Whose me am I, anyway...?

As it happens, I've had some interactions with the psychiatric profession of late, and I find that I have many of the same doubts and reservations I had when talking about life coaches and the gurus of SHAMdom as a whole. [See in particular SHAM chapter 6, "Put Me in Coach," as well as the conclusion, "A SHAM Society."]

This psychiatric-interaction business is one of those admissions they say you're never supposed to make public in this era of corporate due diligence and background checks, but what the hell: I'm 62 years old and I've lived the life I've led. It is what it is at this point.

In any case, I come away with more questions than answers, many of them interrelated. Such as:

What is the goal of this process? Is it to optimize the me that I think I am (or should be)? Or to try to reshape me in certain respects so that I am suddenly a "new and improved" version of me, based on the shrink's expert assessment of things?

Is this undertaking supposed to make me happy or make me successful (bearing in mind that the two are not the same thing, and can even be dichotomous)? And is it legitimate for me to privilege my happiness over the happiness of those in my orbit who depend on me? (Yeah, I know, you can't make anyone else happy unless you're happy with yourself, blah, blah, blah...) Here are some further reflections on happiness from a 2007 Wall Street Journal piece of mine that elicited quite a bit of feedback.

And in the context of this endeavor, what constitutes a successful outcome? Is a successful outcome defined as my feeling more comfortable with the me that I am, even if the me that I am (or turn out to be) is not as good a fit with the external world as some other version of me might be? And who gets to make that call? Me, because I'm, well, me? Or others (like, say, psychiatric professionals, who supposedly know what's better/best for me?) Is this ultimately a solipsistic pursuit wherein I'm seeking to solidify my grasp of who I am and what makes me tick...even if what makes me tick is, in the shrink's judgment, counterproductive in the larger scheme of things?

All of this, of course, inevitably leads to, and depends upon, one's definition of Self. (I've blogged on this before, if you care to read, here, here and here.) I don't maintain many close relationships, but as I've said to the ultra-small handful of people who fall into that category, I think I've done the best I possibly could do with the raw material I had to work with. I am a man of many contradictions (as well as demons) and could've easily been a chaotic, potentially dangerous mess of a human being. (There are elements of my past that no one, and I mean no one, knows about.) Nonetheless, I've objectively achieved quite a bit in my life—I've lived the kind of life that looks good compressed into the format of a resume, with its dry, chronological recitation of facts; I have been at or near the pinnacle of achievement in several realms—really, in every sphere that was of some relevance to my personal notions of  "self-actualization"...so in that limited sense, I feel like a success. I made the best cake out of the ingredients I had to work with.

But it wasn't the best cake in the bakery. And it didn't fetch the price it should have from those who look to buy cakes. And it certainly wasn't a very tasty recipe for some of the folks who depended on me, like my long-suffering wife, among (too many) others.

Bottom line: What sort of therapist does one go in order to ascertain what the objectives of one's therapy ought to be?

Why Goldman Sachs would love The Syndicate.

Got a nice mention here, though Salty Droid deservedly got most of the "face time"...since he brings most of the salient and provocative information. I confess that I did not give this interview opportunity the prep time it deserved; to be fair to me, I couldn't spare the time at all, that particular week. If I'd prepped better, I could've contributed something more journalistically meaningful, at least in terms of my little corner of the SHAMsphere.

Now that I spend most of my day involved in finance (I'll explain in due course), it occurs to me how similar is the world of internet marketing to the world of the derivatives that nearly sank the U.S. economy in 2008 (and, for that matter, the world of Ponzi schemes as well): In both cases you have products that add little or nothing tangible to society but merely create another layer of financial participation in something that already exists (although full participation is reserved mostly for those on the inside). Neither of these activities, in IM or derivatives, really generates any new money; neither really expands the dimensions of the monetary pool. Both are just "clever" (to be kind) ways of redistributing cash in a zero-sum (or nearly zero-sum) game. In IM, that cash flows straight from thousands of hopeful marketing wannabes to the savvy, conscienceless types at the bloodless heart of the realm: The Syndicate, as they are known.

The derivatives that drove the economy into the crapper in 2008 essentially strove to quantify the beta of an underlying property (whose true value was known only to a few privileged insiders) in the same way that today's get-rich-quick internet-marketing schemes essentially sell the rights to a business model that consists of selling the rights to a business model.

Far too often in both cases, there's no "there there."

On leveling the playing field.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how we get to where we are in life.

If you've been with me for a while, you know that I tend to see life through a deterministic lens. I see the human body, including the human mind, as a glorified computer that does what its software tells it to do at any given moment, depending also on the behavioral modifications inflicted by circumstances—i.e. software updates. (But the external events are also, of course, predetermined, in my view. Every stone that sits on your lawn is in the exact position it had to be in at that moment, year-of-our-lord 2012. To riff on the chilling mini-mart coin-flip scene from No Country for Old Men, that stone has been on its journey to its place in your lawn for all the millennia. It could've ended up nowhere else. So has the nail that ended up in your tire, regardless of whether you drove over it accidentally or whether some neighborhood teen put it there.)

My deterministic leanings were a prime prime reason why I never subscribed to the "you can be/do anything you want in life" school of thought. Sometimes the variables that prevent you from doing what you want to do are physical/external: You're not going to play center for the Boston Celtics if (a) there's no such thing as basketball, (b), you're presently serving a life sentence in jail, and/or (c) you're 4-foot-11. And sometimes the variables are more "personal"/internal: You're not going to invent a way of modifying acetylcholine so that it becomes a natural vaccine against cancer if you have the approximate IQ of a breath mint. And please don't cite me exceptional cases; they just prove the rule. And those exceptional cases were predetermined, too.

By the way, the personal/internal stumbling block can also be ambiguity or confusion about what you "really want" to do, or a total misapprehension of what you thought you wanted to do. ... If you're a person of middle age, how many times in life have you pursued a goal that turned out not to be what you wanted once you got it? Those are cases where you were able to be or do "what you want," and yet it wasn't what you wanted after all, in hindsight. So you were still predetermined to fall short of "what you wanted."

I think most of us accept the examples having to do with being 4-foot-11 or having an IQ of 67...but we have a tougher time with the shortcomings that, in the consensus view, stem from flaws or vices. We'll cut someone a pass for flunking out of school if the problem really is a lack of brainpower, but we're less forgiving when the problem is perceived as laziness. Thing is, if you're lazy, you're lazy; you're going to live a phlegmatic, unambitious life. Now, it's possible that society can impose sanctions on you that will lift you out of your laziness. But sometimes those sanctions aren't going to work anyway. Some people are incorrigible. And if you're incorrigible, you're incorrigible. It's a little bit like being left-handed or blue-eyed.

Similarly, we will not cut someone a pass for being a serial killer, even though the tendency to be a serial killer may be every bit as ingrained as the tendency for a genius to do, well, the geniusy things a genius does. (Do you cause thoughts and impulses to occur. Or do they just occur?)

Seems to me that if there is no choice, no free will—if we all pretty much arrive where we simply must be at any given point in the ongoing timelines of our lives—then that realization behooves us to do what we can to understand and even help people who arrived in worse places. Through our insights, we can become part of the software updates that encourage others to be more understanding. This is also why I'm not one of those who flinches when the term redistributionist is applied to Barack Obama.

This becomes something of a paradox, a conundrum, because if you can't help being the way you are, then you might argue that you can't help feeling the way you feel about people who don't seem to deserve your sympathies, including people whom you flat-out dislike and root against. But I think there are higher odds of enlightening our friends and neighbors about determinism and getting them to be more accepting of others than there are of changing someone's mind about being a shiftless bum or a serial killer. This is why I generally feel more sensitivity to the poor, the downtrodden, and those whom life has otherwise passed by.

Of course, I can't help thinking that way.

Does Oprah know her flock?

In the summer of 2010, NBC tried to tap into Secret-mania and the rest of woo-hoo-world by trotting out its new reality series, Breakthrough with Tony Robbins. But NBC was late to the party, catching the wave after it had already broken on-shore and begun to ebb. By summer 2010, SHAMland had taken its share of shots. By summer 2010, major networks, like, oh, ABC, were already running hour-long shows like, oh, a certain self-help critic's Prime Time Mind Games segment on James Ray's sweat lodge debacle (which ABC plans to rerun, by the way. Check your listings). Tony failed to, er, attract a sufficiently large audience, and the series was unceremoniously canceled after just two shows.

[Photo: Oprah gets the famed Firewalk Experience.]

Now comes Oprah Winfrey and OWN. Despite some recent successes (thanks in no small part to the untimely death of Whitney Houston), OWN has struggled to find its voice...and a consistent audience. Winfrey's people had a semi-noisy falling out with Jenny McCarthy before the show even got on-air, and then pulled the plug on Rosie's ratings loser after five lackluster months.

Desperate for content to fill her flailing network, Oprah has decided to resuscitate Tony's moribund show, apparently under the theory that, whatever else viewers may or may not like, there is no limit to her disciples' appetite for empowering fluff.

So I guess we'll see if the Big T still has enough mojo to prop up the Big O. (Nasty, gratuitous, thoroughly cheap shot: Is Tony still taller than Oprah is wide, these days?)

Some disconnected ramblings on money, Mitt, Oscar and Rhonda.

Is it curmudgeonly of me to attack the Oscars for being a shameless paean to nipples, excess and gaud? I know that we're supposed to check our brains at the door and suspend disbelief when we go to see a movie—but the Oscars isn't a movie. The Oscars is/are real life to Hollywood. These people take it all seriously. They dress up in tuxes and gowns like royalty and answer reporters' fawning questions about "who they're wearing" and strut across the stage and coquettishly show lots of leg and act as if they're important and entitled to live the unapologetically greedy lives they lead...exactly as if they earned it.

And what does it say about us that we watch this tripe? Would an "Oscars" for achievements in science pull a billion viewers worldwide? I think not. An Oscars for achievements in teaching? Don't make me laugh.

Or how 'bout—get this—an Oscar for achievemnents in conscience—in empathy for one's fellow man. (Now you're probably laughing.) What do you think of an Oscar for forgoing just one set of 24K gold bathroom fixtures or that extra Lambo (driven only on weekends in nice weather) so that another family or set of families somewhere can have whatever that prodigal $1742 or $376,000 respectively buys? (And don't talk to me about Farm Aid or Live Aid or Comic Relief or any other benefits, please.... So you drive home from those "benefits" in your chauffeured Rolls and pat yourself on the back for your fine humanitarian spirit?)

Apropos of which.... How can we not attack the GOP for being a (nearly) shameless paean to greed, excess and gaud ? Rush Limbaugh declares (and Mitt implies) that we envy the super-rich because we secretly want to be like them—we hate what they have and we don't—so, peevish miscreants that we are, we don't want them to have it either. Perhaps so. But should we have it? Should anyone have it? Does anyone deserve it? If the first mission of government is ensuring the security of the people, shouldn't part of its mandate also be to promote the general security of those who've been less fortunate in life than Mitt or The Donald? (Which is almost all of us.)

Ergo, progressively higher taxes for the progressively more rich.

And finally... Keep in mind that Rhonda's The Secret and the unadulterated uber-narcissism of its law of attraction are a spiritualized rendering of the Republican creed, which tells us that America is about getting more, and then more than more, in the process devoting all of your mental energy to what you really want out of life.

It's all about you...and the rest can go screw.