Houston!

The profit-loving people will perhaps love this, despite their rhetoric!

As one who cares about humans and empathy and emotions, I am not thrilled with this.  But, I am not surprised that it has come to this :(

Consolation Prize

I have blogged in plenty--more than any reader ever wanted to read!--about death, religion, and god.  In blogging about these, I rarely ever make fun of religions, their gods, their narratives, and their followers.  Yes, the atheist that I am, sometimes I do joke about them.  But, for the most part, I don't.  For one simple and fundamental reason: Religions, gods, and the narratives help most people deal with the inevitable: Death.

If there were no death, then we humans would not have invented religions, gods, and the stories of how everything comes about.  We won't find any need to invent new religions/cults either.

But, there is death, and we humans know we are all going to die some time.  What happens to us after we die?  Where did grandma end up?  What about childhood friends? Heck, where did our favorite pet go upon death?

These are troubling questions.  And emotionally taxing questions.

Religions offer ways to deal with the ultimate existential angst:

Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion.

Of course, we are only talking about the sincere people, not like the fake ones who use religion and the fake religious for power.

When we are grieving, when we feel incapable of dealing with terrible developments, religions help:

Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.

Indeed.

Go ahead. Be a nabob of negativity

Hey, does the following make sense to you?

المشاعر السلبية مفتاح الصحة النفسية

Before I tell you what the means, allow me to discuss something with you.  Remember, I noted in yesterday's post that you can't selectively edit me out--you have to put up with my boring stories also ;)

Quite a few months ago, I noticed something interesting in the New York Times.  A select report or a column included a link for the Chinese version or an Arabic version.  Once, I even tweeted the "foreign" language version just to see if there was an audience for it.  And there was.  (I have no idea how to quickly search through my tweets and track that down!)

As much as we (ok, I) beat up on modern technology, I, like many, am an ardent fan of it.  Without the modern communication technology, you, dear reader, and I would not have even met, right?  And here we are exchanging ideas, debating, all thanks to the modern marvel.  If we want to pass along a column to an English-challenged friend somewhere, we can send them the Chinese or Arabic version too.  (I suspect that the FBI has opened a file on me for using the Arabic characters in this post, and for repeatedly writing "Arabic". Hehehe)

So, back to that Arabic phrase.  It was there in this Scientific American piece on "Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being."  Now, go ahead and check that link out for the Arabic version.  (Click that link only if you are white-skinned; the FBI will track you if you are brown-skinned. Haha!)

Although positive emotions are worth cultivating, problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time. In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment.

Why?

“Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being,” says psychologist Jonathan M. Adler of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

Are you thinking what I am thinking?  Why is a psychology expert in the College of Engineering, right?  Yep, this is how I read things, my friend! ;)

The complexity of life means that we can not, will not, be happy all the time.  There will be moments of other emotions that we classify as negative.  Remember the Pixar movie, Inside Out, in which sadness plays a key role?

Unpleasant feelings are just as crucial as the enjoyable ones in helping you make sense of life's ups and downs. “Remember, one of the primary reasons we have emotions in the first place is to help us evaluate our experiences,” Adler says.

Our life experiences are not mere facts, right?  Those experiences are loaded with emotions.

Instead of backing away from negative emotions, accept them. Acknowledge how you are feeling without rushing to change your emotional state.

Or, as I tell people--if they ever check with me--I tell them to honor those emotions and not deny their existence, or drown them in alcohol.  "What you feel is what you feel" is how I have come to conclude about the negative emotions.  To honor them and work through them is the way to do it.  "Learning how to cope with those emotions is the key."  Indeed.

If only I could convey these to the angry members of ISIS.  Hey, can you white readers send ISIS the Arabic version of the Scientific American piece? ;)

What if we, the people, are just not rational?

Decision-making within the 35-home neighborhood where I live became a tad contentious.  The rhetoric got heated.  I followed Harry Truman's "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" and quit the governing board.

If a 35-home neighborhood can generate enough political heat for me to throw in that metaphorical towel, do you think I will be able to stand even one tweet from Adolf Trump?

What shocks me more than Drumpf  as the major party candidate is this: There are tens of millions of people who support him, despite all the horrible tweets of his, and despite all the horrible things he has said about a whole bunch of people not only this country but even outside the US.

We cannot dismiss this as a freakish outlier.  To me, this is all the more evidence that there is a wide gulf between the democracy that we idealize and the reality of it all.  This gulf has existed all the time; it is not anything new.  But, never before has it become this glaringly in our face, which means we can't really be in denial anymore.

When it comes to democracy in America:

[Maybe] the problem is that we were expecting too much out of it in the first place ... It's time to stop pretending that there's such a thing as a rational voter.

I agree.  Maybe it is time we lowered the expectations. And lowered it a great deal.  It is the unrealistic expectations that also then end up with the complications like the ballot measures that we regular people simply cannot even understand and, yet, are asked to vote on.  The same unrealistic expectations of rational voters thinking through issues is also how the Brexit screw-up happened.  It is the same story in any democracy, not only here in the US.

"Can ordinary people, busy with their lives and with no firsthand experience of policy making or public administration, do what the theory expects them to do?" Of course not. "Mostly," Achen and Bartels write, "they identify with ethnic, racial, occupation, religious or other sorts of groups, and often — whether through group ties or hereditary loyalties — with a political party."

Exactly.  Back in the old country, I was always shocked at how ethnic, religious, and other affiliations seemed to lead plenty--perhaps an overwhelming majority even--to vote.  I tell ya, my adopted country is no different from my old country!

The author writes, "it’s finally time to make peace with a simple fact of political life: Informed, individualistic rationality is a chimera."   I am ready.  I made my own peace with it a long time ago, which is also why until a month ago, I never ruled out Hitler winning on November 8th.  It is also why I was not that surprised that Bush won a second term.

The friend always asks me for some kind of a constructive takeaway.  Here, it is simple: Stop imagining about the utopia and work with the reality.  Do not deny the reality that you observe.  And, more than anything else, do not ever think that more education means a better democracy.  Nope!

For the good-government reform community, this suggests something equally radical: giving up on the deeply held belief that American democracy can be solved by giving citizens more opportunities to participate by emailing Congress or voting, and an end to thinking all would be better if more people would just "get informed on the issues. ...
It also means coming to terms with the fact that we don’t think for ourselves; we think together. And maybe that’s fine. Partisanship and group loyalties are inevitable, and they can even be good things if they can help us realize shared interests.

Have a nice day! ;)

Emotions trump logic

It is not unusual for a couple of students every term to bring up the issue of trade deficits and the government debt and, therefore, the compelling urgency to get rid of the welfare programs.  I would try to explain to them that we need to systematically parse all those in order to begin to understand if there is any causal relationship among them.  But, I almost always lose them even as I start going down that path.

Logical understanding of issues involves hard work.  Even if the world's best expert is there to answer the question, the listener has to think along as well.  And when that audience completely shuts off, even Einstein can't win them over.  

At least in my classroom, I have a captive audience that I can work on.  But, when those topics, and more, are discussed as hot political issues, the ongoing campaign season is fully exposing a deep flaw in the democratic process--logic be damned; it's about the voters' emotions!

Consider the case of the trade deficit.  Of course, the US runs deficits with a bunch of countries.  But, does it matter and, if so, why?  Before we can even begin to lecture about this, the frontrunner of the party--which the "local" and the "foreign" frequent commenters ardently support--has staked out his position:

Donald Trump believes that a half-trillion-dollar trade deficit with the rest of the world makes the United States a loser and countries with trade surpluses like China and Mexico winners.
“They’re beating us so badly,” he has said. “Every country we lose money with.”

You think that the nearly forty percent of the party faithful who support Drumpf care about parsing through that claim about winning and losing?  You think they will patiently scroll through the multiple screens of explanation?  Imagine sitting them down and saying, "let me explain to you the Triffin dilemma."  

To re-work an old campaign slogan that worked to elect the man whose wife is now--for now--the front running candidate in the other party. it's the emotions, stupid!

The trouble is that decisions based on emotions will likely cause way more problems than thoughtful decisions can.  Especially over the long haul.  But, almost always, emotions trumps logic.  Which is why even a significant percentage of evangelical voters have favored Trump thus far, even though the thrice-married guy has a long track record of pooh-poohing the very religious values that evangelicals supposedly hold dear.  If it comes down to Trump v. Clinton in November?

GOP-registered evangelicals will not vote for Hillary. You could make a very good argument that Hillary is much more a person of faith and closer to evangelicals on her understanding of God than Trump. But voters aren't moved by logic; they are moved by emotions.

Talk about strange bedfellows! 

Of course, intellectually we have been aware of voting as an emotional act.  What is new is how that visceral nature has been fully exposed this time around.

 Imagine a world in which ideology was ruled by rationality without any biases. In such a world there would be little room for political debate among intelligent people. If we were all exposed to the same facts we would end up reaching the same conclusions. We would still need parties and elections since our interests are not identical. But we would never remain split over questions such as which economic policy would benefit most British people, or which policy would be most effective for tackling terrorism.
The fact that we continue to debate these issues endlessly, and yet never seem to agree, suggests that there is something in ideologies far beyond rationality. This other thing is subjective taste, which, to a large extent, is shaped by our emotional being. De gustibus non est disputandum (In matters of taste, there can be no disputes), as the Latin idiom goes

Meanwhile, there is a petition drive "for allowing the open carry of guns at the Republican convention this July in Cleveland."   It might have started as a satirical statement, but has gained serious attention from Drumpf:

While proclaiming himself "a very, very strong person for Second Amendment," the Republican front-runner told ABC's This Week that "I have not seen the petition. I want to see what it says. I want to read the fine print."

Surely combining emotions and guns in a crowded and contested convention will be uber-rational!

A man ain't supposed to cry

A few weeks ago, the friend and I were at the cinema watching Inside Out.  To my left was a boy who was about eleven or twelve years old.  His father was on his other side and then the mother and the sister.  The kid was certainly animated during the funny scenes.  During one particularly emotional scene, I wondered how the boy would react.  I saw him slowly raise his right hand to his eye and wipe away the tears--it was clear that he didn't want even his father to know that he was crying.

I could relate to him; I, too, right from the time that I was a kid, was told not to cry like a girl.  Oddly enough, the ones who urged me to man up, so to speak, were women, which is no surprise because, after all, it was women who raised us while the older men were busy being useless!  I knew I did not want to be a sob story.

Not that the women who took care of me were the crying kind anyway.  I have no memories of my grandmothers or my mother ever crying, .  They did not come from any steely stock either--perhaps they shed tears when they were by themselves or when we kids were not around.  Which is all the more why I felt like the worst son ever when I made my mother cry by telling her about my marriage having collapsed.

Real men don't cry--that's what we are always told.  But, apparently not so, argues this essay, which asks:

History is full of sorrowful knights, sobbing monks and weeping lovers – what happened to the noble art of the manly cry?

Even the Indian movies, in whatever language it was, never shied away from portraying the male character crying a big cry.  So, what gives?

But actually, the gender gap in crying seems to be a recent development. Historical and literary evidence suggests that, in the past, not only did men cry in public, but no one saw it as feminine or shameful. In fact, male weeping was regarded as normal in almost every part of the world for most of recorded history.

Not having read that essay, you are perhaps thinking that the men cried only at the huge manly events--like the death of a fellow soldier at the war.

Men might cry in this ritual manner over weighty issues of death, war and politics, but surely personal tears of love and frustration were still confined to women?

Right?

Wrong, argues the author.  Here's an example:

In medieval romances, we find innumerable instance of knights crying purely because they miss their girlfriends. In Chrétien de Troyes’ The Knight of the Cart, no less a hero than Lancelot weeps at a brief separation from Guinevere. At another point, he cries on a lady’s shoulder at the thought that he won’t get to go to a big tournament. What’s more, instead of being disgusted by this snivelling, she’s moved to help, and Lancelot gets to go to the tournament after all. 

Visualize that--Sir Lancelot crying because of being away from Guinevere.  Didn't anybody tell the knight not to cry like a girl? ;)

So, what happened?  Boys and men being conditioned not to cry is something recent, modern?

The most obvious possibility is that this shift is the result of changes that took place as we moved from a feudal, agrarian society to one that was urban and industrial. In the Middle Ages, most people spent their lives among those they had known since birth. A typical village had only 50-300 inhabitants, most of them related by blood or marriage; a situation like an extended family stuck in an eternal reunion in the middle of nowhere.

So?

But from the 18th through the 20th centuries, the population became increasingly urbanised; soon, people were living in the midst of thousands of strangers. Furthermore, changes in the economy required men to work together in factories and offices where emotional expression and even private conversation were discouraged as time-wasting. As Tom Lutz writes in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (1999), factory managers deliberately trained their workers to suppress emotion with the aim of boosting productivity: ‘You don’t want emotions interfering with the smooth running of things.’

Has this brainwashing to make us less human and more productive helped us?

Labour productivity might be enhanced; we’re spared the dramas of strangers; and men (and women, in the workplace) are constrained in their use of emotional manipulation.
However, human beings weren’t designed to swallow their emotions, and there’s reason to believe that suppressing tears can be hazardous to your wellbeing.  [Research has] found a relationship between a person’s rate of stress-related illnesses and inadequate crying. Weeping is also, somewhat counter-intuitively, correlated with happiness. ... Finally, crying is an important tool for understanding one’s own feelings. 

Anything else?

Taboos against male expressiveness mean that men are far less likely than women to get help when they’re suffering from depression. This, in turn, is correlated with higher suicide rates; men are three to four times as likely to commit suicide as women. Male depression is also more likely to express itself in alcoholism and drug addiction, which have their own high death toll.

We modern humans are crazy, is all I can conclude.  There is a huge difference between crying as a temper tantrum, which both girls and boys do in order to get their ways, versus crying as a genuine emotion.  If we humans can laugh and laugh heartily to emote, the yin-yang means that we would cry to express the other set of feelings, right?  Maybe the least we can do is stop telling male kids not to cry like a girl.