And now what?

I was writing an essay on politics, maturity, hate and escape. But I don't have a real keyboard right now and I think those issues really require one.

Instead I'll write about something simpler: my life. The thing is lately I've come to several conclusions for which the time to act has clearly arrived.

Truth is I've learned through suffering and meditation I'm not the same as my counterparts. My efforts are much less effective and even exhausting my resources I might not get even close to where they can arrive on average. Expectations need to be reshaped in that light.

I still live above my economic means to distract myself from this fact, but that's obviously not sustainable. However, I'm less and less dependent on these external signs of normality to feel good about myself, which favors mental and emotional well-being despite lower material conditions.

Sometimes I feel abandoning my current professional framework, although relieving me from people that certainly don't contribute to improving my conditions since they are incapable of tolerating my different ways of doing things, would be another cheap escape. Another childish nonacceptance move.

On the other hand I still entertain the possibility to find a better spot that will enable me more than disable. But I understand since chances are lower, that can take longer, and I might have to once again pay the economic price.

Bottom line is these people deeply and negatively affect my vital energy levels, so I start feeling bad as a response to be forced to be in their presence once again.

But I can't let myself go by standards which are not and won't ever be my own. Instead I need to be wise and cold and judge reality in the light of my real choices.

That said, I still feel breaking point approaching and the fact I still haven't found the alternative path makes me nervous about the future.

Depression and Evolution

I've had my first experience with depression at the age of 10. It was really horrible, but I don't want to go into the specifics right now. I want to talk about the conscience that came along with it and the questions concerning humanity as a whole that started popping up in my head back then. And don't get me wrong, I don't think life must be an endless stream of joy and amusement. Pain can teach us valuable lessons indeed, as I've been witnessing non stop in the last couple of years. But whoever has ever struggled with severe depression, knows exactly this is not the case with that particular condition.

While suffering like I've never had before, I've started asking myself what was the purpose of that pain. Honestly, I wasn't able to find an answer from my own perspective, though I'd spend almost all my time awake trying to figure it out. I believe the reason why I wouldn't find the answer was not the fact I was only 10, since I'd have 23 additional years to think about the matter while depression would parasite my life and yet I wouldn't get anywhere either.

Depression seems to want to kill the person that has it, and often enough it accomplishes this goal. Suicide is the obvious case that comes to mind, but there are several others like malnutrition and heart disease. What's the biological logic behind that, assuming there's one? I think some myths must be destroyed for greater comprehension to be finally possible.

Many people believe depression comes from the depths and complexities of the human mind, which is a late 19th century conception. Then there are all sorts of psychological theories that attempt to give a systematic explanation and propose some measures for treatment. While a lot of interesting reading have been generated from this assumption, there are some strong evidence it's not at all valid. Interestingly enough, these don't invalidate the influence of human mind complexity on the disorder outcomes. They just point out that the underlying mechanism is something more primitive. It turns out that many animals can get depressed as well. This fact is the base for all the efficient pharmacological treatment available today.

If Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian theories or the likes were true, animals wouldn't possibly get depressed. You can still claim that what animals have is not the same (while identical symptoms point again to the opposite direction). But supposing they indeed get depressed, what's the biological advantage springing from that phenomenon?

Well, at the individual level I've never managed to find any descent answer. On the other hand, although nasty, depression can make sense at the population order of magnitude. It can be a way for less adapted individuals to succumb as a result from the interaction between the environment conditions and their self perceived ability to cope with them (which is actually how researchers cause depression in animals to test the drugs). This will leave more natural resources for better adapted individuals to thrive and reproduce and can even abbreviate suffering from the ones affected by the disorder (this would account for the humane part of it). Assuming part of the reasons for superior adaptation is genetic, that would support the survival of the best genes. This mechanism could also be beneficial in case of environmental sudden changes, in which disabling part of the population will to compete with each other could save the whole species from self-inflicted extinction.

Today depression prevalence figures in humans seem to point to an up trend (check WHO for details). That could also be consistent with the fact population is huge and resources are finite. Therefore, it seems a quite compelling hypothesis that in the face of a species-wide extinction danger, some genes would get activated and make some of the folks just give up and die without a fight. It makes a lot of sense for the species, (but so would the annihilation of the weaker by the stronger in wars, genocides, etc). Maybe that explains society discriminates depressed people, attributing all sorts of undesirable personality traits to them.

But to me this is the right moment for all human complexity to jump in and finally save the day. It was once very common to die at 30 because of some infection that today would be easily treated with inexpensive antibiotics. It was also natural to have to wonder around to get some food, since agriculture is a human invention too. Isn't it plausible that mental illness is just another natural frontier we need to cross? Couldn't it be just another naturally occurring condition we can decide to abolish, because we are able to replace it with less cruel mechanisms to preserve our existence as species?

For me, at the individual level, the most effective approach to fight depression has been to quit searching for existential reasons for it to have been born within me. Because of our brain power to process and retrieve information, it's quite likely anyone can find these reasons, even if they don't actually exist. This exercise won't help getting better from depression. It's very unintuitive, but in fact the best way to fight depression is to separate one self from it and act deliberately against one's urges emerging from the condition.

Depression and anxiety are deeply affecting human lives at the individual level, but also at the social one. Economic impact is huge, even not being currently accounted for entirely. Families and individuals suffer to great extents and most often they are left alone and abandoned by others as if they were morally flawed. So incredible things never get done because of these nasty conditions and the super counter productive habit of judging and condemning on the basis of these diseases. It's the medieval thing to do and yet it's still done at huge scale in 2014.

If rationality and inteligence really make us something unique in the Universe, it's urgent for us to step up and use these in our own benefit. That's the kind of evolution it's up to us to promote and we must start taking responsibility fot it right now.

Emotional distress and critical decisions: Possible Approaches

Yesterday I've had a terrific talk with my able bodied friends at a bar. This chat has made me realize once again how deeply different we are, despite apparently belonging to a very similar social circle (people that have studied at University of São Paulo in the late 90s and the first decade of 2000's).

The matter of the chat was pretty straight forward, but for some reason our perspectives were radically opposed. Core question is whether or not you should make a critical life decision if you feel under severe emotional distress.

Curiously, this question has two different, opposed and absolutely correct answers:

1- No, you should avoid making a critical decision under these circumstances since common sense shows people's decisions quality will be significantly impaired by a highly emotional state (especially a negative one). This is factual. So why is there a need for a different answer? Because this answer depend on the following factors to be valid:

a. Event frequency: emotional distress must be something sporadic and transient.
b. Independency: decision at hand must not be a highly relevant factor for determining whether emotional distress stops or continues.

If these 2 conditions aren't present, you'll need the second answer:

2- Emotional reasoning is a common distorted thought pattern. It usually emerges from a person will to avoid more emotional distress (usually anxiety). Depending on how cronic this pattern is, it can lead to immobilization, because the person will avoid taking action while the need for it remains. It's a loop mechanism, in which the individual doesn't act because she/he believes it's not the right time and because of the decision not to act, emotional distress can continue for much longer.

In these cases, not only it's beneficial to act in spite of negative feelings, but doing so can actually be the single way out of the whole crisis.

Next, I'll discuss the reasons why my friend finds so obvious 1 is correct and why I tend to go for 2.

Perception, perception, perception...

This text is like an onion because it has multiple layers which are somehow very similar to the others and to the whole onion itself. However, each layer also carry some sort of uniqueness which somehow can align one to crack the code and understand the relationship within the layers through the whole onion and vice-versa.

So I'm presenting a set of cases that function as the layers of the onion and I'll draft both their similarities and their differences. Hopefully, that will allow me to give the reader a better understanding of both the onion and its sublayers, but also the difference between onion layers and non-onion layers.

I've always liked very much what's straight forward and clear. Daltonism test is a visual example of that. Depending on the numbers you see (or not) in the test, you can determine in a very simple and clear way whether or not you are color-blind. It can be influenced by non-relevant factors to what you want to learn with the test, such as the quality and conditions of the screen you're taking the test on. It can also potentially be influenced by the other components related to the computer video or even other factors that can indirectly affect the colors and patterns displayed on the computer screen. But as far as the observer is concerned, the test is well designed to be used with most people and it allows to draw some stable conclusions about a given specific individual.

Maybe I like these tests that much exactly because many of the relevant situations in life don't resemble them at all. Maybe that's why people in general really like them, although most of these people will find it very difficult to understand the underlying mechanism at work here. Understanding this mechanics is a double edged sword. On one hand, this awareness can make one realize that most of the situations in which she finds herself in everyday have a very small margin of control. On the other, people are required to make decisions all the time and we have been gifted or cursed with the ability to employ rational resources to make the ones that we feel will benefit us the most, directly, indirectly or both. So if we are biased towards thinking we have more control over the environment and situations that surround us, we'll also observe two opposite classes of effects: the feeling of more control over one's life is highly correlated to ones perceived quality of life. This phenomenon is actually pretty easy to understand in the positive way. Because, if effort is required from us in life to keep it going, it's very reassuring to have the feeling we can influence and even control the outcomes of what we do.

Only this is true to a very limited extent if we think statistically about the concrete world around. The interesting fact is that humans suck big time in consciously perceiving probabilities related phenomena. Therefore, objective mistakes in these terms are not only the most common case but actually the general rule of thumb. But because this reassuring effect of feeling in control is so important, human brains tend to ignore this very concrete piece of information and act if probability distributions were completely different. Or much worse, as if they were absolutely irrelevant to important decisions in life.

Now this could generate a tragic effect on people, because unexpected things are not only happening every now and then. They are happening all the time. But then we kept very primitive brain structures along with noble cortical ones. These old folks that take care of many of these very otherwise conscient mind boggling phenomena in a super fast and efficient way that we hardly notice. So despite the fact we consciously live some sort of self-generated ever occurring deception, we usually don't feel too much harm from that.

Now there's another fuzzy element. If we were able to see reality on a very objective light like we feel we can with the color blindness test, we'd soon enough realize the correlation between our desires, efforts and their outcomes have a real distribution that is absolutely incompatible with what we expect them to be. And then comes another really curious fact: that doesn't really matter, because our minds have the habit (that is very efficiently neutralized by the scientific method) to reshape our perceptions in order to better match our expectations. In other words, since we're not able to control the precise distance we can launch a ball on a court, our brain dynamically reshapes the results of our observations in order to make things smoother and more logical.

Some of these distortions, and this might have a lot to do with the way we evolved into highly social creatures or been a consequence of that, are shared among a large number of people. Because of that, and because these people cannot usually grasp what different people might actually perceive from the same phenomenon, a false truth can be born and raised quite easily.

Back to the colorblindness test, imagine that it didn't come with any instructions whatsoever. And imagine that people taking the test didn't know its mechanics and purpose of it. Very objectively, a large group of people (actually most of the human beings on Earth) would get to see the same numbers. However, color-blind people would consistently see different numbers. If you can anticipate where I'm heading to, it's not really hard to realize that the answer to the question "what can you see in this circle" will admit more than 1 correct answer. If you think about it philosophically, it actually admits endless right answers since there's a degree of clear subjectivity in the question itself.

However, if no disclaimer about what's supposed to happen to that perception is made, we tend to see the building of two mutually excluding groups of answers which are both essentially correct. But there's something very interesting behind this scenario. Almost everybody will be able to easily and consistently see a steady set of numbers in the test. Except that most of the population will see a set of numbers and a minority will see a different set or no number at all.

In the situation in which someone with authority will come and prompt people about the basics of what's going to happen, it's fairly easy to anticipate that rational beings won't try to prove other people wrong, because differences in perceptions is not only expected, it is the very value of the test in the first place. It's actually what makes a test out of the activity in the first place.

Now imagine instead of this disclaimer about a test to identify people's ability to see colors, people get prompted this is just an ordinary set of numbers. In this case, in case everyone is familiar with the symbols and if they share a common understanding of what numbers should look like, it's very likely that people will possibly disagree about which is the correct answer to that simple innocent question about seeing something inside of a circle.

Then suppose this is not just a matter of right and wrong. Imagine that there are all sorts of earthly benefits or disadvantages of seeing one set of numbers and not the others. This could actually be a test to keep color-blind people from accessing some sort of resources. As the non-color-blind are the vast majority, they could actually determine that seeing their right set of numbers is a condition for taking part on a particular social activity.

This could be done with some sort of coherent idea in mind like preventing color blind people from operating machinery in which inability to tell different colors could pose harm to them or to others. It could also be used as some sort of way of establishing "normal" ow "desired by majority"standards of perceptions. These could or could not be confused with the objective truth. It would depend on:

a. Is the group imposing the standards while being aware of the exact extent in which the test will identify a difference among people? If they know the fact that the test will essentially identify people that are not able to see colors in what's considered normal range among human beings, they will be already expecting to see different results and to tell they can be both correct since they change according to how people perceive colors. For those with this knowledge, the moral load attached to the answer will be close to 0, and it will be fairly easy to rationally avoid any sort of non-sensical and much wider perception of deviation in people seeing colors differently.

b. Now let's imagine the issue came up within a democratic context but there's no previous knowledge about what are the possible outcomes of the test and even less information about the underlying causes of each different scenario. In this case, it's not at all hard to imagine that the majority of the people could come to the conclusion the only right answer is the one shared by the majority itself. And this is something really easy and straight forward to determine. Then the problem is entirely different. Because there will be an answer which is widely considered to be consistently the correct one, and because of the lack of relevant knowledge about the underlying causes of the observed differences, people will certainly going to wonder why some people see one set of numbers, while much fewer people will say very candidly that the answer is completely different.

Let's approach the next layer of this onion: what is at stake here? Color-blindness is considered a fairly benign condition, since seeing colors usually won't prevent someone from performing daily necessary activities well enough. And it's clear that has to do with the characteristic of this particular individual or group but also to the conditions considered "normal" within a given society or smaller social group. If society had evolved to give lots of importance to color perception, and often used that everywhere at the space in which members of the group interact, color blindness could represent a highly disabling condition. Imagine if there was a deadly disease transmitted by a species of green mosquitoes. But also that there were identical red ones which were 10 thousand times more prevalent and completely harmless. In this case, ability to see colors would clearly represent a huge advantage.

Biological reasons are not the only relevant factor in determining disability level. Situation of color-blind people would vary a lot depending on the social conditions in which they find themselves. If they were the majority of the people, and they lived in a fairly democratic environment, the issue of not being able to tell the difference from a harmless mosquito and a deadly one might generate a series of social efforts due to its huge potential risk and harm to a very large chunk of the population. If there weren't any associated condition that could determine social exclusion, it's very likely there would be incentives for someone to:

a. Come up with a plan for solving the detection problem
b. To spend public money on its implementation

After these two steps, depending on how well the issue was tackled and the percentage of its efficient mitigation, it's quite possible the issue could be reassessed as something considerably less important, not only as a limitation for people that are color blind, but also the value of having a "better" color perception. It's easy to establish in this example that the extent of disability that will affect individuals is very much connected with:

a. how large and socially relevant is the population affected by a difference in the way they perceive a given aspect of current social reality

b. how large are the incentives for someone to individually or collectively generate and implement a solution for the problem at hand (item "a" is very important in determining item "b")

My example is hypothetical, but something really similar has actually happened with common vision impairments that can be effectively corrected (or mitigated) as long as the adequate lenses are utilized. If these conditions weren't so prevalent in socially relevant population, there might not have been enough incentives for the solution to materialize. Which would mean that a condition that today doesn't impose disability to the people that have then, could represent a severely incapacitating one.

Although I've discussed different cases of disability or potential disability, it's clear that human perception is the real core issue here. It's also the core issue on every case of social exclusion on the face of the Earth, explained by anatomic and physiological differences or not. The fact this problem structure is so widespread is not as astonishing as the fact this mechanism is almost always ignored by everyone, including those who suffer discrimination.

I must say it's very tough to acknowledge you are going to get worse life outcomes like income and health because of that structure. It's also more likely for you to get socially isolated, whether you deviate from the expected level of achievements characteristic to your social group or not. This reality is bitter, and it's not irrational to want to ignore all these issues and try to live your life the best way you can.

Unfortunately, this is not a very good option. We are social creatures above all, and it's natural to seek external references in life, especially when growing up. Therefore, I tend to believe that despite being something so bitter and unfair, it's important to be very candid about it from the very beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning result in cognitive dissonances that can be far more destructive than the concrete conditions themselves. I feel more important than to generate more general awareness, it's critical to provide conditions for this awareness to be created very early.

The knowledge of the rationale for discrimination doesn't make the phenomenon lighter. But it creates the possibility of defense. It allows people to resist in mental clarity rather than being treated like garbage in utter mental confusion.

On Politics: What makes it so hard to discuss [part II]

Alright, so now the task is to choose the best representative. It may seem simpler than to actually solve problems in the public sphere with your own hands (and probably it is). But that doesn't make it easy.

As I said in part I, in democracy theoretically you don't need to bother thinking about others. They can take care of their own interests, right? Yes, theoretically. But then comes the other tricky part of the deal. People have different education levels, which means that the knowledge about the political process itself can be deficient. In other words, some people might not be prepared enough to choose their representatives to defend their interests later on.

The answer to this imbroglio was supposed to be political parties. If you check out their roots, you'll realize things shouldn't be that complicated. Political parties are usually organized in two possible ways. First one is an ideology like Socialism, Social Democracy, Liberalism, etc. In these cases, a party will represent a mindset and an opinion on how public issues should be approached and solved. The other type of party organization refers to a particular social group, like the labor party. These doesn't necessarily perfectly align with any specific ideology school. These parties will act in the best interest of the social group they represent. This allows for a further degree of freedom to common people, since they don't need specific theoretical knowledge to make their political choice. In theory, this is a basic assumption to choose a party by ideology.

Alright, there we have it. The instrument for political engagement is in place and decision making theoretical frameworks are outlined. Let's add one more layer of complexity: in any given group of people, even those closely aligned ideologically, there's still room for disagreement. Not every factory worker will feel exactly the same about life, in the private or the public spheres. And although the other path has united people exactly around political principles, it turns out that they can also disagree about a number of things.

Results of that are a bit discouraging. It's fantastic to be able to influence the public sphere and to choose our representatives among those who uphold our principles and interests. But apart from the fundamental interpretation problem, you might not agree with anyone in terms of government principles. One of democracy shortcomings is that in this case your views won't be taken into account. So one can say that a precondition to be represented is to find a party which has similar interests in their agenda. But since numbers are in the core of the democratic process, likelihood of unique views to be represented is very low, because of their uniqueness. This is particularly bad if the majority is wrong about something.

But lets suppose you're one of the lucky ones to find a party that actually represents your interests and worldviews. Cool! Game over! Next! Not so fast.  

Because of size and complexity, the same logic used to determine who would be representing people in the government is applied to government decisions themselves. What that means is that in order to relevant measures to be executed, they must also win elections, when they are judged by all the elected representatives of the parliament. Again in life we get to the point where things are rather probabilistic, not deterministic. Even if your candidate to the government has won the elections, the measures to be taken still need to go through a similar process in parliament. Then, on average, it's possible to expect that the party with most elected representatives tends to be able to get most projects approved and executed.

I'm sure you've already noticed the game has become extremely complicated already for your decision to travel from your head to concrete reality. Well, there's much more!

Complexity and size of both the matters to be managed, the mechanism to get it done and the population to be represented, create additional challenges. Politicians are not robots (although some of them act like machines). That means besides public interests they were chosen to defend, they also have their private affairs. With governments getting larger and larger and more complex, average voter visibility of what's being done on her behalf is very limited. So these politician folks are dealing with huge amounts of resources that are public and the owners of these resources can't really see how these are spent.

This creates one of the most perverse system fragilities. Democracy is about numbers, and it's not possible to mess with them, right? Wrong! If the elections are clean, it indeed has this arithmetical flavor to it. But even in these cases, brute force, or money in modern terms, still have many options to have it its way. One of their options is available before elections. Capital can approach both voters and candidates, offering advantages in exchange for favors. This can be done legally or illegally. It actually also depends on the context.

It's interesting to note that the possibility capital has to influence political decisions doesn't end there. After the elections, people with lots of money can still explore politicians individual desires to have decisions made in their best interest. Corruption is the name of the game when it comes to overcome democratic barrier.  Then what? See you in part III.

On Politics: What makes it so hard to discuss [part I]

Elections period is an interesting one. Not only because since 1984, Brazilians have the privilege to choose the ones to represent them in the parliament and government. There's something quite interesting in the very way people make their decisions and position themselves politically.

Because of that, my goal in this series is to outline a simple and short guide for a rational political decision. I'm not probably qualified for doing so in large depths, so I'll concentrate in the process as a sequence of steps leading to a final decision.

But in this first part I think I need to tackle a hard question: what does it mean to make a political decision? As much as I like history, I don't want to go back in time too much because then people will lose interest. After all, history books are there for anyone to read from, but people usually don't. A political decision depends on context. There are common principles that tie political realities in every democracy, but the process is seldom identical. Let's summarize as much as possible.

Humans have liked to live together since quite early existing as such. That might have to do with the fact we are rational, and it's not hard to conclude it's better to live in community and in peace than fighting everyone else all the time to satisfy our basic needs.

Despite that being definitely a good thing, it comes along with some hard challenges. People want to live together and share a number of things because that can bring benefits to everyone involved. Public goods are the ones that only make sense if shared by the entire community. However, reality is not perfect, and there will be times in which a public decision will be more beneficial to some than to others. It's very intuitive that the more diverse society is, the more this kind of discrepancy in interests will occur.

The matter can be solved in two ways: either we reproduce wild life conditions within society and let the stronger decide and benefit themselves (which will always happen to a certain degree) or we come up with mechanisms that allow everyone to participate in decisions, so there's more balance in who gets more benefits from public decisions (and hopefully) a maximization of common good. The word politics comes exactly from the word polis, which means city. Politics means the issues from the polis, or the issues arising from living in community.

If we lived in a community with 20 people, it would be fairly easy to take everyone's opinion into account in public matters without compromising the speed or feasibility of the decision making. But when numbers increase, it becomes impractical to consult everybody on every decision (even if we still agree that decisions affecting everyone should get everyone's input to make them fair). Apart from the numerical issue, the world has indeed become very complex and specialized. This basically means that it has become impossible to be knowledgeable about everything public that's going on all the time.

Democracy was the best mechanism to solve the numbers part of this dilemma. Society needs different people getting busy with different things. In the current state of affairs, we've decided that people will allocate their time the best way they can, thus maximizing their individual return and also the social one. But that also mean that a huge chunk of population will be occupied with matters that are far away from managing public interests. Someone has to do it on their behalf, and democracy makes that possible.

The genius idea about democracy is that the mechanism to choose representatives theoretically determines the opinions of the majority will naturally prevail, thus distancing society government from the wild jungle. It also theoretically eliminates the indicidual need to think about others in order to make better collective decisions. You can think exclusively about your own interests but the public resources will only benefit you if the needs you're expressing are the majority ones. In democracy, a very powerful and rich person's vote is worth exactly the same as the one from a humble and poor person. In the jungle-like scenario, the poor person would never have any voice. But in democracy, if the majority is indeed poor and humble, public decisions will benefit them, not the rich guys.

This simplifies life a lot. Because instead of being directly involved in all the public matters, individual decision is limited to choosing the best representative. The latter is the one responsible for studying the matters and making a sound decisions. But of course this is not as easy as it may seem. I'll cover this part on the next part.