Belly Button Lint

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Tag: safety

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    The Irrational Actor (Peltzman Effect)

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    1–2 minutes

    To be a "rational actor," you must have awareness of the risks.

    Most people move through the world on unconscious bias, making calculations beneath a rational threshold.

    The Peltzman Effect shows the safer we make things, such as demanding seatbelts and airbags, the riskier our behavior becomes. We have a "risk budget" we subconsciously calculate and increase our risky behavior to the corresponding risk to life and limb.

    In short, we are irrational actors who actively thwart the technology and policies aimed at saving us: safety-proofing doesn’t save us; we fight against it.

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    Return to Nature: a reaction to precarity that is precarious

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    1–2 minutes

    The first reaction to precarity from complexity is returning to a natural state (rejecting society). Which is noble and -definitionally- insane.

    The attempt is for humans to return to themselves and reinhabit the flesh in a state of nature as they exit the digital, mechanical, cybernetic systems that distort you.

    The anxiety producing the rejection is real: We are in a fragmenting machine chewing apart the world’s stability. T

    The problem is you enter another level of precarity by excusing yourself from society: you have no sway or power and are entirely reliant on compassion when they decide to displace you.

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    Seeking Likability: The Illusion of Safety and Authenticity

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    1–2 minutes

    The desire to be liked by others (likability), whether it’s your boss or strangers, can stem from a need for safety or a desire to be seen as a good person.

    However, seeking approval requires constant effort and doesn’t guarantee stability or assurance. Trying to please everyone is an impossible task, as people’s desires often conflict.

    Instead, being genuinely responsible and consistent in yourself can attract genuine “liking” from others. True liking, or respect, is gained from the recognition that you are working on yourself first, not working to please others.

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    Protection paradox

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    1–2 minutes

    How do you protect transparency, while at the same time protecting privacy?

    Open access, transparency, and truth require openness, while defense or security requires obscuration, walls, and locks.

    And yet, complete transparency is a protective measure by disallowing hiding. Promoting hiding generates secrets from which darkness can thrive. Yet, we may need to hide from the evil that claims to be the light.

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    Don’t Corner Me

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    1–2 minutes

    Don’t put somebody in a corner unless you’re ready to accept the opposite of confrontation.
    Often a fight is a way to re-secure position or bid for attention, but it is such a stressful encounter that a secure person will avoid your attachment style, leaving you no one to fight with.

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    Don’t solve the Excuses

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    1–2 minutes

    We create our failures: they are our excuses not to succeed because some part of us is scared.

    "I can’t do that, it would compromise who I am."

    We protect our "self" relentlessly, setting up fail-safe double binds to protect our scared ego: "I am not liked because I am not likable" or "To be true, I must isolate."

    The symptoms of our distress, perhaps a psychosomatic ailment, are resolved once we work past our self-righteous barriers. And yet, if we keep solving the excuses (I am not likable, I am authentic), our protectionist psychology creates new excuses to prevent change, which means we continue to hurt.

    {Adlerian psychology}

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    Out maneuver Yourself

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    1–2 minutes

    Our ability to forecast motivations leads us to form expectations. Conforming to our predictions, we extrapolate seemingly rational actions or behaviors.

    This most often looks like a crafted argument dropped onto the unsuspecting. Or we create a routine for optimal results so complicated (obsessive) that we can’t remember.

    This excessive manufacturing and maneuvering becomes second nture: a series of defenses. Unfortunately, they prevent us from encountering the world as it is.

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    reputational policing

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    1–2 minutes

    To consider your online reputation as worth defending only encourages others to take perverse pleasure in denigrating it.
    This is not the fault of social media; it does not divide us or make us worse.
    The capitalist system we are in plays out as subversive competition on social media. Enjoyment through dissidence is encouraged, where trolling builds a reputation by destruction, which converts the troll into a king, who then must be subverted or torn down in turn.
    In short, to consider the online self as an extension of your reputation (worth defending) is the trap into which we must not fall.

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    Tolerance and Fragility

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    1–2 minutes

    Tolerance is said to build resilience. If so, do like-minded bubbles create fragility?

    Tolerance is allowing without indeed agreeing or being in alignment. This is a practice of maintaining oneself as aloof or separate from reality, a protected kernel of you.

    Fragility is expecting reality to align with your beliefs and mesh yourself with the world: there is no defensive layer of protection.

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    We all believe something, even if it is nothing.

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    1–2 minutes

    Our lives are shaped around organizing principles. When our structure is attacked, we either lift the drawbridge or reign fire and boiling oil.

    It is easiest to see this reaction with religion and politics, but science, reason, and wealth are the modern castles we defend.

    The most difficult to realize we are defending is “nothing.” (Nothing should interfere with us, or nothing is essential.) It is a cynical slide that allows rampant permissions, dismissing structure entirely for the freedom nothing allows.

    But we should be able to ask: is this belief leading me to moralize more or treat people better?